Agrarian Roots of American Political Equality

Today, as we celebrate Independence Day, I have been thinking about the concept of independence in American political thought. For early Americans, independence from Britain was more than simply severing national connections; it was part of a larger perspective on political equality as a matter of autonomy of individuals, as well as of nations. The perspective later gave rise to such characteristic American developments as Emersonian self-reliance, but it was originally shaped by the situation of people who were equally free from subordination to each other because they controlled their own property, and most importantly their property in land.

 The first national understanding of equality emerged from the pursuit of economic and social independence by individuals during the colonial period. This understanding was less a matter of Americans having the same standards of living or even being able to look forward to the same opportunities than it was a matter of being able to hold and farm land and thereby to live apart from a hierarchy of dependence. Land, more than anything else, provided the real basis of the early American economy and much of the nation’s history of expansion across the continent can be understood as the quest for more land by individuals seeking to support themselves and, in their quest, acquiring the view that each of them, whether scratching bare sustenance from a small plot or harvesting export crops from a vast plantation, could be self-supporting and self-contained. Even the appearance of a middling sort in the eastern cities owed much to the constant possibility of moving out of the cities.

By the time of national independence, the central political issue for most Americans was not the redistribution of wealth. It was whether the acknowledged and accepted inequalities of condition would subordinate some to others. The American commitment to an ideal of equality grew in a society not only of inequalities in condition, but of great regional variations in stratification.  Many of these variations can be linked to the class background of the settlers in different locations. The earliest wave of immigrants to the lands that became the United States consisted of Puritans who came from the east of England in the years 1629 to 1640 and settled in Massachusetts. Most of these early arrivals were from the middle ranks of English society and the majority worked in skilled craft and trade occupations. Still, while people from the lowest class positions in English society made up only a very small proportion of the settlers in Massachusetts, a little under one-fourth arrived as servants, so that some stratification definitely existed. The elite of the Puritan-based society of New England that came out of the Massachusetts settlement, though, consisted of the interconnected and intermarried leading families of ministers and magistrates.  Heavily drawn from the eastern counties of England, the men of these families had attended the same schools before migration, with nearly half attending three colleges of Cambridge, according to David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989).

.

 Despite the clear existence of a New England elite, stratification was relatively modest in this section of the colonies. The mainly middle-ranking population of Massachusetts multiplied rapidly in the years following 1640 and settled much of the northeastern region of the future United States.  High levels of literacy characterized the great mass of this population, as well as the small upper elite. Wealthy ruling families had arisen in Massachusetts by 1760, but their power was insecure and they could be challenged by larger publics. Similarly, proprietary gentry had come into existence in the Mid-Atlantic region in the face of diversity of ethnicity and religion,

 The governing elite of Virginia came closest to the aristocratic ruling class of England, although the two were distinguished by, among other characteristics, the commercial origins of the former. By the time of the Revolution, Virginia was largely ruled by wealthy planters whose position and power came from what their crops and speculations. More importantly, the Virginia planters exercised their powers primarily over their slaves, rather than over white freemen, regardless of how poor those white freemen might be.

In relative terms, then, early America actually was a fairly equal society. Comparing America’s colonial elites with the English ruling class, Gary J. Kornbluth and John M. Murrin observed in their 1993 chapter on “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class” (in Alfred F. Young’s edited volume Beyond the American Revolution),  that “North America was much more rural and had no set of men as wealthy as the families that governed England. England had no class of laborers as exploited as the slaves of America. The most affluent 1 percent in England probably controlled over 40 percent of the wealth, and the richest 5 percent owned over 70 percent of the kingdom’s land and personal property. In the colonies the yeomanry – roughly 60 percent of white householders – controlled 70 percent of the land. The wealthiest 5 percent in colonial society claimed only 30 percent. The most distinctive feature of the colonies was the relative economic autonomy of the middling orders. Thus, colonial society had a lower basement and a lower ceiling than England, and it also had far more people crowded into the middle” ( p. 29).

The emphasis on the rural character of colonial America and on land is important. The United States at its inception was an overwhelmingly rural society: 95% of Americans lived in rural areas in 1790, with an average population density of only 4.5 people per square mile, compared to 17.8 people per square mile in 1890 and 70.3 people per square mile in 1990 (1990 Census of Population and Housing, "1990 Population and Housing Unit Counts: United States", (CPH-2, Table2, 4.).  In looking at these numbers, we should recall the the U.S. at the end of the eighteenth century was limited to the relatively densely populated east and did not include the vast reaches that would be added with the Louisiana Purchase or the later Gadsden Purchase. In this spread-out, farming society, the early American version of what would later be called “equal opportunity” was based precisely on the ready availability of land. And it was the quest for land, more than anything else that created economic mobility, as well as geographic mobility.

In his book Dangerous Nation (2006), historian and former State Department official Robert Kagan has observed that for the American colonists of the eighteenth century

The desire for land was not primarily a desire for profit. Some land speculators made fortunes off the lands they bought and sold. But for the vast majority of settlers, the benefits of expansion were of a more spiritual and political nature. Landownership equaled liberty, both in Lockean theory and in practice. Settlement on the ever-expanding frontier offered unprecedented freedom and independence, and a sense of honor, to hundreds of thousands of families who would otherwise have lived a more dependent or oppressed existence in Europe or crowded in the cities on the Atlantic Coast. The endless supply of land meant that no one, except the slave, was condemned to spend a lifetime in the employ of someone else. Men earned wages only until they had enough money to buy land and move away. This was the original “American dream,” one that Abraham Lincoln was still extolling a century later: the opportunity of every white male to abandon a wage earner’s life for the independent life of the landowner (p. 15).

            By examining tax lists from the late 1700s, Jackson T. Main, in his 1974 book Political Parties Before the Constitution, determined that substantial upward mobility characterized early America.  Even in older farm districts, many landless individuals acquired property between the 1760’s and the 1780’s.  In new frontier areas, rates of land acquisition were high.  In the cities, skilled workers could obtain credit and open shops, and relatively high wages enabled even poor workers to move up by learning trades. Most importantly, geographic and horizontal mobility raised chances for vertical mobility. The ever-present opportunity to move on to settle available land held out the possibility of moving out and being on one’s own, out of the power of a patron or employer. It also helped keep the labor market in the east coast cities fluid and contributed to the independence of the relatively small numbers of urban workers by boosting demand for labor and it making it relatively easy for workers to move from one employer to another. This early version of the land of opportunity was based on the opportunity to acquire land.  Understanding this fact is crucial for understanding the westward push first to the center and then to the far west of the continent.

One might plausibly argue, in fact, that this driving hunger for land not only settled what would become the United States with European descendants, but even created the United States as an independent nation.  By the middle of the eighteenth century, settlers from the English American colonies were finding their plots of land by pushing relentlessly into the Ohio Valley, claimed by the French as well as the British. Control of the land so eagerly sought became the key to fortune. Stock companies, such as the Ohio Company, sought to bring together shareholders and obtain title to vast reaches of land. However, settlement brought the Americans, and by extension England, into conflict with the French, so the English government attempted to limit the settlement that was the source of independence, mobility and fortune. The Seven Years War, known in America as the French and Indian War, began when Ohio Company stockholder and Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie sent the youthful Colonel George Washington to place a fort on the Ohio River in order to secure colonial property interests. The clashes between Washington’s forces and the French escalated into a war between France and England. Although it resulted in victory for the English, the need to pay for this long and expensive struggle led England to attempt to extend new forms of taxation to the American colonies, provoking a colonial protest that expanded into a war for independence.

To describe the American Revolution as a struggle for independence is to emphasize “independence,” and not just separation from the original European homeland. Samuel Johnson, one of the most eloquent oponents of the Americans, described himself to James Boswell as “a friend to subordination,”  For Johnson, an ordered society required a hierarchy of dependents and patrons, and to opt out of such a hierarchy was to court anarchy. Indeed, one of the fundamental sources of disagreement and misunderstanding between the British and their troublesome American subjects concerned relationships of subordination. British communications repeatedly emphasized the theme of the subordinate position of the colonies toward the mother country and it was this, more than the mere payment of taxes, that sparked violent responses from recalcitrant colonists. The same quest for land that had led the Americans to start the French and Indian War later also produced a spirit of independence from ranked authority that made it difficult to command them to pay for the war.

I want to emphasize that equality as independence derived from land and from the resulting relatively high degree of control over labor power in towns was different from economic equality. In fact, land ownership was one of the major sources of economic inequality. This was not just because some Americans owned vast tracts while others held small plots. In a mainly agricultural society with continuing immigration driving up the demand for land, landowners could count on steadily rising values.  Speculation in land therefore became one of the earliest routes to wealth before and after the Revolution.  The brilliant, slippery French diplomat Talleyrand, during a period of disfavor in the turbulent years after the Revolution in his own country, took advantage of his refuge in the United States to pile up a tidy sum speculating in American land.

The idea of equality as the independence of landed freemen was central to the agrarian perspective of Thomas Jefferson. Recognizing the importance of land speculation in creating inequality, Jefferson observed that “the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess.” Jefferson saw little contradiction between great estates and equality because he understood equality as the absence of hierarchical dependence. Jefferson’s model of society was one of independent farmers, each working his own land. He believed that Saxon England prior to the Norman Conquest had been based on alodial law, in which land belonged to the person who worked it, and argued that American society should be a return to this old Saxon system

 Jefferson’s social vision makes it clear just how he managed to square social egalitarianism with a belief in the existence of superior individuals. All men were indeed not only created equal, but would live in equal circumstances insofar as none were dependent on others for support or patronage because each controlled his own agrarian base. Some might indeed hold larger tracts, as Jefferson did, But this would not give larger land holders power over smaller holders.

With a basic social and economic equality assured by agrarian independence, the only real ranked inequality would be within a narrow range of political authority. Even Jefferson’s counties would need administrators and judges. One way in which these leaders could be chosen would be through a popular vote. The likely candidates could also be trained and pre-selected over their lifetimes, though, through some program like Jefferson’s 1797 educational scheme for basic education for all (white men) and a competitive pyramid of schooling for political leaders. Such a program would give the independent yeomen the basic learning not only to control their own livelihoods more effectively, but also to recognize and support the special abilities of leaders. Given Jefferson’s concept of a strictly limited government, his “natural aristocracy” would, in theory, pose few problems for the egalitarianism of a social structure existing largely outside the sphere of political power.

Jeffersonian agrarians such as John Taylor of Caroline, emphasized landed property as the means by which each household (of whites, at least) could maintain self-sufficiency. In his massive treatise on the agrarian ideal (1814), Taylor attacked commercial activities as means of drawing off the abundance created by farmers and mechanics and concentrating this in the abundance in the hands of a powerful elite of investors. To modern eyes the Viriginia planters look like a feudal aristocracy and the Hamiltonian merchants and bankers look like  the rising challenge to aristocratic ways. But from the agrarian point of view, it was Alexander Hamilton and his allies who wanted to impose a rank-ordered society along British lines by institutionalizing the commercial means of confiscating the products of the labor of independent landed property owners.

The Market, Equality, and Abstraction

The primitive equality of humanity asserted by Rousseau and Marx seems to have been more than a philosophical speculation or golden age myth.   Without individual ownership of property, and no differentiation of labor beyond gender differentiation, humans in foraging, hunter gatherer bands had no systematic basis for systematically distinguishing among individual men or individual women.  Some may have been more persuasive or more powerful than others, but whatever prestige people held characterized them as personalities, not as social statuses.  Only the advent of settled village life brought the need for regularity and predictability in relations that brought well-defined leadership into existence.

Differentiated societies and the unequal statuses inherent in differentiated societies posed two options regarding the identification of individuals with their statuses. Either each human being was identical with his or her position in a society or each was in some sense distinct from the social position happened to occupy.  In its most radical state, the first option was total immanence. If statuses are positions in a system of social relations, then being completely identified with a status means being completely a part of the social world. The extreme of the second option was total transcendence. If one’s true self is not one’s place in society, then every individual is ultimately apart from the realm of extant social relations.

Caste systems have expressed one level of social immanence. According to the classic work of Georges Dumézil, still widely accepted today, the early Indo-European speaking peoples divided their societies into three fundamental categories of humans: priests, warriors, and herder-cultivators.  These three categories may still survive in three of the major Hindu castes of  brahmans, ksatriyas, and vaisyas.. The Hindu example may suggest to us that even in the immanence of a caste system there may be some transcendent level at which humans are equal.  If people can move from one caste to another through metempsychosis, then there must be some part of them that is not identical with caste. This is a theoretical transcendence, though, and it reinforces rather than undermines inequality.  Another way of putting this coexistence of transcendence and immanence in social life is that people may be seen as completely in the social order while they maintain an ultimate self that is completely outside of the social order.

In the canonical tradition of Europe, the dual existence of hierarchical social order and abstract, transcendent egalitarian individualism appears throughout the philosophical and religious traditions of Mediterranean antiquity.   Epicureanism, for example, taught that individuals should strive for a state of eudaimonia, or well-being, by pursuing the state of ataraxia, or freedom from trouble and anxiety.  While it did not challenge the social hierarchy directly, Epicureanism did encourage withdrawal from political and administrative involvement and it offered a private egalitarian alternative to public hierarchy by admitting people from all walks of life on the same basis as adherents.  The Stoics posited moral virtue as the path to eudaimonia and argued that each individual, regardless of social position, could pursue virtue. When the Stoic Epictetus was a slave, his capacity for the pursuit of virtue was the same as the later Stoic Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Being a slave or an emperor was accidental. In their true natures, or ultimate selves, both were equal in the pursuit of virtue. The idea of “nature” was the way in which both Epicureans and Stoics expressed their extra-social egalitarianism, since for both living in accordance with nature was the way in which people could live in a manner consistent with their true natures. The idea would become important for views about individual egalitarianism in early modern European, since it would be reinterpreted as natural law, but the concept of natural law was not just an inheritance from antiquity. It was an old idea that became useful and relevant for the interpretation of a new situation.

Out of the decay of the political and social order of the Roman Empire medieval corporatism had emerged. Christendom maintained the old extra-social, transcendent egalitarianism within a rigidly hierarchical system, in which each individual in the saeculum wholly identified with location, family, guild, and status. The old sociology of the three orders reappeared as the unchanging division into oratores, bellatores, and laborares. Within their all-encompassing statuses, people did not have rights, but privileges; literally, private laws that applied to them as members of corporate bodies.

It is difficult to trace the original causes of the breakdown in worldly hierarchy, but this breakdown clearly accompanied a development of enormous importance for the emergence of modernity: the rise of banking and investment between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Loaning money at interest encouraged entrepreneurial activities and stimulated the search for more efficient production of goods and spread of information. Finance, in other words, set the stage for the first Industrial Revolution, the beginning of which is conventionally dated about 1750.

One consequence of that revolution was the breakdown of the corporate order, and its replacement by what Thomas Carlyle, in widely used phrase, called the “Cash Nexus.” Relations between people in a market system became defined less by invariant positions and more by free-floating exchanges. As Bruce Mazlish argued in A New Science, the modern discipline of sociology grew out of responses to the transition to the Cash Nexus, either by “lamenters,” who bemoaned the loss of the old ties, or by “breakers,” who saw the old ties as chains and celebrated the liberation of individuals by the marketplace.

In my view, one of the most notable consequences of the rise of the free market system was the “immanentization” of the transcendent equality of individuals. By treating individuals as interchangeable units of production, the market abstracted them from their corporate settings. Previously, each one had a soul in another realm apart from present activities. In the fluidity of the market, no one could be wholly identified with present activities; each private individual existed apart from all socially defining connections. This, I think, was the root of our modern idea of rights: we share in universal rights to the extent we can be considered as pure abstractions, utterly outside our nets of social connections. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, pushed this assumption of individual rights as properties of abstract human entities to what I consider a strange extreme, essentially arguing that a just society would be one based entirely on individual rights and that individual rights can be identified by imaginatively stripping social beings of all their social traits and relationships.

Behind individual rights, then, lies the market economy. People have entered the realm of abstract rights and left the realm of immanent status to the extent that they have entered the market. Within the United States, the debate over abolition of slavery, was an argument about the replacement of a racial caste order by the Cash Nexus of a labor market (John C. Calhoun, then, was a “lamenter,” like Wordsworth).  Similarly, the women’s rights movement has proceeded with women’s movement out of the status relations of the home and into the labor market as abstract sexless entities. Census data show that only 15 percent of women aged 16 and over participated in the American labor force in 1870, but that this grew to just over a quarter of American women by 1910.  The urban setting of the new industrial America, shrinking families, and movement into the public sphere of the market economy meant that the complete identification of women with women’s roles began to weaken. In the minds of a growing number of Americans, women were becoming abstract beings whose rights and social roles entailed participation in an impersonal, rationalized society.

Like most Americans, I’m deeply attached to the idea of individual, equal rights. As Mazlish’s lamenters realized, though, the same abstraction that frees us can also leave us lost. The quest for authenticity from Rousseau to modern identity politics has been a desperate response to being reduced to abstractions. Further, human beings never really function as completely abstract, independent beings. What they can do even in the Cash Nexus of the marketplace depends on their upbringings and their social networks, so that there is always an element of caste within the market. Too great an attachment to the ideal of complete abstract equality, ironically, can produce heavy handed governmental efforts to “level the playing field” by searching for strategies to dissolve all benefits of social connection, and the further government pursues these kinds of strategies, the more it exercises control and undermines the independent equality of rights. “Starting from unlimited freedom,” proclaimed Dostoevsky’s Shigalov, “I arrive at unlimited despotism.”

Jefferson-Adams and the Natural Aristocracy

The historian Gordon Wood, in his magisterial 1969 classic The Creation of the American Republic, observed that the ideal of equality was a formative part of early American culture.  For Wood, the early American attraction to goals of equality grew out of the unsettling experience of the Revolution, the severing of ties to the English hierarchy, and the rise of new individuals to political and social power during the bitter struggle for separation from Britain. The turmoil of the Revolutionary years did undoubtedly contribute to an American rhetoric and ideology of equality.  However, the ideal of a political body of equal individuals took such a strong hold because it emerged from a long historical experience before the establishment of the new nation and the ideal developed in the ways that it did because the historical experience both promoted dedication to some form of equality and presented that dedication with grave challenges and contradictions. The intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, including the egalitarian theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, undoubtedly influenced the thinking of leading individuals in the American war of independence and the early republic. But the history and social setting of the period left them open to these kinds of ideas and created the need to reconcile thoughts about equality and inequality among citizens. 

By the time of national independence, the central political issue for most Americans was not the redistribution of wealth. It was whether the acknowledged and accepted inequalities of condition would subordinate some to others. Looking back to England, the citizens of the new nation saw that the hierarchy of dependence in Europe rested on inherited status. Thus, the great debate over stratification at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the argument over the Natural Aristocracy, was in large part fueled by concerns about whether the “well-born” would be able to re-create and a European-style hierarchy of dependence in the United States. From this very early time, Americans readily accepted differences in wealth, as long as those differences resulted from each person pursuing an independent course. Wealth from the accident of birth carried the taint of Old World hierarchy and raised the possibility of replacing what we now call acquired status with ascribed. Definitions of the Natural Aristocracy were often complicated and contradictory, sometimes portraying the elite as a coherent social class to be balanced against other classes in maintaining equality and sometimes as a collection of individuals of talent. These differing definitions affected how people saw the members of the elite and what kinds of responses they advocated to keep inequality of condition from threatening the political equality of independent yeomen or middling town dwellers.

The idea of equality as the independence of landed freemen took on a quasi-mythical form in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson. Recognizing the importance of land speculation in creating inequality, Jefferson observed that “the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess” (Quoted in Linklater 2007, p. 27).  Jefferson saw little contradiction between great estates and equality because he understood equality as the absence of hierarchical dependence. Jefferson’s model of society was one of independent farmers, each working his own land. He believed that Saxon England prior to the Norman Conquest had been based on alodial law, in which land belonged to the person who worked it, and argued that American society should be a return to this old Saxon system (Jefferson 1950).  “In the model he envisioned, the political structure would be built up from the community based on the local ‘hundred’ or county with its own court and administration” (Quoted in Andro Linklater, The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity. New York: Walker & Company, 2007, p. 47).

Jefferson’s social vision makes it clear just how he managed to square social egalitarianism with a belief in the existence of superior individuals. All men (and Jefferson’s ideas did apply chiefly to “men” in the narrower sense of male humans) were indeed not only created equal, but would live in equal circumstances insofar as none were dependent on others for support or patronage because each controlled his own agrarian base. Some might indeed hold larger tracts, as Jefferson did, But this would not give larger land holders power over smaller holders.

American beliefs and concerns over equality as independence coalesced at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the phrase “natural aristocracy.” Today, we remember this phrase either as a point of contention in the struggle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over the adoption of the Constitution or a question of political philosophy in the late correspondence of Jefferson and John Adams.  The concept of the natural aristocrat was one of the most widely accepted notions in early social and political thinking about the creation of the American nation. Writing back in England, in the Wealth of Nations (Everyman’s Library,1954 [1776], vol. II, p. 118), Adam Smith attributed the American struggle to the desire of the “… the leading men, the natural aristocracy” of the colonies to manage public affairs.  In America, this elite management, taken for granted by Smith, came under scrutiny during the efforts to design a governmental structure following independence. Even those who were most sympathetic to an an English-style rank-ordering of society, who were often members of an elite based on birth, tended to accept an implicit and generally unexamined assumption of the situation later known as “equality of opportunity,” in which personal virtues and talents, not advantages of birth, would be the primary sources of preeminence.

Because American concerns were chiefly about hierarchy and dependence, arguments about unequal wealth and position in the early republic often concentrated on whether the most advantaged would employ power to subject others and become a true estate. A concentration of power could help to turn wealthier, more socially connected, and cleverer people into a European-style elite. This was the reason the Federalist-Anti-Federalist debate over the Constitution became a debate over stratification. It was a debate that broadened and deepened American thinking about social classes and produced a range of views, but always stayed close to the issue of what a generally accepted socioeconomic inequality meant for relations of independence.

John Adams took a complicated view of the natural aristocracy, seeing its members as sources of both danger and national political advantage.  To overcome the dangers of natural aristocrats to political equality, he proposed “to throw the rich and the proud into one group, in a separate assembley, and there tie their hands; if you give them scope with the people at large, or their representatives, they will destroy all equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamation of the people themselves [italics in the original]. They will have much more power mixed with the representatives, than separated from them. In the first case, if they unite, they will give the law, and govern all; if they differ, they will divide the state, and go to a decision by force. But placing them alone by themselves, the society avails itself of all their abilities and virtues; they become a solid check to the representatives themselves, as well as to the executive power, and you disarm them entirely of their power to do mischief” (John Adams, Letter XXXII, Massachusetts Gazette, Sept. 4, 1787, p. 4). Behind Adams’ political theory is a concept of stratification based on a categorization into the natural aristocrats and “the people at large.” Adams’s argument about restraining the natural aristocracy was an ingenious use of a common Anti-Federalist argument for Federalist purposes, since those opposed to a more centralized government often argued precisely that localized and diffused politics were needed to restrain the natural aristocrats.

With the successful adoption of the Constitution, the debate over the role of inequality in American life became less immediately relevant.  But looking back at this debate reveals some of the assumptions and ideas about equality and inequality held by early Americans. Americans did not all agree on their opposition to rank-ordered subordination, nor were they always consistent in their views. The elite Anti Federalists, in particular, often appeared to oppose centralization of governmental authority because they were inclined toward a kind of subordination, in which they imagined themselves, as local elites, better able than a distant authority to direct their own communities. This kind of anti-democratic localism would continue to be one stream in American social views, later appearing in the thought of John C. Calhoun and again among the Southern Bourbons after Reconstruction. Alongside this regional elitism, though, the Jeffersonian image of independent white yeomen continued to hold imaginations in the South.

The most common opinion was a general acceptance of human inequality, combined with the goal of keeping that inequality from becoming permanently institutionalized as hereditary aristocracy and restraining it from becoming a system of subordination.  The last important discussion of the concept of the natural aristocracy took place as an epilogue to the old debate at the time of the Constitution, in the letters of Jefferson and Adams in the Fall of 1813, the year after the two political rivals finally renewed their friendship. Writing on September 2, and commenting on a passage of Theognis, Adams raised the question of who are the “aristoi”  He translated this word, which means “the best” in Greek, as “aristocrats.” “Philosophy may Answer ‘the Wise and Good,’” Adams maintained, “But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, ‘the rich, the beautiful and well born’” (Adams, in Lester J. Cappon The Adams-Jefferson Letters, Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 1988, p. 371).  Adams told Jefferson that “the five Pillars of Aristocracy are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the last two” (Adams, in Cappon 1988, p. 371).

Adams, then saw the inequality described by aristocracy as consisting of individual qualities, rather than inhering in social structure. Today, most commentators would probably classify being “well born,” having an advantageous family situation, as a matter of the system of positions into which individuals are born. Adams, though, writing at a time before sociologically thinking permeated views of the world, considered advantages of birth, personal appearance, and financial situation all as individual qualities. Moreover, he argued that the social assets that individuals possess outweigh moral and intellectual capacities.  Although Adams threw together different kinds of human inequalities, it is evident that Adams took a highly skeptical and critical view of social inequality, even while regarding it as inevitable.  The things that make people “the best” in a society are usually not the most constructive traits.  The suspicion of preeminence is consistent with the old Federalist’s earlier concerns with setting up institutions that can control and direct the political influence of the supposedly best people.

Jefferson replied to these thoughts on October 28. He recognized that Adams was lumping together different types of inequality as components of the aristocracy, and then assuming that the least desirable components would receive the greatest emphasis.  Jefferson responded by dividing the qualities identified by Adams into two categories: those belonging to the “artificial aristocracy” and those belonging to the “natural aristocracy.” “The grounds of [the natural aristocracy],” according to Jefferson, “are virtue and talents.” Bodily strength, he explained, was a primary ground of this natural preeminence, but modern weapons have rendered this obsolete. “[B]odily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness, and other accomplishments, has become an auxiliary ground of distinction.” Jefferson did not make it clear why these other accomplishments should have diminished along with strength, although presumably gunpowder did not displace beauty or politeness in the same way that it displaced physical prowess. The artificial aristocracy, on the other hand, is “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” (Jefferson, in Cappon, 1988, p. 388).

Jefferson distinguished between the fundamental political rights of white men, which were equal, and their opportunities for leadership, which the author of the Declaration of Independence believed should be distributed according to virtues and talents.  Neither Jefferson nor John Adams was a social leveler. Both saw stratification as inevitable, and justifiable to the extent that it was the product of those virtues and talents. It is notable that Jefferson’s optimism about the natural aristocracy was based on his differentiation of inequality based on “virtues and talents” and inequality based on “wealth and birth.”  We can see in Jefferson’s interpretation some of the early traces of the “equality of opportunity” view that was gradually to emerge from the “equality of independence” perspective. The willingness to free the natural aristocrats from constraints came out of the belief that their superiority would be the expression of personal qualities. However, Jefferson also believed, as we have seen, that in a society of independent individual yeomen even political leadership by people of superior talents would not subordinate the general citizenry.

Adams, true to his old dedication to restraining the natural aristocrats, was much more skeptical of inequality. While he combined different kinds of inequalities, he also made a point that many social scientists would accept today: that the advantages that modern commentators might describe as “ascribed status” influence and can outweigh the advantages of “achieved status.” This did not lead him to argue for abolishing social inequality, but to continue his long-held support for finding ways to restrain and direct those at the top.

In the years that have followed this interchange between the two founders, Americans have tended to lean toward the Jeffersonian approach when they have seen a wide opening for virtues and talents, especially as opportunity became a greater part of the national understanding of the meaning of equality. When they have become more conscious of threats to the efficacy of individual virtues and talents, as in the Progressive Era, they have tended to favor the Adams approach, although fostering opportunity for achievement became a more common rationale for constructing political means of constraint.