“I hope you’re happy now” are never spoken without a happy smirk of irony. Happiness is elusive – hard to attain, harder to maintain, and hardest of all to recognize. Recall the time when you were happiest. You didn’t know how happy you were at the time... when the kids were little and you hadn’t slept in three years... that first job in New York sharing a one-bedroom apartment with six people on a salary that wasn’t even “making your age”... those bright, shining days at college that you flunked out of. And, let us note, the Declaration of Independence reads, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” not “Life, Liberty, and Whoopee.” The happiness that America is founded on is our freedom from being told that we should shut up and be happy with what we’ve got. And this is pretty much how the words “Pursuit of Happiness” got into the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was semi-quoting John Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise of Government in which the phrase “Lives, Liberties, and Estates,” appears several times. Locke was one of the Enlightenment’s foremost proponents of natural law and the rights it naturally bestows – rights that are so much a part of our nature that nothing can take them away, and we can’t get rid of them. Unalienable rights. When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he was referring
directly to Chapter IX of the Second Treatise in which Locke says that men are “willing to joyn in Society... for the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties, and Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property .” Every educated person at the time understood Jefferson’s reference. And many educated people must have wondered about Jefferson’s substitution of laughs for land. The fact that property isn’t mentioned in the Declaration of Independence still seems odd. The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man lists property second only to liberty. And the French revolutionaries had less respect for other people’s property (and less property) than the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson may have been trying to convey the idea that our new nation wasn’t going to be a European kind of place. America wouldn’t be parceled into aristocratic estates kept intact by primogeniture and passed down from eldest son to eldest son with titles like Duke of Schenectady, Baron Hackensack, and Count Plymouth Rock. “Pursuit of Happiness” also may have supplanted “Property” because of definitional concerns. Locke died in 1704, when “Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property ”
The happiness that America is founded on is our freedom from being told that we should shut up and be happy with what we’ve got.
American Consequences
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