By the mid-18th century, Anglo-Americans generally believed in the virtues of a “rough” economic equality, that a republic needed to avoid concentrated wealth and great poverty in order to maintain the public good and prevent corruption. These ideals held particular power because they reflected the experiences of most British Americans. Widespread property ownership among white settlers meant that in every province a far higher percentage of white adult men could vote than in England. Even the wealthiest Southern planters needed the political support of their poorer—yet still property-holding—neighbors.
The widespread embrace of these ideas can be glimpsed in the publication of Cato’s Letters in the Boston Independent Advertiser in 1748. The very first selection included the warning that when a man’s wealth “become immeasurably or surprising great,” the community “ought to make strict Enquiry, how they came by them, and oblige them” to surrender part of their riches. “But, will some say, is it a Crime to be rich? Yes, certainly. At the publick expence, or to the Danger of the Publick.” The Advertiser was edited by Samuel Adams for artisans and laborers fired up by their successful resistance to impressment—the Navy’s effort to grab men for forced service—and concerned about rising poverty in the postwar depression. Sixteen years later, Adams would organize those artisans and laborers into the Sons of Liberty to resist British imperial measures.
These egalitarian ideas became more apparent as the conflict with London deepened and moved towards revolution. In his 1773 election sermon, Benjamin Trumbull warned Connecticut’s governor and legislators that if a few were allowed to “amass all the riches and wealth of a country” they would “by fraud or force . . . oppress and tyrannize over their fellow-men.” To avoid that evil, the community needed to keep property “as equally divided as possible.” Three years later, such a measure nearly became part of Pennsylvania’s first constitution when a delegate, probably Benjamin Franklin, proposed empowering the legislature to take “excessive” property from individuals because concentrations of wealth were “a danger to the happiness of mankind.”
As the War for Independence widened and inflation became a major problem, many states and towns sought to regulate prices, in part for egalitarian reasons. For example, in May 1777, committees of safety in Plymouth County began their resolution supporting Massachusetts price limits by insisting that “the felicity, freedom, and happiness of a community” depends on “an equitable exchange of the fruits of the earth.” Two years later, as inflation returned, a huge Philadelphia gathering denounced the wealthy and elected a committee to lower prices. When a merchant committee condemned those restraints, the committee insisted that civil society required “subordination to the common good” and argued that those who had built the merchants’ ships were entitled to regulate goods carried on the vessels.