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!
Now, there’s an expression I’ve not heard in a long time . . . a long time indeed.
“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?”
Actually, we ought properly ask what did Jefferson and that whole generation of founding fathers mean by the word.
As you read the writings of the Founding Fathers, and the various other documents recording their thoughts and ideas, you will come to wonder, more and more, at how often you encounter the word ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’ (and, likewise the word ‘affection’ or ‘affections’). These terms did not merely reflect a fad, or the fashion of the day, but, aside from their ordinary and daily meaning, also conveyed meaning as a specific philosophical consequence of a society existing in harmony with Natural Law. Such a society was said to promote the happiness and to bind the affections of its individual constituents, by permitting each of them to enjoy fully the benefits of living in a state of nature, while spreading evenly throughout the whole of society the burden of combating the negatives of living in a state of nature. All that is required of anyone is that they have respect (affection) for every member of the society.
Not only does ‘happiness’ belong in that sentence, it is in full partnership with its fellows. The meaning of none can be fully understood but in the context of all.
“It seems Jefferson was forthcoming with his answer in a letter to James Monroe dated 1782"
A well-known letter, full of matters of great import (but then, with Jefferson, there were so many of those). So then, as I reported in an earlier post, a society living in harmony with Natural Law, is a happy society, that would, . . . “in the first instance, let us alone in our beliefs, and leave us to provide for our own wants and needs according to the best of our own abilities, and, in the second instance, would protect us from the aggressions of . . . Prince and Commoner alike”. It would be a society which, as quoted from the first paragraph of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, “promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections . . .”
It was common with Jefferson and with many of his contemporaries, that when using a word or a term, they oft functioned on several levels at once, and with each level quite likely being fully integrated with some or all of the others. It takes a bit of study to appreciate this fact.