ANCILLARY NOTES ON THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

 

• Ø The Continental Congress appointed a committee of five- Jefferson (Virginia), John Adams (Massachusetts), Ben Franklin (Pennsylvania), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), and Robert Livingston (New York) to write the Declaration.

 

• Ø The Committee asked Jefferson to do the composing because they knew of his excellent writing skill. He had just finished writing the Preamble to the Virginia Constitution.

 

• Ø Jefferson wrote in Philadelphia from June 11 through June 28.

 

• Ø Jefferson’s original draft was over 1800 words in length. Congress expunged (eliminated) 460. Included in these 460 words was Jefferson’s stunning condemnation of slavery.

 

• Ø The Declaration was-and remains-epochal. Its greatness lies in its soaring affirmation of human liberty. Men were to be free, Jefferson wrote, not merely because they wanted to, or because tyranny was unjust. Men were to be free because they were, in fact, free under “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

 

• Ø Human rights were not generously granted by granted by kings and therefore retractable. Human rights were a birthright given by God and therefore inalienable.

 

• Ø First among these were the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Government’s only just function was to secure and advance these rights

 

• Ø When governments stopped performing this function, it was the right and duty of men to rebel against it and form another.

 

• Ø When listing the long train of abuses, Jefferson references the dissolution of colonial legislative bodies by King George III. Fresh in his mind was the dissolution of Virginia’s House of Burgesses by the Royal Governor in 1775.

 

ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT AND THE DECLARATION

 

• Ø Impressed by Enlightenment thought, Jefferson shared its faith in reason, science, and human perfectibility.

 

• Ø “We believe,” he would say in 1823, “that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice.”

 

• Ø Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke were for Jefferson a “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.”

 

• Ø He admired Bacon for his theory of inductive reasoning (part to whole) from observed fact.

 

• Ø He valued Newton for revolutionary description of a physical world governed by predictable laws of cause and effect, laws applicable as well to human conduct.

 

• Ø Locke became Jefferson’s source for his view of natural human rights; rights founded not on the will of man but in the very substance of the natural order; rights that can be discovered through human reason.

 

• Ø Jefferson’s admired, too, Locke’s belief that man protected his natural rights to life, liberty, and property through a voluntary mutual contract that establishes a protective government that can be overthrown if its selected leaders fail to live up to its terms.

 

• Ø Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, (chapter II), says this: “Every one as he is bound to preserve himself, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not unless it be to take justice on an Offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the Preservation of the Life, the Liberty, Health, Limb or Goods of another.”

 

 

• Ø Locke defines usurpation (Second Treatise, Chapter XVIII) as follows: The exercise of power which another (person) hath a right to.

 

• Ø Locke defines tyranny (Second Treatise, Chapter XVIII) as follows: The extension of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to.

 

• Ø In The Second Treatise, Chapter XIX, Locke writes this: “The People who are more disposed to suffer, than right themselves by Resistance, are not apt to stir.” In the Declaration, Jefferson writes: “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are insufferable, than to right themselves.”

 

• Ø In The Virginia Declaration of the Rights of Man written by George Mason just before Jefferson wrote the Declaration, we read, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

 

• Ø That the central argument of the Declaration is based mainly upon Locke’s Second Treatise (written 1679-1680) is indisputable. However, Jefferson departed from Locke’s trinity of “Life, Liberty, and Estate” and substituted “the pursuit of happiness.” From where did he get this idea or did he think of it independently?

 

• Ø Locke, in The Second Treatise, Chapter VII, says that, “Man hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty, and Estate against the Injuries and Attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of law in others.” (Notice how Locke defines property as “life, liberty, and estate.)

 

 

 

 

• Ø In The Virginia Declaration of the Rights of Man written by George Mason just before Jefferson wrote the Declaration, we read, “That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

 

• Ø It seems certain that the first eighteenth-century philosopher to have developed the idea was Jean Jacques Burlamaqui. We don’t know, however, if Jefferson had read Burlamaqui. We do know that he had read James Wilson’s Considerations on the Authority of the British Parliament which was based on Burlamaqui’s work.

 

• Ø Perhaps he might have drawn the idea from the famous British jurist Sir William Blackstone whose treatment of the natural law was based on Burlamaqui’s work or from Emmerich de Vattel, who studied under Burlamaqui at Geneva, Switzerland.

 

• Ø Or Jefferson might even have found it where Burlamaqui did-in Aristotle. In a section of The Politics entitled “Happiness as the Aim of the Constitution,” Aristotle uses the exact phrase “the pursuit of happiness” when discussing the aims of a constitution.  He says that the most important part of any constitution is the education of those who are going to live under it.

 

• Ø Aristotle’s position is that happiness (eudaimonia) is the complete and perfect use of all our faculties under the guidance of arête (virtue). Hence, the best constitution, in order to produce happiness, must be operated by men who are utilizing virtue. The three factors that go into making one virtuous are nature, habit, and reason (logos).

 

• Ø So where did Jefferson find the phrase “the pursuit of happiness?” No one really knows for sure.