Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown Melinda Lawson (bio) Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War By Richard D. Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. 400 pages, 22 halftones, 6⅛” x 9¼.” $40.00 cloth. The founders’ call for equal rights has long drawn scrutiny for the many ways it stood at odds with the realities of their world. Even at the time there were critics—particularly British critics— who noted what appeared clearly to them to be flagrant hypocrisy. Samuel Johnson, whose 1775 pamphlet featured a scathing observation about the slaveholders’ “yelps for liberty,” is merely the most well-known of these. Richard Brown’s Self-Evident Truths sets out to “investigate the proposition that the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration were not simply rhetorical window-dressing but inspired serious aspirations from the moment they were proclaimed” (viii). Since many of these aspirations met vigorous opposition, the decades following the Revolution were marked by a series of contests over the meaning of equal rights. Brown’s book explores the struggle over that meaning as it took place concerning race, gender, religion, nationality, age, and class. Focusing on constitutions, bills of rights, and courtroom practices, Brown examines the ways in which various states either realized or disavowed equal rights in theory, policy, and practice. When the Revolutionaries declared all men equal and endowed with inalienable rights, “they spoke abstractly, without closely considering the ultimate consequences of their expansive rhetoric” (292). It is not, Brown explains, that the founders were hypocritical. They did not intend to include Indians or slaves because neither were considered to be members of society, and they failed to anticipate the rise of a free black population. They never considered that women or children might have equal rights, and though they repealed primogeniture and entail, they never believed that equal rights meant equal distribution of property. The privileges the founders were most concerned with removing were those that separated them from other elite white men in England: the kind that monarchs and aristocrats distributed—privileges that as American colonists they could never enjoy. But the language the founders employed laid the rhetorical groundwork for much broader claims, and over the years numerous groups took up the call for equal rights. Even when they did not succeed, these early actions laid the groundwork for subsequent movements and ultimately for a much more expansive understanding of equal rights. Given the founders’ limited conception of membership in society, it is not surprising that the earliest successes among these quests lay in the realms of religion and nationality or ethnicity, [End Page 295] where the people in search of equality were also white males. An emphatic belief in the right to property meant that campaigns for equal rights for people of color, for women and children, and for class equality met more resistance. Though the level of resistance varied, the outcomes for equal rights in all these arenas were marked by complexity. Progress varied between and even within states; moreover, as Brown’s focus on practice reveals, a state’s constitution and its policies might mandate one thing, while its practices revealed something very different. Regarding religious equality, for example, in North Carolina state laws forbade establishment, mandatory church attendance, and directed or nondirected taxation for churches. The state also prohibited active clergymen from serving in a legislative state body. Still, these laws did not add up to religious equality: the state also required all state officeholders to swear to a belief in the “‘the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments’” and “‘avow the ‘truth of the Protestant religion’”(43), thus barring free thinkers, Catholics, and Jews. Yet Brown points to practicing Catholics as well as one Jew serving in state office while these laws were in effect. If those practices diverged from policy in a manner that defied prescribed limits on equal rights, the opposite was true for people of color. In nineteenth-century New England, though no policy suggested that African Americans were to be punished differently, blacks were nine times more likely...