Ch. 1.2. Jefferson’s Draft: the Preamble, paragraph B
(Continued from Maier, pp. 133-39.)
Jefferson-perhaps with some help from Franklin-made the same kind of careful editorial adjustments in the opening lines of the next paragraph, which, as an examination of successive drafts of the document reveals, were based upon the first three provisions of the Mason committee draft of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights.
Jefferson began with Mason’s statement “that all men are born equally free and independent,” which he rewrote to say they were “created equal and independent,” then (on his “original rough draft”) cut out the “& independent.” Mason said that all men had “certain inherent natural rights, of which, they cannot, by an compact, deprive or divest their posterity,” which Jefferson compressed marvelously into a statement that men derived from their equal creation “rights inherent & inalienable,” then moved the noun to the end of the phrase so it read “inherent & inalienable rights.” Among those rights, Mason said were “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” which Jefferson again shortened first to “the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness,” and then simply to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Again, scholars have devoted considerable effort to understanding where Jefferson picked up the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” which, it turns out, appeared with sufficient frequency in earlier European writings. In fact, references to happiness as a political goal are everywhere in American political writings as well. What did Jefferson mean? The obvious answer is that he meant to say more economically and movingly what Mason stated with some awkwardness an at considerably greater length.
For Jefferson and his contemporaries, happiness “no doubt demanded safety or security, which would have been in keeping with the biblical phrase one colonist after another used to describe the good life – to be at peace under their vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid (Micah 4:4). The inherent right to pursue happiness probably also included “the means of acquiring and possessing property,” but not the ownership of specific things since property can be sold and is therefore alienable. In this case, Jefferson perhaps sacrificed clarity of meaning for grace of language. In general, however, his rewriting of Mason produced a more memorable statement of the same content. Less was more.
Long essays have in fact been written on one phrase after another from the second paragraph of the Declaration. Unfortunately, no section of that document suffers more from a separation of parts from the whole, since its meaning lies in an escalating sequence of connected assertions. As reported by the Committee of Five, the paragraph began:
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing it’s powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.
This one long sentence, which was carefully worked over, asserted one right, the right of revolution, which was, after all, the right Americans were exercising in 1776. The point came at the end since, according to the historian Stephen Lucas, Jefferson used what the eighteenth century knew as the style periodique, presenting a series of linked propositions in such a way that “the sense of the whole is not brought out till the close.” That was considered an especially musical way of writing, notable for the dignity and gravity it conveyed. If so, and Lucas’s view accords well with what we know of Jefferson’s fascination with the rules that governed harmonious uses of language, removing individual phrases or groups of phrases from their appointed place unravels Jefferson’s artistry in composing the sequence.
In terms of substance, however, Jefferson’s assertion of the right of revolution summarized succinctly ideas defended and explained at greater length by a long list of seventeenth-century writers that included such prominent figures as John Milton, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke, as well as a host of others, English and Scottish, familiar and obscure, who continued and, in some measure, developed that “Whig” tradition in the eighteenth century.
By the time of the Revolution those ideas had become, in the generalized form captured by Jefferson, a political orthodoxy whose basic principles colonists could pick up from sermons or newspapers or even schoolbooks without ever reading a systematic work of political theory. The sentiments Jefferson eloquently expressed were, in short, absolutely conventional among Americans of his time.
The opening assertions of “self-evident” truths concern men in a “state of nature” before government was established. That was even clearer in earlier drafts where the description of men as “equal & independent” echoed an opening reference to the Americans’ collective assumption of an “equal & independent station” among “the powers of the earth.”
The equal status of separate nation-states, who lack any common superintending authority except for “the laws of nature and nature’s god,” is essentially the same as that of individuals in a state of nature, a point, incidentally, that John Locke made explicitly in his Second Treatise of Government. The equality asserted in the Declaration was therefore compatible with differences. France, Luxembourg, and Russia are, for example, equal in status as self-governing nations despite substantial differences in population, landmass, and wealth.
With regard to persons, equality meant simply that no one held authority over others by right of birth or as a gift of God. The same idea appeared in many other contemporary writings, including Common Sense, which said that “all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.” Since no legitimate power came by right of inheritance, all rightful authority came from the people, who established and empowered governments to protect or “secure” their “inalienable rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those statements led directly to the “self-evident” point–and the term “self-evident” was perhaps Franklin’s–that the people had a right to reclaim that original grant of power and start over if the governments they created failed to serve the purpose those governments were meant to fulfill.
English and American defenders of “revolution principles“–that is, those who justified the English revolutions of the seventeenth century–were never at home with anarchy. From the beginning they explained at length the preconditions of legitimate popular resistance and revolution, which became increasingly elaborate and emphatic in the eighteenth century. Resistance and revolution could not be provoked by magistrates’ casual errors or private immoralities, nor could force be used except as a last resort, after all the “peaceful means of redress” had become exhausted. Legitimate opposition had to answer acts of misrule so serious and so protracted that they aroused the “Body of the People,” which was itself understood as a restraining factor since the people were hesitant, to act.
Only after a “long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and, Artifices, all tending the same way,” and making their “design visible to the People,” Locke wrote, would the people “rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected.” These ideas Jefferson restated in his next sentences:
Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes: and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed but when a long train of abuses & usurpations, begun at a distinguished period, & pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government & to provide new guards for their future security.
The reference to “a long train of abuses” recalled Locke’s phrase, but the same idea was stated in many other places by many other authors; and the phrase “begun at a distinguished period” had appeared earlier in Jefferson’ s Summary View [of 1774]. Jefferson’s point was more important than the sources of his language: where abuses persisted and led toward the same objective, “absolute Despotism” — a term Franklin or Adams and Franklin substituted for Jefferson’s “arbitrary power” — it was not just the right but the duty of the people to “throw off such government” and establish another more likely to provide the security they sought. And that was precisely the situation of the Americans.
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; & such now is the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which appears no solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest, but all have in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
Here Jefferson revealed how he would fulfill his opening promise to explain what had impelled the colonists “to dissolve the political bands” connecting them to the British people, and assume a “separate and equal station” among the powers of the earth. His explanation – the story he set out to tell – was different from that in the State and local declarations of Independence, and perhaps different from what readers of the Declaration’s first paragraph expected and, to some extent, still expect. State and local declarations told how and why the colonists had decided to abandon their longstanding bonds with Britain and accept Independence. A handful of events from 1775 and 1776, when their change of heart occurred, was enough for that, and enough to make the point that, without declaring Independence and seeking outside help, they faced imminent destruction.
Like the state and local declarations, Jefferson’s draft Declaration spoke of a “necessity” that constrained or forced the colonists to “expunge” British authority, but the necessity he described was firmly based on “Lockean” contract principles. The most recent state documents – especially those that called themselves “Declarations” – had, of course, moved in that direction, and for good reason. Major public pronouncements were appropriately founded on the grand principles that justified revolution. But in setting out to prove that George III had attempted to establish an “absolute tyranny” over the Americans and so forced them to go their separate way, Jefferson incurred, under the terms he stated, an obligation to demonstrate that they had suffered “a long train of abuses, and usurpations” over an extended period of time.
In fact, Jefferson went further than he had to, asserting that George III’s injuries were “unremitting,” that there was “no solitary fact” that was. not aimed at establishing tyranny. A kindly prayer for his American subjects, a token contribution to some colonial charity, any harmless or well-meaning act might derail that argument. Could Jefferson ever have cited facts enough to make his point? After stating all of its twenty-one charges, his draft Declaration concluded that a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. It was, it seems, not just the King’s acts that were at issue – and under English Whig “revolution principles” they would have been enough to dissolve the Americans’ contractual obligations to him and to the British state – but his character.
Jefferson’s draft Declaration of Independence did not, in short, blame the King merely because that was the English way of announcing that the state had forfeited its legitimacy, but because George III was personally responsible for the cruel acts attributed to him. “Future ages will scarce believe,” Jefferson wrote, “that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of twelve years only, to build a foundation, so broad and undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered & fixed in principles of freedom.”
Here, it seems, John Adams differed with Jefferson: for Adams (in 1822, at any rate) said that the King had acted outside the bounds of law on the basis of bad advice from his servants, and so was cruel “in his official capacity only,” without the private malevolence that would make him a tyrant “in disposition and in nature.” On that point, however, Jefferson’s lines echoed those state and local declarations of Independence that turned on the King not as a figurehead but as a man for whom the colonists had once held great affection, but who had forfeited their allegiance and their love by a persistent, personal hostility toward them.
It remained to explain why it had become necessary for the American people “to dissolve the political bands” that tied them to the British people. The “political bands” that bound the American and British “peoples were severely limited under the theory of Empire that Jefferson and other colonists had espoused by 1776: both peoples were subject to the same King, and that was it. But those “bands” had been enough to bring together Englishmen – those of the City of London, for example – and colonists in a protracted effort to change the King’s government and its policy toward America.
Congress had appealed for support to the British people and so had the Massachusetts General Court, which sent its account of Lexington and Concord to Eng1and in the hope it would arouse the British people. There were also other, nonpolitical “bands” – of shared traditions, language, religion, and simple affection. But the support of the English people never emerged to the extent that the Americans had hoped. In recalling those ill-fated efforts to enlist the help of their fellow subjects in Britain, Jefferson further demonstrated, that the Americans had not thrown off their ties with the Mother Country hastily or for “light and transient causes.”