Although most Americans in 1776 believed that not everyone in a republic had to have same amount of property All took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth and the bulk of the population remained dependent servants or poor landless laborers. 8 In the 1780s James Madison had his doubts about this moral capacity of the people stretched to the limit, but even he admitted that ordinary people had to have sufficient “virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom” or “no theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure.” Good republicans had to believe in the common sense of the common people. 9 The American people, wrote Governor William Livingston of New Jersey in a common reckoning of 1787, “do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support a republican government.” 20 When the Revolutionary leaders had asserted that all men were created equal, most had not imagined that ordinary people, farmers, artisans, and other workers would actually come to hold high governmental office. 21