The Founders' Ideas of Freedom and Equality
The Founder's ideas of freedom differed greatly from the ideas of freedom and equality held by most Americans today. Indeed, as Constitutional scholar and Columbia professor Eric Foner tells us in The Story of American Freedom, "colonial America was a society with deep democratic potential." (p. 12)
The key word here is, of course, "potential." Early America was not democratic as we think of the term today, but it had the potential to become democratic. In other words, the words of the Founding Fathers in the founding documents made it possible for a broader meaning of freedom and equality as the nation grew. Indeed, the idea of freedom was developing - 
and it took the struggle for independence to transform this society into a nation that proclaimed itself to be an asylum for liberty for all mankind. So, let’s begin to look at the development of the idea of freedom.
- First, we must remember that the American Revolution was fought in the name of liberty.
- The word and idea was everywhere. There were liberty trees, liberty poles, Sons and Daughters of Liberty, hundreds of pamphlets entitled A Chariot of Liberty and Oration on the beauties of Liberty.
- People held mock funerals of liberty in which a coffin was carried to a cemetery only to have the occupant miraculously revived at the last moment.
- People spoke longingly of the "sweets of liberty."
- One British immigrant to Maryland commented in 1775, "They are all liberty mad."
- In this context, liberty meant political, social, and economic liberation from British rule.
- Second, we must remember that until the 1760s, the vast majority of colonists in North America saw themselves as British subjects who when they disagreed with an imperial policy, sent petitions, wrote oppositional pamphlets, and incited crowd activity.
- After passage of the Intolerable Acts in 1774 that suspended the Massachusetts legislature and closed the port of Boston, some colonists began to interpret British policies as part of a plan to destroy liberty in America and a design "for enslaving the colonies."
- It took the words of Thomas Paine who published Common Sense in January 1776 to explain that t
he new independent United States would be an “empire of liberty” that would provide an “asylum for mankind.” Thus, he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” The Americans were going to create something unique and different in the world, and it would be based upon liberty.
- James Madison took this a step further by defining the new nation as "the workshop of liberty to the Civilized World." (In Foner, p. 15.)
For the Founders, the idea of liberty contained in the words in the Declaration of Independence was revolutionary. To them liberty was not British law based upon the hereditary rights of freeborn Englishmen. Rather, liberty was for those Americans who worked hard for it. And guaranteeing such liberty justified fighting for independence from the British. Independence meant a new birth of freedom.
So, what were the essential characteristics that defined the idea of freedom in Revolutionary America?
- American freedom was imagined as a form of property - with property meaning
rights and liberties as well as physical possessions. No one could be free without property.
- American freedom redrew the boundaries between the free and unfree - those who were free from British rule and culture and those who were unfree and still tied to Britain.
- American freedom required developing a limited government that allowed
citizens to seek and realize their own life goals without government interference.
But freedom still had very clear boundaries during the Revolutionary Era. After the Revolution, the boundaries of freedom were extended largely to free white men, who in some states, must own property or be able to pay taxes. Those not entitled to freedom were all African-American slaves - who were not considered people - and in most states, freed African Americans - as well as all women.
- Free women were citizens of the new nation; they could be naturalized if they immigrated and they were counted fully in determining representation in Congress.
- In law and social reality, however, women lacked the essential qualifications for politcal participation: property ownership, the right to control one's own person, and the right to vote.
- Thus, for women and blacks, the denial of full freedom rested on the assumption of natural incapacity, since women were widely thought to be naturally submissive and irrational "creatures of sentiment unfit for citizenship" and African Americans were considered incapable of reason.
The boundaries of equality were even more narrow.
- To the Founders, equality meant that no man held greater rights through hereditary birth than any other man.
- All men were created equal; that is, all men had the equal opportunity to earn social privilege. They had the right to an opportunity to work hard and thereby achieve equal status in society. If they failed, they had not worked hard enough - the Protestant work ethic.
- Thus, being "created" equal was NOT the same thing as being equal.
Thus, the Founders were not hypocites as we so often think about with our 21st Century minds. They meant it when they said, "all men are created equal."