This coming Friday, June 12, 2026, is the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the first article of which is generally consistent with the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
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| George Mason's original draft |
While this sounds pretty innocuous — unless you are a member of the British Parliament in 1776 — there are some aspects of this seemingly straightforward assertion that are extremely complex and subtle . . . and which may often be lost on the modern reader. First and foremost, there is the fact that many of the individuals responsible for drafting and adopting the Declaration were slaveowners . . . and yet they began their document with the clear and unequivocal statement “[t]hat all men are by nature equally free and independent.”
Does this invalidate the Declaration? Brand those who drafted and voted for it hypocrites, knaves, or fools? Or is there more to the story?
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| Orestes Brownson |
As a caveat, this is not an apology for slavery, an excuse, or anything other than an examination of the facts — the story behind the story, as it were — and an analysis of what the words actually mean. It begins with realizing that the specific form of American liberal democracy that evolved was not individualist as some think, collectivist as some would like, but personalist — a recognition of the dignity of the individual human being as a person in society. As Orestes Brownson was to put it in The American Republic (1865),
The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. . . . its mission is not so much the realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the State, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual — the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. (Orestes A. Brownson, The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2003, 3.)
Consequently, what came out of the thought of the Founding Fathers and the political and economic conditions of the time was less of a compromise than some today believe. Still, the most important compromise that allowed American personalist liberal democracy to take root very nearly destroyed it from the beginning and has still not been dealt with adequately today: slavery.
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| George Mason |
This requires a little back story. Personalist American liberal democracy resolved the differences between the contract theory of John Locke and Algernon Sidney, and Robert Cardinal Bellarmine’s reliance on the collective having social rights by direct grant from God. This, according to Fr. John Clement Rager, was thanks to George Mason of Gunston Hall. (Rev. John Clement Rager, S.T.D., The Political Philosophy of Blessed Robert Bellarmine. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1926.)
This, in a sense, threw a wildcard into the game. Where most of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic relied on Locke, Sidney, and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in forming their political thought, Mason almost certainly read those authors, but also the works of Bellarmine, especially De Laicis, Bellarmine’s “Treatise on Civil Government.” This created a difficulty, at least for Mason.
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| John Locke |
Although Locke and Sidney asserted the natural state of a human being is outside society, Mason accepted Bellarmine’s (and Aristotle’s) position man is by nature a political animal. The state of nature, therefore, is not a condition of being outside of society, but of being a full member of society.
On the other hand, Bellarmine claimed individual human beings do not possess all rights by nature, but that God grants certain rights directly to the collective. Mason acknowledged the logic of Locke and Sidney in recognizing individual human beings have all rights by nature. He also, however, accepted Bellarmine’s position that human beings are naturally members of society — but not Bellarmine’s idea that God grants certain rights directly to the collective, an abstraction created by human beings.
We won’t get into the complex argument why this is so, but an abstraction, whether king or collective, only has such rights as the organized body of people delegate to it from their personal rights, whether out of necessity or expedience. Whether he realized it or not, Mason’s theory of society constituted a completed concept of political personalism.
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| Thomas Jefferson |
This, as we will now see, is evident from Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, from which Thomas Jefferson derived certain principles found in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, drafted between June 11 and June 28, 1776. It is necessary to specify Mason’s draft as the Virginia document was almost voted down due to Mason basing it on his theory of society which, as it respected the dignity of every human being, would have abolished the basis of human chattel slavery.
A slaveowner who hated slavery, Mason’s original draft read, “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.” Conservatives, outraged, immediately realized Mason’s language took away their justification for owning other human beings. They demanded the offending passage and some others be removed or amended.
Faced with the possibility — the near certainty, actually — Virginia’s failure to adopt its Declaration would stop the American Revolution dead in its tracks, Mason agreed to the changes, very much against his better judgement and inclination. As Robert A. Rutland related in his biography of Mason,
As finally approved, the first sentence read “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; . . .” The italicized phrase, with its implicit proposition that slaves are not members of society, placated the opposition. (Robert A. Rutland, George Mason: Reluctant Statesman. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1961, 54.)
Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson’s final draft of the Declaration of Independence left the natural law basis of the American theory of society intact. This, however, was only at the cost of omitting private property from the list of natural rights. Private property remains a natural right by implication, of course. It is just not specified. The big sacrifice, however, was being forced to delete a clause explicitly condemning slavery:
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
(Anyone who has seen the musical play 1776 got a good, even entertaining depiction of the struggle over the removal of this passage. The timeline was altered, character locations were changed, and events altered for dramatic purposes, but the dialogue was taken almost verbatim from letters and other historical documents.)
American liberalism is thus a form of political personalism, a theory of society based on the inherent dignity of every human being. As a result, and excepting the abomination of slavery and the treatment of native peoples, it was clear to commentators such as Alexis de Tocqueville that the American theory of society as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is materially consistent with the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism as presented in the short book, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, and thus with the Economic Democracy Act (EDA).
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