The Declaration of Independence is the most read, listened to, and celebrated of our nation’s foundation documents.  The common title for the Declaration, however, is an unfortunate misnomer and misdirects our attention.  Jefferson’s original title was: A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.  The title of the document held at the National Archives is The Unanimous Declaration By the Thirteen United States of America.  In some of the earliest reprints the words “Unanimous” and “Thirteen” were dropped.    The fact that “Independence” was never part of the original title is not a trivial point.  It would be more to the point to call it The Declaration of Liberty; for that was the cause that the founders were most vehemently declaring.

In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln directed the nation’s attention to the Declaration’s assertions of liberty and equality.  A focus on political independence, or a reminder of the right of a “people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another” and assume “the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them” would have been awkward to say the least.  After all, independence was what the Confederates were fighting for. The Declaration has continued to inspire freedom seekers, and not necessarily independence seekers, from around the world, and from the most dissimilar political philosophies, such as the French revolutionaries of 1789 to Ho Chi Minh and Beijing’s Tiananmen Square protesters.  Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute observer of the early United States, wrote that the American Revolution was “produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence.”^[1]

In June of 1776, Richard Henry Lee’s Resolution for Independence concisely stated the Second Continental Congress’ view of the facts: the colonies were free and independent.  The revolutionaries, however, were not just political architects who were deconstructing one system and constructing a new model of government.  They were political philosophers engaged with the biggest question: how are people supposed to live?  That was why Jefferson went well beyond Lee’s straight forward statement to assert a few cardinal truths concerning human values when he wrote the Declaration.  To be free to pursue happiness was the ultimate purpose of life.

In the Declaration, the word “happiness” appeared two times and was the climactic word that ended the sentences where it was used.  As both a musician and an architect, Jefferson was acutely attuned to the importance of repetition.   The rhythm and design of his sentences were well thought out, particularly since Jefferson wrote the Declaration to be read aloud.  He was aware of the stylistic importance of placing the emphatic word at the end of the sentence.  If we imagine Jefferson putting those two sentences to music, one can almost see the crescendo symbols beneath the two stanzas.  As Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone wrote: “He was a ready writer but he could also be a fastidious one, and he never weighed his phrases more carefully than now.”^[2]  The Declaration underwent extensive editing before it was approved by Congress, with some twenty-six major alterations and two new paragraphs added.  Jefferson’s statements about rights and happiness, however, remained untouched.^[3]

As asserted in the Declaration, we have many inalienable rights, hence the use of the phrase “among these;” but Jefferson chose the most fundamental to spell out.  People must be able to preserve their life, they must be free to control the direction of their life, and if these two rights were secured, they would be able to pursue the ultimate goal of happiness.  Life and liberty were the means to the end state of happiness.  When Jefferson wrote of happiness he presented what might initially appear to be a conflict over how happiness was connected to a meaningful life.  It was potentially paradoxical because with the dual mentions in the opening paragraph of the Declaration, each time it seemed to present a different perspective.

In the first use of the word it appeared as though happiness was an individual and private matter in that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  The implication was that the maintenance of rights was for the benefit of the individual.  As long as a person was in possession of his life and was at liberty, he could pursue his own idea of happiness.  Toward the end of the paragraph the meaning shifts.  Happiness was a goal that was to be achieved collectively through the community and was the government’s responsibility.  The Declaration stated that “the People” will create new governments “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”   It could not possibly be a purely private and subjective matter if the ultimate goal of government was to secure happiness for the general population.  If each person was at liberty to self-define his ideal end state then one person’s idea of happiness might conflict with another’s.  In a situation where the maintenance of happiness was to be achieved by the collective action of government, there must be an agreed upon definition of this happiness experience that everyone was pursuing.  The notion that the people will create governments that will both ensure safety and promote happiness was yet another idea potentially loaded with problems.

Much of the past two-hundred plus years of political debate has been a wrangling over the problem of the seemingly zero-sum game between liberty and security.  If all are completely free there is no security so we give up some liberty with the hopes of finding some security.  How much freedom to give up for how much safeguarding?  More than two-hundred years of intense and often hostile political debate in the United States has not answered that question.  On the other hand, if the citizenry shared a vision of happiness that was based on an agreed upon definition of the good life that all clear-thinking people would choose, conflict could be minimal.  This idea of a communal or public happiness was an idea that was expressed by Jefferson in one of his few published documents.  In A View of the Rights of British America published in 1774, Jefferson wrote of a peoples’ right to “establish new societies, under which such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness (italics added).”^[4]

Jefferson never clearly explained what or who inspired his use of the word “happiness.” In fact, if Jefferson’s use of the word was unusual, then we might be inclined to dismiss the usage and attribute it to some sort of Jeffersonian eccentricity.  Its prominence in the Declaration, however, was not a deviation from the norms of his day.  Both before and after the printing of the Declaration, the word happiness was regularly used when discussing the goal of government.  The strength of the Declaration was that it stated what everyone already agreed to be true, or as John Adams wrote in his own prickly sort of way, “there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in congress for two years.”^[5]

Happiness was a familiar theme in many of the most well-known writings of the day.  The popular Reverend Jonathan Mayhew of Boston preached in 1754 that the purpose of government was the happiness of men.   Although Jefferson claimed not to have read his pamphlet, in 1764 James Otis wrote that the end of government was “to provide for the security, the quiet, and happy enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.”^[6]   In 1765, the Continental Congress  asserted, “that the increase, prosperity, and happiness of these colonies depend on the full and free enjoyment of their rights and liberties.”^[7]  Jefferson most certainly read the widely circulated work written in 1768 by a man he admired enormously, Joseph Priestly.  Priestly wrote, “that the happiness of the whole community is the ultimate end of government can never be doubted… The great object of civil society is the happiness of the members of it.”^[8]

Josiah Quincy wrote in 1774 in an essay, Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill, that the utilitarian objective of civil society was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”^[9]  In response to the congressional delegates looking for guidance in writing state constitutions, in April of 1776 John Adams wrote Thoughts on Government, where he asserted that “the happiness of society is the end of government.”^[10]

In the years immediately preceding the Declaration, numerous essays appeared in the Virginia Gazette with titles such as “The Pursuit of Happiness,” “Happiness,” “Essay on Happiness,” and “The Character of the Happy Life.”  All of these essays connected happiness with virtue.^[11]  Fresh in Jefferson’s mind as well, must have been the widely read and commented upon pamphlet Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, written in 1774 by James Wilson, one of the most highly respected legal scholars in the colonies.  He expressed ideas, as well as the paragraph structure, that will reemerge in the Declaration: “All men are, by nature, equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded in the consent of those who are subject to it: such consent was given with a view to ensure the happiness of the governed…. The consequence is, that the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.^[12]

The most frequently cited source for Jefferson’s statement on rights was from his friend and fellow Virginian, George Mason.  In June of 1776, the Virginia Constitutional Convention approved “A Declaration of Rights” that had been written by Mason.  All men were “by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights,” and they must never be deprived of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.^[13]

Mason’s emphasis on happiness can be traced to an earlier reference from 1774, when he penned the Fairfax County Resolves.  He wrote that people are only to be governed by laws passed by elected representatives, and that the laws must protect the “safety and happiness” of the community.^[14]  Virginia’s “Declaration of Rights” appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12, 1776, the same day Congress appointed the committee of five to write the Declaration.  We will never know, but we might safely assume, that Mason’s Declaration was discussed.  What, after all, could have been of greater interest to Jefferson than what was coming out of the Virginia Constitutional Convention?  It is likely that Mason’s words were fresh in Jefferson’s mind, and it is very possible that a copy of Mason’s Declaration was close at hand.

The similarities between Mason’s and Jefferson’s Declarations are indeed striking. It is also interesting to explore the words that Jefferson decided to exclude.  Mason wrote of the rights of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”  Jefferson dropped safety, perhaps believing that safety was already covered by the right to preserve one’s life.  Jefferson also seemed to believe that we have a right to pursue happiness, but no right to necessarily obtain it.  With this, Jefferson was reaching back to the Aristotelian view of happiness: it was a life well lived and dependent on a person’s efforts at a virtuous life as well as the individual’s ability to maximize inherent capacities.  Jefferson corrected Mason’s error.  It was entirely within a person’s own power to become virtuous and no government could make sure a person obtained it.  Mason appeared to be the bridge between John Locke and Jefferson concerning the issue of property and happiness.  Mason included both “property” and “happiness” in his statements.  Jefferson chose to drop “property” and single out “happiness.”

Historians debate which philosopher may have influenced Jefferson more, yet most Declaration scholars recognize the clear influence of John Locke.^[15]  The notion that freedom and happiness was inseparably linked to the protection of property and was therefore the primary object of government was Locke’s essential thesis.^[16]  Nonetheless, Jefferson was never attached to any one philosophical creed.  He drew from a deep well of often competing philosophical schools, such as the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans; he was fascinated by Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus.^[17]

In 1825, the aging Jefferson recollected that when he wrote the Declaration he had been influenced by “the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”^[18]  Even if we were to concede that Jefferson’s list was chronological—ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Enlightenment—the preeminence of Aristotle’s views on the connections between politics and ethics had a tremendous impact on the Enlightenment thinking that Jefferson assimilated and articulated.^[19]  The Declaration was the eighteenth-century culmination of two thousand years of thinking about the human condition that begins with Aristotle’s systematic presentation of his view that politics and ethics were not  two distinctly separate areas of study.^[20] According to Aristotle “We took the end of political science to be the chief good, and political science is concerned most of all with producing citizens of a certain kind, namely, those who are both good and the sort to perform noble actions” (NE I.9.1099b29-32).  When Jefferson wrote that happiness was the ultimate aim of human life it was an expression of Aristotle’s understanding of happiness (eudemonia) as a style of virtuous living, well-being, or flourishing that could be judged objectively.

We honor the Declaration without realizing how profoundly this nation has disconnected from the original meaning of the words that the document celebrated.  The National Archives can preserve the parchment, but the conceptual additions and subtractions from mental constructs can happen slowly and outside of awareness as a result of human experience.  Modern definitions of happiness reference subjective emotional states such as joy, merriment, and cheerfulness.   Happiness had become a private, affective state that could only be judged individually; an idea we are more familiar with today.  Within the brain, it is a limbic system (often called the mammalian brain) dominated experience.   The founders meant for it to mean much more.

 

[1]  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. James T. Schleifer, ed. Eduardo Nolla, English ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), 1:117.

[2] Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, vol. 1, Jefferson and His Time (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), 221.

[3] Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 151.

[4] Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” 1774, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 4.

[5] Quoted in Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 151.

[6] Howard Mumford Jones. The Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) 1953, 4.

[7] “Resolutions of the Continental Congress October 19, 1765,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed March 7, 2018, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolu65.asp.

[8] Herbert Lawrence Ganter, “Jefferson’s ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ and Some Forgotten Men,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd ser., 16, no. 4 (October 1936): 585.

[9] Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness, 4.

[10] Ibid.

 [11]  Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 1

[12] Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 108.

[13]  “Virginia Declaration of Rights,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed March 7, 2018, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/virginia.asp.

[14] “George Mason and Historic Human Rights Documents,” Gunston Hall, Home of George Mason, accessed March 7, 2018, http://gunstonhall.org/georgemason/rights.html.

[15]  Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Will’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 36, no. 4 (October 1979).

[16] Charles Beard’s 1913 classic, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, was one of the earliest and most influential proponents of the theory that the founders were most concerned with the problems associated with the distribution of property and that government’s primary purpose was the protection of economic well-being.

[17]  Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, 49.

[18]   Thomas Jefferson, “From Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825,” Founders Online, accessed March 7, 2018, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5212.

[19] Garrett Ward Sheldon, “The Political Theory of the Declaration of Independence,” in The Declaration of Independence: Origins and Impact, ed. Scott Douglas Gerber (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002), 16.

[20] Malcolm Schofield, “Aristotle’s Political Ethics,” The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard Kraut (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 305.