One must also consider that he words equal and equality as used

One must also consider that he words equal and equality, as used in the eighteenth century, did not necessarily imply a conflict with the institution of slavery. Broadly speaking, five general usages of these terms (apart from those referring to nations under natural law) were current in American political discourse during the late eighteenth century. Two were derived from Locke. The first was that all men are equal in the sense that none has a natural or God-given right to rule over another.

The idea could be extended logically to discredit slavery, but ordinarily it was not. The usual understanding was that the doctrine applied only to the supposed divine right of kings; and upon that understanding, almost every American agreed that all men are created equal.

The other Lockean conception of equality lay in his epistemological proposition that humans were born with a tabula rasa, and that what they become as adults - wise or foolish, good or evil - was a function of time and circumstance, of what they experienced and of what they were taught and learned.

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An obvious inference from this premise was that mankind could be greatly (if not infinitely) improved by education and by the conscious reorganization of society. In one way or another, a number of the founders accepted this precursor of the Idea of Progress. Alexander Hamilton, however, was one of the few Americans who were willing to tie Locke's epistemology to the question of slavery: Hamilton was convinced that the supposed inferiority of American blacks was a result of conditions under which they lived and that under equal circumstances blacks would prove to be intellectually and socially equal to whites.

(Syrett, Papers of Hamilton 17-19)

Another conception of equality concerned morality. John Taylor of Caroline was expressing a widely held view when he maintained that all men were equally bound by moral duties and that they had the moral right to perform those duties. (Leslie Wharton, Polity and the Public Good: Conflicting Theories of Republican Government in the New Nation, 15-16) Slavery was not necessarily condemned by this definition, for in an ultimate sense moral accountability was to God: blacks and whites were equal in His eyes, and that should be enough for any man. In a society in which almost everyone believed in a future state of eternal rewards and punishments (and in which reminders of one's own mortality were almost continuous), that was no trivial abstraction.

Nor was slavery incompatible with the view of equality which held that it meant equality before the law. Slaves did not have standing in law equal to that of freemen, but neither did women or children. And as will be seen, limiting the rights of citizenship to "freemen" was entirely consistent with republican principles; indeed, in most versions of republican theory such a limitation was not only acceptable but also indispensable.

There remains one further conception of equality that had gained some currency, and it alone negated the possibility of slavery as a morally acceptable institution. This was the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy, which held that all adult human beings are endowed with a moral sense - an innate knowledge of what is right and what is wrong, of what is good and what is evil - and with a disposition to do good. "In this respect," wrote Francis Hutcheson, "all men are originally equal," and they have equal capacities for judging whether their rules are good or bad. From that position it is but a short step to radical democracy, and no distance at all to the conclusion (again in Hutcheson's words) that "Nature makes none masters, none slaves." Thomas Jefferson, among others, was powerfully influenced by Hutcheson and the Common Sense school. It is scarcely a wonder, then, that Jefferson could write, apropos slavery, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." (Garry Willis, Inventing America, 228)