The New Criterion recently published a review by Michael Anton of a new book by Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding. Anton’s review is entitled “Founding Philosophy.”
...Early on in his review, Anton addresses the question of how we are to understand the claim in the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal. In what way are we equal? After all, we are certainly not equal in intelligence, strength, beauty, or virtue; we do not all have the same gifts and talents.
The Declaration teaches that all men are created equal. But do we today understand equality as the Founders did?
In his book, West presents Harry Jaffa’s explanation of the Founders’ declaration that all men are created equal. Anton puts the Jaffa/West account like this:
“The idea is elegantly simple: all men are by nature equally free and independent. Nature has not—as she has, for example, in the case of certain social insects—delineated some members of the human species as natural rulers and others as natural workers or slaves.”
Jaffa’s neither booted nor saddled image has a splendid pedigree. Here is the Jefferson quote Jaffa refers to:
“All eyes are open to or opening to…the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Jefferson in his turn had borrowed the metaphor. It was made famous by Richard Rumbold. Rumbold was a British subject executed for his political views in 1685, shortly before Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. In his famous “Speech from the Gallows", he declared:
“I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”
To us, Jefferson’s words have a very clear meaning: that “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few [born] booted and spurred” means human beings are not born subject to the rule of monarchs and aristocrats who have political power by right of birth....