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In a playful second a century in the past, the historian Carl Becker contemplated this counterfactual: What if Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, had drafted the Declaration of Independence? A scholar of the American Revolution, Becker knew that such a factor was believable. Franklin was, in spite of everything, on the Committee of Five in Philadelphia, which was allotted the job of drawing up the textual content in June 1776. A gifted author of nice standing, he was simply the type of one that would possibly compose a doc of such paramount significance.
Yet Becker thought the thought absurd. Although he admired Franklin for his “intimate and confidential” type, Becker didn’t consider that the writer of Poor Richard’s Almanack may have written such sentences as “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” or “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” These strains had been charged with a peculiar, arresting high quality, mixing precision with poetry. This high quality Becker related to Jefferson’s “engaging felicities”—fairly totally different from Franklin’s prose, which had an “air of the tavern or print shop.”
In reality, Franklin would have been most unlikely to supply the Declaration’s first draft. By 1776, he was too worn out by the strains of life to deal with the problem. Also, as he later confided to Jefferson, he had made it a rule to “avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” as a result of taking up a process of that nature was to ask hassle. Jefferson, then nonetheless 33, would be taught the knowledge of this for himself when Congress debated his draft. First, on about June 12, he sat down at a touring desk of his personal design within the parlor of his lodgings on Seventh and Market Street and began work on the Declaration of Independence.
Franklin was, nonetheless, among the many first to learn Jefferson’s efforts, every week or so later—as was John Adams, who discovered himself “delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded.” From Adams, this was excessive reward, however there was additionally a touch of one thing else in his praise. The “flights of oratory” definitely had luster, however did the phrases have actual substance? Becker himself, in a detailed rereading of the “original Rough draught,” confessed that Jefferson’s prose generally left him with a sense of insecurity, “as of resting one’s weight on something fragile.”
Nowhere is that this sensation extra current than within the Declaration’s most celebrated phrase, “the pursuit of Happiness.”
This seems within the second sentence of the doc as Jefferson outlines his temporary record of “unalienable rights”—“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The last 4 phrases have an instantaneous aesthetic attract, however the longer one lingers over them, the extra a riddle seems. Why has Jefferson denoted each life and liberty as rights, however not happiness, which is certified by the phrase pursuit? Was this use of pursuit purely rhetorical? As the Nineteenth-century lawyer Rufus Choate believed, was it nothing greater than a type of “glittering and sounding generalities” designed to decoration “that passionate and eloquent manifesto”?
Many commentators have interpreted pursuit on this means over time. It provides rhythm and flourish at a pivotal early second within the textual content. Others, nonetheless, haven’t been so positive. To the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., “the pursuit of Happiness” had actual which means, however not the which means most readers acknowledge right this moment. To illustrate his level, Schlesinger sifted by patriot literature by such writers as James Otis, Josiah Quincy II, James Wilson, and Adams himself. All of them wrote about happiness, although—in contrast to Jefferson—framed it not as one thing folks ought to merely “strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right.”
The clearest expression of this strand of American thought got here in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was drafted in May 1776. In it, Mason spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Mason’s textual content, which was reprinted in Philadelphia newspapers in early June, has lengthy been acknowledged as a key affect on Jefferson. The hyperlink between the 2 declarations is obvious sufficient, but the essential shift from “obtaining happiness” to easily pursuing it isn’t so simply defined.
In 1964, Schlesinger wrote a placing brief essay titled “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” wherein he supplied a brand new interpretation. For years, he argued, folks had been studying that line incorrectly. Schlesinger believed that when Jefferson wrote pursuit, he was utilizing it within the phrase’s “more emphatic” which means—as attorneys used to speak about “the pursuit of the law” or medical doctors spoke of “the pursuit of medicine.” This didn’t imply questing after or chasing down. Instead, it implied an individual’s engagement with a apply or vocation already of their possession. Jefferson was not at odds with the opposite Founders in any respect, in line with Schlesinger, however in his studying of the road the shift in which means was vital: Some of the romantic sense of mission, a few of the novelty of its concept of itself, was gone.
“The pursuit of Happiness” could also be pure rhetoric, as Choate believed, or it might have a misplaced which means, as Schlesinger argued, however there’s a third interpretation we must always think about. The age of Enlightenment out of which the United States arose was abuzz with discussions of happiness. What was it? How greatest to accumulate it? Debating golf equipment churned over these points. The thinker Francis Hutcheson got here up with complicated formulation involving human qualities equivalent to “benevolence” (B), “ability” (A), “self-love” (S), and “interest” (I) to create the situations for what he termed the “moment of good” (M). (One a part of his workings went M = B + S x A = BA.) Others relied on expertise greater than principle. Having encountered the Indigenous folks of New Holland (modern-day Australia) for the primary time, Captain Cook sailed away mulling, ungrammatically, whether or not they had been “far more happier than we Europeans.”
But the writer who wrote with probably the most depth about happiness throughout the Revolutionary interval was Samuel Johnson. Johnson was somebody the entire Founders knew properly. Ever for the reason that replica of elements of his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1750, his work had discovered a prepared viewers within the colonies. As the historian James G. Basker has identified, “Johnson was a part of the consciousness of every literate American during the Founding Era.” And for Jefferson, he notes particularly, “the connection was unusually subtle and sustained.”
As a younger man, Jefferson sought out Johnson’s political tracts. He really helpful Johnson’s Dictionary as a essential addition to the library a good friend was developing, and he all the time made positive he had a replica handy himself, whether or not he was in Monticello or Paris. Later, in a 1798 letter, he confessed to utilizing it as “a Repertory, to find favorite passages which I wished to recollect,” though he added intriguingly, “but too rarely with success.”
This line captures one thing of the place Johnson occupied in Jefferson’s thoughts—usually there, not all the time as a welcome visitor. In 1775, Johnson had emerged because the sharpest British critic of what he known as the “wild, indefinite and obscure” resolutions of the Continental Congress. Jefferson had felt the heat of his prose greater than most. Reading the copy of Johnson’s livid polemic Taxation No Tyranny that he’d acquired shortly after its publication that yr, the slave-owning Jefferson would have been confronted with a distinctly private taunt: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Johnson’s admonitions did not just haunt Jefferson at Monticello; they also followed him to Philadelphia in 1776. The week that Jefferson arrived to attend the Congress in May, The Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a long letter about “Doctor Johnson,” his Dictionary, and using phrases as weapons. Jefferson wouldn’t reply brazenly to any of this. In politics, he and Johnson had been as divided as might be, however when it got here to a different matter, happiness, there was an odd convergence between the 2. Five occasions earlier than 1776, in all of his main works—The Rambler, Dictionary, The Idler, the novella Rasselas, and the political pamphlet The False Alarm—Johnson used the phrase the pursuit of happiness.
That building was not itself distinctive: As Basker observes, “it also occurs in other writers of the period and the question of whether Jefferson took it directly from Johnson remains tantalizingly open.” More notable, and necessary, is the similarity in how these two nice figures considered happiness. Time and once more, Johnson burdened his perception that pursuing happiness was a pure human intuition. This impulse, nonetheless, got here with a warning. To pursue was pure; to acquire was a unique proposition.
Johnson demonstrated this distinction most powerfully in Rasselas, which was printed first in Britain in 1759 after which in Philadelphia in 1768. This ethical fable recounted the adventures of an Abyssinian prince who, along with his colourful entourage, was all the time in search of however by no means fairly discovering happiness. Sometimes, their journey can be lit up by moments of hope; extra continuously got here disappointment. At one level, in a quintessentially Johnsonian twist, one of many characters cries out in exasperation on the paradox that confronts them: “Yet what, said she, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?”
As the literary scholar Thomas Keymer has famous, Rasselas supplies a clue to assist us unpick one of the vital participating and ambiguous strains within the Declaration. By 1776, Jefferson was already identified for his “happy talent for composition,” however this was solely part of his genius. He appears, too, to have had the present of foresight. In that line, he frames, eloquently but economically, the sort of nation this new republic can be.
It was to be a spot of promise, however it might not promise an excessive amount of. It couldn’t be each the land of alternative and a spot of better security. Pursue happiness, by all means, however don’t count on a assure of acquiring it. Already in Jefferson’s tough draft, “The United States of America”—one of many very first makes use of of this identify—we are able to glimpse the rising nation’s important character.
That character endures to this present day. The United States would provide those that wished to come back the possibility of bettering themselves. But like Johnson, Jefferson appears to have appreciated the dangers of the hunt. Who knew, particularly within the perilous summer season of 1776, what lay forward? The “pursuit of Happiness” was sufficient.