“All men are created equal” is the most cherished phrase in the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most powerful ideas to emerge during the Revolution.  Yet most Americans have little idea of what this concept meant at the time, nor how it evolved along with their country’s institutions and culture.  In 1600, equality was viewed as anarchy, and rigid socio-economic hierarchies were viewed as necessary for a moral civil order.  Over the next century and a half, this order was undermined, first with the idea that political and economic equality had existed among Englishmen before the Norman conquest; then with the Enlightenment notion that all humans were born with the same capabilities and inherent rights to life, liberty, and property; and finally by a radical evangelical movement.  Educated Anglo-Americans also embraced the lesson from Classical history that a republic could only survive as long as it avoided extremes of rich and poor.  In Revolutionary America, all of these ideas were, to varying degrees, part of the popular yet still controversial concept of equality.  But after the war, even as democracy widened and developed deeper roots, the celebration of individual liberty and property ownership caused notions of substantive economic equality to become marginalized.  Racial inequalities increased even as slavery ended in North, and women were never considered part of the body politic or economic.  My Forum lecture will outline these intellectual developments and show how they created a tension between liberty and equality during the nation’s first half-century that is still with us today.