Adams' thoughts on natural and legal equality don't get nearly enough attention, given that he wasn't simply one of the key American Founders but that he also served on the committee that was responsible for drafting the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson did most of the heavy lifting when it came to that draft, it was considered to be the work of the entire committee, and eventually of the Continental Congress as well. After the Revolution, Adams continued to think about the question of human equality and human difference, and the meaning of each for law and politics, particularly in light of the horrific consequences of the absolutist egalitarianism of the French Revolution:
That all men are born to equal rights is true. Every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has. This is an indubitable as a moral government in the universe. But to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life, is as gross a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French revolution.
And for some Aristotlean support for his contentions, Adams resorted to one of the classic concepts of Western philosophy, the idea of the chain of being:
Nature, which has established in the universe a chain of being and universal order, descending from archangels to microscopic animalcules, has ordained that no two objects shall be perfectly alike, and no two creatures perfectly equal. Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them.
On a side note, its nice to see that Adams believed in angels.
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