Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War

In a series of lucidly presented case studies from antebellum America, Brown (The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler with Irene Quenzler Brown), emeritus professor of history at the University of Connecticut, examines situations in which the egalitarian philosophy of the American Revolution confronted uncomfortable realities. Brown writes that Thomas Jefferson’s line that “all men are created equal” was “not simply rhetorical window-dressing.” But though many of the nation’s founders were committed to a new birth of social equality, they and their supporters were often frustrated by entrenched social, economic, and cultural forces that militated against the achievement of their ideals. Protestant Americans rejected state religion, but they hated and feared Catholics and were uncomfortable with Jews and Quakers. White women—however educated, accomplished, or wealthy they might be—were legally equivalent to children, citizens subordinate to their supposed natural superiors: white men. And both enslaved and free people of color learned from bitter experience that racial difference precluded equal treatment by law. Through vivid accounts of dozens of legal cases, Brown explores the alternate widening and narrowing of the gap between ideology and reality with regard to the concept of equal rights, and shows Americans of all backgrounds attempting to adjust the balance to their advantage. (Mar.)