In recent years, economic inequality in the United States has grown to unprecedented levels, and discussions about disparities in wealth and income have once again taken a central place in American society and politics. This panel adds a critical historical dimension to these debates, taking Daniel Mandell’s recent The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 as its point of departure. The papers here consider how republican notions of a “rough” equality were transformed during the mid-nineteenth century, in response to social and economic changes stemming from the spread of markets and wage labor, the growing conflicts over slavery, and the rise of political democracy in the United States and revolutionary Europe. In the decades before the Civil War, land reformers and labor activists revived ideas of economic equality derived from longstanding traditions within Anglo-American political thought, while free Black demands for political rights and economic independence and ideas stemming from the 1848 revolutions in Europe infused these traditions with new life, prompting a backlash from both slaveholding conservatives and northern laissez-faire liberals. How did different social and economic groups draw on longstanding egalitarian traditions within Anglo-American political thought, as well as new ideas derived from the revolutions in Europe, to advance notions of economic equality? To what extent were these ideas in tension with equally entrenched ideas about the sanctity of private property or competing ideals of racial, gender, and political equality?

The papers presented will consider how different groups drew on both longstanding political traditions and newer ideas prompted by political and economic change, while facing challenges from the rise of liberal capitalism in the North and the anti-egalitarian ideology of southern slaveholders. Sean Griffin will describe how free Black activists combined ideas associated with land reform and labor activism with demands for economic independence and self-determination, only to confront the limits of a reconstructed nation still committed to racism and the sanctity of property rights. Matthew Stanley will examine how labor reformers and abolitionists were influenced by egalitarian ideas stemming from the French Revolution of 1848, and Jesse George-Nichol will discuss how southern slaveholders responded to what they considered new and dangerous innovations on ideas of political and racial equality. Dr. Mandell (Truman State University) will chair the panel, and Matthew Karp (Princeton University) will offer comment.