All men are created equal

The quotation "All men are created equal" has been called an "immortal declaration", and "perhaps" the single phrase of the United States Revolutionary period with the most grand "continuing importance". Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in the Declaration of Independence as a rebuttal to the going political theory of the day: the Divine Right of Kings. It was thereafter quoted or incorporated into speeches by a wide array of substantial figures in American political and social life in the United States. The final form of the phrase was stylized by Benjamin Franklin.

Origin of Jefferson's use of the phrase

Line containing Jefferson's use of the phrase "all men are created equal", in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson may have also borrowed the expression from an Italian friend and neighbor, Philip Mazzei, as noted by Joint Resolution 175 of the 103rd Congress as well as by John F. Kennedy in "A Nation Of Immigrants."

The opening of the United States Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, states as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;

In 1776 the Second Continental Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to write the Declaration of Independence. The five men voted to have Thomas Jefferson write the document. After Jefferson finished he gave the document to Franklin to proof. Franklin suggested minor changes, but one of them stands out far more than the others. Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred and un-deniable..." Franklin changed it to, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

The same concept appears in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which was written mostly by John Adams. The Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which opens that constitution states:

Article I. All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

The plaintiffs in the cases of Brom and Bett v. John Ashley and Commonwealth v. Nathaniel Jennison argued that this provision abolished slavery in Massachusetts. The latter case resulted in a "sweeping declaration . . . that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the principles of liberty and legal equality articulated in the new Massachusetts Constitution".

These statements illustrated the idea of natural rights, a philosophical concept borrowed from the Enlightenment. Indeed, many of the ideas in the Declaration were taken from the English political philosopher John Locke, himself a proponent of liberalism. Locke, however, referred to "life, liberty and property" rather than the "pursuit of happiness," as Jefferson reformulated the idea in the Declaration.

The phrase has since been considered a hallmark statement in democratic constitutions and similar human rights instruments, many of which have adopted the phrase or variants thereof.^{[citation needed]}

Slavery and the phrase

The contradiction between the claim that "all men are created equal" and the existence of American slavery attracted comment when the Declaration of Independence was first published. Congress, having made a few changes in wording, deleted nearly a fourth of the draft before publication, removing a passage critical of the slave trade, and many members of Congress, Jefferson included, owned slaves. In 1776, abolitionist Thomas Day responding to the hypocrisy in the Declaration wrote:

If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.

Applications in American history

Declaring the equality of all men did not prevent the United States from continuing the widespread practice of slavery, although the phrase was frequently raised by abolitionists in anti-slavery arguments. President Abraham Lincoln relied on the Declaration of Independence when making the case that slavery went against the deepest commitments of the American nation. Though he did so throughout the 1850s and into his presidency, the most famous example can be found in the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others convened at the Seneca Falls Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848, they drafted and signed a document titled the Declaration of Sentiments. The opening sentence alludes to this phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

The phrase was also quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous I Have a Dream speech, as the "creed" of the United States:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'

Hobbesian origin

Thomas Hobbes also proposed an early variant of equality among men in his treatise Leviathan:

Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself. An as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general and infallible rules, called science, which very few have and but in few things, as being not a native faculty born with us, nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men than that of strength. For prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

In the above passage Hobbes proposes a rough equivalence among men, based on the idea that the strongest man is not so strong that he is protected from the strength of the weakest and is thus not strong enough to be considered greater.^{[citation needed]} Here, Hobbes stands upon his presumptions over the state of nature, within which he describes the hypothetical condition that preceded governments and details that within natural world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (loc. cit.).

See also

• Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), article 1: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
• Is-ought problem
• John Ball (1381), "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the nobleman?"
• Second-class citizen
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), article 1: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights..."
• Equality before the law