I’ll be incredibly loose with my definition of “founder” here, but I think it’s fair to include those who came before our traditional idea of our Founders. As much respect as we may have for the Washingtons, Franklins, and Jeffersons, they did not operate in a vacuum and invent the idea of equality, which serves as the conceptual well-spring from which all other ideas about governance flow.
And it’s not as if famous authors like Thomas Paine and John Locke, who both brilliantly articulated many of the principles of the founding and our views on free-markets, were the intellectual inventors of these concepts either. They are just the most popular and contemporary to the American Revolution. I mean, it makes sense. Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776, just like Adam Smith who published Wealth of Nations, the blueprint for capitalism, in 1776 as well. It’s like a trifecta of ideas and events, but those ideas and events didn’t suddenly appear in 1776 out of thin air and start an instant revolution.
Equality was a concept already brewing in the hearts and minds of Americans. 1776 was not when it began, but when it exploded in Britain’s face.
“the principle of equality in a natural state” — John Wise
The quote above is from a book written by minister John Wise (his real name, not a pun) in 1717. The book, A Vindication of the Government of New England, offers some insight into the political and religious viewpoints of the day and was very popular at the time. It speaks to the belief that there is a nature to humanity and that equality is part of that natural state. Specifically, equality as created equal in the site of nature and/or nature’s God. Not equality in results.
Not long after, in 1725, minister John Buckley published the first American review of John Locke’s political theories that further pushed the concepts of equality into the intellectual space of the American mind. Three years after that, Daniel Dulany published his pamphlet on citizens to equal rights which was then endorsed by the Maryland Assembly. Elisha Williams produced sermons on The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants in 1744.
You get the point.
Equality was a concept brewing deeply in the colonies and was discussed long before the revolution. It became a basic expectation of Americans who heard it through sermons and political treatises for several decades leading up to the Revolution. And it is no coincidence that many of the writers who popularized the concept were ministers. It aligns with the concept of man being created in the image of God, and the eventual expression “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”
Ok, so who cares, right? Why does this matter?
You might remember the 1619 Project. Several journalists, working with the N.Y. Times published several essays about what they called the “true founding” of the United States. They posited that 1619 was the real start of the nation, as the date of the first slave arriving on our shores starts the process which culminated in the American Revolution, as a fight to preserve slavery, not a fight to be free from Britain and practice a new version of equality. But understanding the long march of equality as a concept and then an expectation, helps to better frame the true reasons for our Revolution and further existence.
If people understand this basic concept, it makes attempts to subvert it historically ridiculous. It makes it easier to preserve the history of our founding, which informs not only our past and present, but our future. Instead of questioning our right to exist based on ill-informed guilt, we have a story to be proud of.
We have a reason to continue on a well-defined and righteous path.