The ME in the credit for the letter refers to “Memorial Edition” as Bergh’s effort was more or less timed to correspond with the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase.
TO JAMES MADISON. MONTICELLO, August 30, 1823.
DEAR SIR,-I received the enclosed letters from the President, with a request, that after perusal I would forward them to you, for perusal by yourself also, and to be returned then to him. You have doubtless seen Timothy Pickering's Fourth of July observations on the Declaration of Independence.
If his principles and prejudices, personal and political, gave us no reason to doubt whether he had truly quoted the information he alleges to have received from Mr. Adams, I should then say, that in some of the particulars, Mr. Adams' memory has led him into unquestionable error. At the age of eighty-eight, and forty-seven years after the transactions of Independence, this is not wonderful. Nor should I, at the age of eighty, on the small advantage of that difference only, venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes, taken by myself at the [15-461] moment and on the spot.
He says, "the committee of five, to wit, Dr. Franklin, Sherman, Livingston, and ourselves, met, discussed the subject, and then appointed him and myself to make the draught; that we, as a sub-committee, met, and after the urgencies of each on the other, I consented to undertake the task; that the draught being made, we, the sub-committee, met, and conned the paper over, and he does not remember that he made or suggested a single alteration."
Now these details are quite incorrect. The committee of five met; no such thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit, before presenting it to the committee; and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own handwritings. Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal.
I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress.
This personal communication and consultation with Mr. Adams, he has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee. Pickering's observations, and Mr. Adams' in addition, “that it contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis' pamphlet," may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge. Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke's treatise on government. Otis' pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.
Had Mr. Adams been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of Revolution. For no man's confident and fervid addresses, more than Mr. Adams', encouraged and supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day. Yet, on the same ground, we may ask what of these elevated thoughts was new, or can be affirmed never before to have entered the conceptions of man? Whether, also, the sentiments of Independence, and the reasons for declaring it, which make so great a portion of the instrument, had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before the 4th of July, '76, or this dictum also of Mr. Adams be another slip of memory, let history say. This, however, I will say for Mr. Adams, that he supported the Declaration with zeal and ability, fighting fearlessly for every word of it.
As to myself, I thought it a duty to be, on that occasion, a passive auditor of the opinions of others, more impartial judges than I could be, of its merits or demerits. During the debate I was sitting by Doctor Franklin, and he observed that I was writhing a little under the acrimonious criticisms on some of its parts; and it was on that occasion, that by way of comfort, he told me the story of John Thompson, the hatter, and his new sign.
Timothy thinks the instrument the better for having a fourth of it expunged. He would have thought it still better, had the other three-fourths gone out also, all but the single sentiment (the only one he approves), which recommends friendship to his dear England, whenever she is willing to be at peace with us. His insinuations are, that although “the high tone of the instrument was in unison with the warm feelings of the times, this sentiment of habitual friendship to England should never be forgotten, and that the duties it enjoins should especially be borne in mind on every celebration of this anniversary.” In other words that the Declaration, as being a libel on the government of England, composed in times of passion, should now be buried in utter oblivion, to spare the feelings of our English friends and Angloman fellow citizens.
But it is not to wound them that we wish to keep it in mind; but to cherish the principles of the instrument in the bosoms of our own citizens: and it is a heavenly comfort to see that these principles are yet so strongly felt, as to render a circumstance so trifling as this little lapse of memory of Mr. Adams, worthy of being solemnly announced and supported at an anniversary assemblage of the nation on its birthday.
In opposition, however, to Mr. Pickering, I pray God that these principles may be eternal, and close the prayer with my affectionate wishes for yourself of long life, health and happiness.
. . . . . Jefferson, letter to James Madison, August 30, 1823, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh Editor, ME, vol. 15 - pg 461
Jefferson's reference to Adams' memory lapse as "not wonderful" simply meant to confer an absence of any surprise that someone of Adams' advanced age might suffer such a lapse.
Dear YHAOS, when one writes in haste, one repents at leisure. It seems my take on Jefferson’s “happiness” was incorrect and misleading, as you point out in the above. In an earlier post, I claimed that, as a “squishy” Deist, Jefferson eschewed the Lockean language of “property” as the third inalienable human right that a just government must secure, in favor of the language of “happiness.” My claim was based on my memory of a facsimile of an early draft of the DoI in Jefferson’s handwriting, reproduced in Thomas Fleming’s magisterial and amazingly comprehensive Liberty!: The American Revolution [Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1997, p, 171].
So, magnifying glass in hand, I went back to my source. Though there were many cross-outs and overwrites in the text, the “happiness” language wasn’t one of them. In the accompanying caption, Fleming remarks, “This early draft shows how heavily Jefferson edited the Declaration. In one version, he changed almost one-third of the words.”
I earlier complained that the “happiness” language was too “squishy” because every person would define “happiness” in a different way. Then I realized, we don’t need to concern ourselves with any multiplicity of definitions. For our present purposes it is sufficient to ask: What does Jefferson mean by this word?
It seems Jefferson was forthcoming with his answer in a letter to James Monroe dated 1782 [op. cit.]:
If we are made in some degree for others, yet, in a greater, are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling, and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged. Nothing could so completely divest us of that liberty as the establishment of the opinion, that the State has perpetual right to the services of its members. This, to men of certain ways of thinking, would be to annihilate the blessings of existence, and to contradict the Giver of life, who gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness. And certainly, to such it were better that they had never been born. [Democracy by Thomas Jefferson, “selected and arranged with an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Ph.D., formerly Research Associate in History, University of California." New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1939, p. 22f.]Furthermore, Jay was not involved with the DoI as I alleged earlier. I was thinking of John Adams — and should have remembered his name, if only because I’m born and raised in Massachusetts. (John Adams is the author of The Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; that is to say, of the Massachusetts bill of rights.) But really, I do think my allegation that the other men comprising the “committee” charged with writing the DoI really did “fade into the background,” once it became evident that TJ was on “a roll.” Including Ben Franklin, which says a lot.
Please may we correct the public record in all the foregoing regards?
That exercise beats “urban legends” any day of the week….
Thank you so very much for your scholarship, astuteness, and ever gracious conversation, dear YHAOS!