with competency, there will be few poor, and few dependent.
Madison concurred, but felt compelled to point out that “equality,” as Pinckney would have it, did not include an identity of material interests. As Shay’s Rebellion had made clear, already there were “different interests”—between creditors and debtors, farmers and manufacturers, and “particularly the distinction of rich & poor”—and these would likely intensify over time:
An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, & secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings. These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarter to give notice of the future danger.
Hamilton agreed with Madison: “It was certainly true: that nothing like an equality of property existed: that an inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and that it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself. This inequality of property constituted the great & fundamental distinction in Society.”2
Rousseau had recognized this phenomenon: “It is precisely because the force of things always tends to destroy equality,” he had written, “that the force of legislation must tend to maintain it.” But, writing in The Federalist Papers, Madison made clear, that if Rousseau’s observation was correct, his prescription was wrong: the duty of government was to preserve inequality.
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
“The latent causes of faction,” Madison concluded, “are thus sown in the nature of man.” Hamilton agreed; inequality was natural, inevitable, and an altogether proper foundation for government:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . . Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
The notion was perhaps most fully developed in John Adams’s Discourses on Davila. There, Adams posited the existence of a “natural aristocracy”: “every society,” he wrote, “naturally produces an order of men, which it is impossible to confine to an equality of rights.” The rhetoric was too strong for some of his countrymen, but the central premise was widely shared: there is a social order, and it is altogether natural.
Perhaps no word dominated the rhetoric of the convention like this one: everything—rights, laws, orders, the government itself—all had to be “natural.” Montesquieu—part naturalist, part empiricist—had suggested that the natural law of each nation would vary with its natural conditions: the proper government was the one that consisted with the “spirit of the nation.” No authority was cited at the convention more than Montesquieu, and no idea seemed to capture the framers’ imagination like this one. The new government had to suit the country’s nature: it had to accommodate, not shape, the natural order of things.3
America’s natural order in turn seemed to depend on three interrelated phenomena. There was, first, human nature. There was near unanimous agreement with Madison’s sentiment that self-interest was “sown in the nature of man”; rejected was the Republican vision of an enlightened citizenry, trained in civic virtue, finding its fullest political expression in the idea of the public good. “It is the nature of man,” proclaimed James Wilson during the ratification debates, “to pursue his own interest, in preference to the public good.” Noah Webster, writing as “A Citizen of America,” insisted that “[t]he first and almost only principle that governs men, is interest” (emphasis in original). There was no altruism in this conception of humanity; “men are,” as Hamilton summarized it, “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”
There was, second, natural inequality. The more egalitarian-minded Republicans, following Rousseau, had posited a community of genuine equals: they advocated what for the next two centuries would be cryptically and often pejoratively described as “social equality.” But for most of the framers, such a state was inconceivable. Some men, they reasoned, would naturally achieve greater success than others, if they were simply left to pursue their interests; it was the inevitable result of the “diversity in the faculties of men.” Thus arose the distinctions between classes—between rich and poor, between creditors and debtors—distinctions that are, as Madison explained in a 1787 letter to Jefferson, “various and unavoidable,” due to the “unequal faculties of acquiring” property. These are, Madison explained, “natural distinctions,” unlike the “artificial distinctions” created by politics and religion. It was not a great leap to Adams’s natural aristocracy, even if, for political reasons, few Federalists—and still fewer Republicans—were openly willing to make it.
There were, finally, natural rights. The notion is generally attributed to Locke, but the American conception is probably somewhat original: Locke’s Treatises on Government likely relied too heavily on biblical authority for the deists who founded the new nation, and there is no real evidence that the more significant exposition of rights in the Second Treatise was even read by the framers. What the Americans fashioned was a conception of natural rights that lacked Locke’s rigorous conceptual framework, and perhaps also his conditions. For Locke, the social compact limited the exercise of rights, and even “inalienable rights” of “life” and “property” required the protection of positive law. For the framers, natural rights referred more loosely to freedoms which the government was bound to respect: rights to life, liberty, and property. These were more likely to be genuinely inalienable—they could not be ceded to the state—and genuinely natural—they preceded the state, and gave rise to, but did not depend upon, its positive laws.4
The distinction may be more than semantic: it may explain the framers’ otherwise remarkable capacity for inequality. The American conception of natural rights clearly underlies Madison’s “first object of government”; the social compact cannot embrace limitations on the pursuits of men because liberty is, a priori, essential to political life. Distinctions of property, then, are rooted in an inviolable liberty: inequality becomes a political mandate. This is not Rousseau, of course, and it is not even Locke. It explains, perhaps, why “equality” almost never appears as a first order principle: it is only a condition, as in, for example, John Dickinson’s devotion to “equal liberty” or “equal freedom.” When the framers do advocate “equality”—as when Noah Webster argues for an “equality of property”—it is almost always “liberty” that is on their minds: Webster’s argument is, above all, for the free alienability of property rights, for the accumulation of property not through divine rights of inheritance, but through merit.5
America’s natural order may not have been rooted in Locke or Rousseau, but it was clearly a product of its times. The modernist shift from the supernatural to the natural simply found full expression in the new nation. The process was manifest in a host of material ways—in the gradual transition, for example, from religious to property qualifications for suffrage—but its most significant impact was on political theory: it was not God, but nature, that defined and limited the realm of the politically
