Indeed, if equality had meant only equality of opportunity or a rough equality of property-holding, it could never have become, as it has, the single most powerful and radical ideological force in all of American history. Equality became so potent for Americans because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else, not just at birth, not in talent or property or wealth, and not just in some transcendental religious sense of the equality of all souls.
Equality: no one is better than anyone else. Seems a little amorphous in its definition; claims that no other nation has quite ever had equality this way. Seems doubtful asked whether we have had an exactly that way, either, but so be it.
