Equality and Diversity: The Eighteenth-Century Debate about Equal Protection and Equal Civil Rights

Abstract

Living, as we do, in a world in which our discussions of equality often lead back to the desegregation decisions, to the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the antislavery debates of the 1830s, we tend to allow those momentous events to dominate our understanding of the ideas of equal protection and equal civil rights. Indeed, historians have frequently asserted that the idea of equal protection first developed in the 1830s in discussions of slavery and that it otherwise had little history prior to its adoption into the U. S. Constitution. 1 Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, however-long before even the 1830s-equal protection of the laws and equal civil rights were hardly notions unknown to Americans, who used these different standards of equality to address problems of religious diversity. In late eighteenth-century America-a na