From the beginning, Indigenous Americans, Black Americans, and women noted that the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence ought to apply to them as well as to propertied white men.
In 1774, the year after her enslavers relinquished their claim on her, Boston poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to Mohegan cleric Samson Occom about the hypocrisy of leaders who rallied for freedom while practicing enslavement. “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance,” she wrote, adding, “I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.” She noted “the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.”[1]
John Adams’s wife, Abigail, agreed and sought to prescribe a solution to the “strange Absurdity” that Wheatley identified. “I long to hear that you have declared an independency,” she wrote to John in March 1776, “and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. . . . Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”[2]
The Framers did not include rights for women in the new code of laws. But the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence gave those excluded from those principles by the Constitution both the language and the right to challenge their exclusion. Famously, in 1852, formerly enslaved maritime worker Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He honored the Founders as “great men” but asked: “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”[3]
In that question, Douglass drew attention to a theme that excluded Americans had emphasized since the nation’s founding. In 1791, Black mathematician and naturalist Benjamin Banneker directly called out then–secretary of state Thomas Jefferson for praising the “proper ideas of the great valuation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings to which you were entitled by nature,” while at the same time “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression. . . .”[4]
In 1848, Douglass had been present at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York when reformers insisting that women should have equal rights wrote a Declaration of Sentiments. Following the format of the Declaration of Independence, they asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”[5]
As proof they listed the facts that men refused to let women vote and compelled their obedience to laws they had no say in creating, including ones that took all their property and gave all power—including that of owning their children—to husbands. Men limited the educational opportunities available to women, shut them out of most professions, and worked to destroy women’s confidence in their own strength to trick them into dependency. The reformers at Seneca Falls demanded “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
The Declaration of Independence gave marginalized Americans not just the language but also the grounds to challenge the laws that made them unequal. While the Revolutionary War was still raging, Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved woman living in Sheffield, Massachusetts, heard the language of her new state constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal,” echoing the Declaration of Independence. She sued for her freedom. Her lawyers argued that the principles in the constitution meant that the state could not defend enslavement, and a jury agreed, awarding Freeman and an associated plaintiff thirty shillings in damages and the costs of the trial.[6]
Quock Walker, suing around the same time for freedom and damages, also won his case in a Massachusetts courtroom. The judge concluded that enslavement had been a “usage” in the colony but that “the Idea of Slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct & Constitution & there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational Creature.”[7]
Not every bid for equality was as successful as those of Freeman and Walker. In the early Republic, judges grappled with the idea that the concept of liberty and independence should include women. The 1805 case of Martin v. Massachusetts explored whether women could make their own political decisions. The presiding judge concluded that the idea of liberty could not possibly mean the destruction of men’s patriarchal authority. Instead, men included women in the new order by redefining them as “Republican mothers,” whose role in the new society was not to vote and hold office, but rather to rear their sons to be good citizens and patriots.[8]
Indigenous Americans also turned to the courts to protect their rights. The Cherokees in Georgia had adjusted to the influx of Euro-Americans by adopting a plantation economy, including slavery; developing their own written language and newspaper; and, in 1827, establishing their own constitution based on the U.S. Constitution.
When Congress passed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, Chief John Ross and his advisors, acting under the advice of Senators Daniel Webster of New Hampshire and Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, hired former attorney general William Wirt to defend their rights under the U.S. Constitution. They lost their first suit, but in 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court declared that the Cherokees were a sovereign nation and could make their own laws, settling “for ever” the question “as to who is right and who is wrong,” as one Cherokee put it.[9]
But the Cherokees’ victory ran up against another group clamoring for inclusion in the new system: poor white men.
The Constitution created a framework for democracy but didn’t really make it clear how ordinary people—ordinary men in those days—would engage with their government aside from those few who had the right to vote for leaders. The Framers expected that governmental affairs would continue to be run by folks like them, and since they did not expect that their new country would develop political parties, they hoped they could harness a man’s self-interest to create a government that would not become tyrannical.
This abstract system broke down fast. By the 1820s, southern leaders worried that northern merchants and bankers would take over the new nation. When congressmen threw their votes to the Massachusetts-born son of a former president, John Quincy Adams, for the presidency in 1824 over the southern Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson, their fears seemed to have come true. Jackson promptly began to characterize the federal government as a distant tyranny run by elites that was trampling the rights of ordinary white men.
Southern white men began to argue that true democracy was located not in the federal government but in the states. The federal government was distant, they argued, and its leaders were trying to impose their unwelcome values on people whose needs and cultures were different than the leaders acknowledged. One such intrusion was the decision in Worcester v. Georgia recognizing the Cherokees’ sovereignty. Andrew Jackson, who defeated Adams to become president in 1829 and thus was in office when the decision came down, made it clear he would not enforce it. One man recalled that “he sportively said in private conversation that if . . . called on to support the decree of the Court he will call on those who have brought about the decision to enforce it[;] that he will call on the Militia of Massachusetts.”[10]
Jackson’s supporters, members of the new Democratic Party, began to articulate a new language of democracy, based in ordinary men rather than in the traditional ruling class. Poet Walt Whitman in 1855 juxtaposed “The President, holding a cabinet council . . . surrounded by the Great Secretaries” with “three matrons stately and friendly . . . the crew of the fish-smack . . . the Missourian . . . toting his wares and his cattle . . . the indescribable crowd is gather’d—it is the Fourth of Seventh-month—(What salutes of cannon and small arms!)”[11]
But for all of Whitman’s celebration of the many peoples in the United States, the demand of poorer white men for inclusion in the government was based on the idea of keeping other marginalized people out. States’ rights democracy kept white men in charge, for they were the voters who determined the shape of the state governments. Those white men advanced their own interests at the expense of their Brown and Black neighbors, declaring it the nation’s “Manifest Destiny” to push Indigenous Americans off their lands and take over parts of Mexico to establish plantations and plantation slavery there. Above all, they protected and extended the practice of human enslavement that people like Elizabeth Freeman had successfully challenged seventy years before.
The triumph of this populist “democracy” took Indigenous American lands in the Southeast, enabling the southern system of enslavement to spread into the rich “Black Belt,” so called for the color of its soil. Those white enslavers for whom the booming economy worked best defended states’ rights, which allowed a minority to impose its will over the wishes of a national majority, as the heart of American democracy.
They silenced their opponents, took away the right to petition the government to end human enslavement, closed off access to opposing opinions, and in 1837 murdered Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement. Elijah’s younger brother, Owen, saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. “I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,” he declared.[12]
By the 1850s, these defenders of human enslavement made up only a small minority of the country. Realizing that the vast majority of Americans objected to their ideology, they rewrote American history, claiming that the Framers had deliberately established a nation based in states’ rights and white supremacy.
The nation was a collection of states, President Franklin Pierce insisted in 1855, and the Framers had deliberately established only “a Federal Republic of the free white men of the colonies.”[13]
The Democrats set out to shape the nation according to their new version of history. They advanced the idea that the question of human enslavement should be decided not by the national majority, but by “popular sovereignty” in which local voters got to decide the fate of the institution. But they quickly hedged that idea of voters’ choice by making it impossible for voters to choose to build states without enslavement. Under their system, southern enslavers could pick up the extra states they needed to overawe the free states in the national government and spread enslavement across the country. Then they prohibited the federal government from interfering with slavery.
This popular sovereignty, politicians said, was the true meaning of American democracy. And it meant that the nation would throw out the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal and had a right to a say in their government, and become one based instead on racial hierarchies in which some people were better than others and had the right to rule.
But not everyone agreed. In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”[14]