Evident Truth Evident Truth

Part I: The Revolutionary Origins of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”

It all begins with an idea.

On a sweltering June day in 1776, a young Thomas Jefferson sat in a Philadelphia boarding house with quill in hand, crafting an audacious document that would give birth to a nation. Jefferson’s pen poured out a preamble that declared timeless ideals: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words, written in the Declaration of Independence, marked a revolutionary beginning – the “caterpillar” stage of America’s founding transformation. They encapsulated the Enlightenment dreams of natural rights and human equality that would later be tested, contested, and eventually metamorphose through the crucible of constitutional debate (Parts II and III). This exposé (Part I of a three-part series) delves into the origins and evolving meaning of the Declaration’s famous creed, tracing its journey from Jefferson’s draft table and the Continental Congress to its reverberations across colonies and continents, and through the conscience of generations of Americans.

Enlightenment Seeds: Jefferson’s Influences and the Birth of a Creed

Jefferson did not invent the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” ex nihilo – he distilled them from a rich brew of Enlightenment philosophy and colonial discourse. John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, was a paramount influence. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke argued that political society exists to secure people’s fundamental “property,” which he famously defined as their “life, liberty, and estate”en.wikipedia.org. Jefferson, an ardent reader of Locke, was intimately familiar with this triad of natural rights. Locke had even written that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness”en.wikipedia.org, foreshadowing the very language Jefferson chose. By the 18th century, the notion that the pursuit of happiness was an essential human aim had permeated Enlightenment thought – not only via Locke, but through a broader intellectual tradition. European thinkers like Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui and legal scholars like William Blackstone had tied natural law to human happiness; Blackstone wrote that man’s divine obligation is “that [he] should pursue his own true and substantial happiness”en.wikipedia.org. In drawing on this milieu, Jefferson replaced Locke’s narrow term “estate” (property) with the more expansive “pursuit of happiness,” signaling that the American Revolution stood for more than property rights – it stood for human fulfillment and well-being as core purposes of governmenten.wikipedia.org.

Jefferson’s drafting process in June 1776 was both solitary and collaborative. The Continental Congress had appointed a Committee of Five – Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston – to compose a formal declaration of independenceen.wikipedia.org. The committee, recognizing Jefferson’s literary talent, tasked the 33-year-old Virginian with writing the first draft. Jefferson sequestered himself in a rented room on Philadelphia’s Market Street, pouring the Enlightenment ideals of his library into a concise, electric prose. He later recalled that he aimed not to craft new principles but to express the “common sense of the subject” and “the American mind”nps.gov – a synthesis of ideas already “harmonizing sentiments of the day.” The initial draft Jefferson produced spoke of truths “sacred & undeniable” in their certainty that all men are equal and free.

According to lore, when Jefferson shared his draft with Franklin and Adams for feedback, Franklin gently wielded his editing pencil to fine-tune the rhetoric. Jefferson’s original phrasing – “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” – grounded America’s rights in almost theological certitude. Franklin, the elder statesman and consummate Enlightenment rationalist, saw an opportunity to sharpen the tone. He famously crossed out “sacred & undeniable” and replaced it with “self-evident,” shifting the authority from divine sanction to reason itselfveteransbreakfastclub.org. In Franklin’s view, the truths of equality and rights should stand on logic and shared human experience, needing no religious proofveteransbreakfastclub.org. This small edit packed a powerful nuance: it invited readers to accept the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness as obvious to any clear-thinking mind. (Some historians note that the surviving draft in Jefferson’s handwriting shows the change to “self-evident,” leaving open the possibility Jefferson made the edit himselffounders.archives.gov. Either way, the final text reflected Franklin’s Enlightenment influence.)

Other alterations followed. Adams and Franklin suggested minor wording tweaks, and Jefferson himself pruned and polished his “Rough draught.” When the Committee of Five submitted their refined version to the full Congress on June 28, it still contained Jefferson’s soaring preamble in full. Over the next few days of intense debate (July 1–4, 1776), the Second Continental Congress scrutinized and revised the document. They left the famous opening lines on equality and unalienable rights largely intacten.wikipedia.org, a testament to the broad agreement on those Enlightenment principles. However, Congress did cut or soften other parts of Jefferson’s draft to forge a consensus among thirteen fractious colonies. Most notably, they struck out an entire passage in which Jefferson had condemned the slave trade in searing terms – calling it a “cruel war against human nature itself” and an “execrable commerce” imposed by the British crownhistory.comhistory.com. Jefferson’s draft excoriated King George III for perpetuating the enslavement of Africans and even for inciting enslaved people to insurrection by offering them freedom if they fought for Britainhistory.com. This bold anti-slavery indictment threatened to splinter the Congress. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, whose economies depended on slavery, fiercely objected, as did some New Englanders involved in the transatlantic slave tradehistory.com. Bowing to political necessity, Congress removed the passage on July 3. “The clause… reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia,” Jefferson later lamented, adding that some northern delegates “felt a little tender” about it as wellhistory.com. In the final edit, all direct mention of slavery was excised – an omission that exposed a glaring contradiction between the new nation’s ideals and its realities.

When the Congress adopted the revised Declaration on July 4, 1776, the heart of Jefferson’s preamble – those ringing phrases on human equality and rights – survived untouched. The delegates had dared to assert a radical philosophy: that legitimate governments derive power from the consent of the governed and exist to secure the people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that triumphant moment, the American Revolutionaries planted an ideological flag that would inspire hope, reflection, and debate for centuries to come. The caterpillar of American ideals had emerged, proclaiming what Abraham Lincoln later called “the principles and sentiments which originated in this hall” in 1776nps.gov. But how would these lofty words be received in their own time? And what did “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” truly mean to those who heard them in 1776?

Immediate Impact: Reception of the Declaration at Home and Abroad

The Declaration of Independence was both a domestic manifesto and a message to “a candid world.” Once approved, it was printed and proclaimed throughout the American colonies. In town squares and army camps, public readings of the document drew rapt crowds. For Patriot Americans, Jefferson’s words carried electrifying clarity. General George Washington had the Declaration read aloud to his troops, hoping to inspire them with the justice of their cause. The assertion that “all men are created equal” with inherent rights was, as one contemporary put it, “as self-evident as the truths of holy writ.” To many colonists, long accustomed to inherited privilege and monarchy, this language was revolutionary gospel – a clarion call that their new nation would be founded on natural rights and liberty for (at least some) common men, not on the prerogatives of kings.

Yet not everyone greeted the Declaration’s ideals with unalloyed praise. Loyalists inside America and skeptics abroad heard hypocrisy in the Patriots’ high-minded words. How, they asked, could a slaveholding society declare “all men” entitled to liberty and happiness? The famous British writer Samuel Johnson wryly quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”history.com. From London, the London Chronicle scoffed that Congress’s manifesto was grandiose and treasonous. Closer to home, exiled royal governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts published a scathing rebuttal. Pointing to the southern colonies, Hutchinson taunted that Americans themselves denied basic rights to hundreds of thousands. “I could wish to ask the Delegates of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas,” he wrote, “how their constituents justify depriving more than a hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable?”history.com. Such critiques underscored the chasm between the new nation’s creed and its practices. The world was watching to see if the United States would live up to its soaring principles or prove them a mere rhetorical device.

Even as these debates swirled, the ideas in the Declaration immediately found echoes in new American laws. As independence was declared, several former colonies were busy drafting state constitutions, often including their own bills of rights. Virginia, under the leadership of George Mason, adopted a Declaration of Rights on June 12, 1776 – just weeks before Jefferson’s Declaration. Mason’s text is strikingly similar to Jefferson’s preamble (and indeed helped inspire it): “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights… namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”en.wikipedia.orgsupremecourt.gov. This Virginia declaration linked happiness with safety and property, reflecting a Lockean emphasis on possessions alongside the more idealistic pursuit of well-being. Jefferson, who was a Virginian and a friend of Mason, undoubtedly knew of this language. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 likewise enshrined that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent and inalienable rights, amongst which are… enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”press-pubs.uchicago.edu. In short, early state charters often echoed the triad of rights from the Declaration, though many reinserted “property” explicitly alongside (or in place of) “pursuit of happiness.” This suggests that to America’s revolutionary generation, happiness was an expansive concept – one that encompassed personal security, safety, and yes, the right to acquire property, as prerequisites to living a fulfilling lifesupremecourt.gov.

Abroad, the Declaration’s immediate impact was mixed but significant. In Britain, the government and loyalist press dismissed it as a self-serving list of grievances from rebellious subjects. But in France, which was locked in its own rivalry with Britain, the American Declaration was read with fascination. Thomas Jefferson later served as a diplomat in Paris and found that French intellectuals like the Marquis de Condorcet applauded Virginia’s and America’s rights declarations. (Condorcet wrote that “the first Declaration of Rights that is entitled to be called such is that of Virginia… its author is entitled to the eternal gratitude of mankind.”supremecourt.gov) Indeed, Jefferson’s words about liberty and happiness helped set the ideological stage for the French Revolution a decade later. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) echoed many Enlightenment principles common to 1776 – asserting liberty, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights. And in the newly independent United States, the Declaration’s ideals swiftly became a touchstone of political culture. July 4th would be celebrated each year as Independence Day, honoring not just the birth of the nation but the bold creed that defined that birth. John Adams predicted that future Americans would commemorate July 4 with fireworks and festivities, as the day when the new nation staked “her claim to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He was right. The words of the Declaration began to assume an almost sacred status in the American imagination.

Still, the young republic had to grapple with implementing those ideals in governance – a challenge that would occupy the next chapter of the founding (to be explored in Parts II and III). The Constitution of 1787, for instance, does not explicitly mention “happiness,” and it compromised on the issue of slavery, revealing an uneasy tension between the revolutionary creed and pragmatic politics. But before turning to that “chrysalis” stage of transformation, it’s crucial to trace how the meaning of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” evolved in American thought after 1776. What did these words come to mean for future generations?

Metamorphosis of Meaning: From Revolutionary Slogan to American Creed

Over time, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has proven to be a living phrase – one that Americans have continuously reinterpreted and reinvigorated in light of their changing values. In the founding era, the triad primarily signified freedom from tyranny and the right of individuals to seek their own fulfillment. To the Founding Fathers, “life” and “liberty” were concrete conditions (to live and to be free from despotic control), and “the pursuit of happiness” suggested a broad ability to pursue one’s well-being and virtue. Notably, 18th-century readers would have understood “pursuit of happiness” not as a fleeting search for personal pleasure, but as the collective opportunity to attain real human flourishing. The wording in Jefferson’s day implied an actual attainment of happiness, akin to the Virginia phrase “pursuing and obtaining happiness”news.emory.edu. In other words, happiness was regarded as a societal good – the proper end of good government and just laws. As Professor Brent Strawn explains, in 1776 “the pursuit of happiness” meant “practicing happiness, the experience of happiness – not just chasing it but actually catching it”news.emory.edunews.emory.edu. All citizens had an unalienable right to live a fulfilling life, and the government’s role was to secure the conditions of that flourishingnews.emory.edunews.emory.edu. This was far from a shallow promise of easy joy; it was a profound commitment to the public good and individual dignity.

In the early Republic, leaders like George Washington and James Madison referenced the pursuit of happiness as an objective for the new government. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, for instance, proclaimed that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are essential to good government and “the happiness of mankind,” linking civic virtue to collective well-being. And when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791, it enshrined many specific liberties (speech, religion, due process) that can be seen as concrete safeguards for life and liberty – though it notably protected “property” rather than happiness per se. (The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” without due process, a phrasing that hearkens back to Locke and suggests that by the constitutional era, property had reasserted itself in American legal thought as a fundamental right alongside life and liberty.)

As American society progressed, marginalized groups and reformers seized upon the Declaration’s ideals to hold the nation accountable to its founding promise. The document’s language became a moral yardstick. In the 19th century, abolitionists wielded “all men are created equal” and the rights of life and liberty as a bludgeon against slavery. Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, pointed out the bitter irony that the nation celebrating its freedom was still denying freedom to millions of enslaved people. The Civil War era, in turn, became a crucible for reinterpreting the founding creed. President Abraham Lincoln revered the Declaration’s principles, calling them “the definitions and axioms of free society.” He believed the Union was fighting to vindicate “that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world”nps.gov. In his famous Gettysburg Address (1863), Lincoln echoed Jefferson’s vision, resolving that “this nation… shall have a new birth of freedom” so that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” – the very embodiment of consent of the governed – would not perish. For Lincoln, the pursuit of happiness meant the opportunity of all people to enjoy the fruits of their own labor and to advance in life. During the Lincoln–Douglas debates, he argued that the Declaration’s promise extended to all, regardless of race, in at least the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – even if the full realization of equality was still distant.

Other movements drew direct inspiration from Jefferson’s words. In 1848, the pioneering women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, drafted a “Declaration of Sentiments” deliberately modeled on the 1776 Declaration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her co-authors pointedly modified Jefferson’s text to proclaim that “all men and women are created equal”, and that they are endowed with the same inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”constitutioncenter.org. By echoing the Declaration, the suffragists underscored that women were entitled to the founding promises that had so far been reserved for men. Stanton’s declaration listed the many ways in which women were denied life, liberty, and happiness – from legal subjugation in marriage to the lack of voting rights – thereby shaming America to live up to its creed. It would take over 70 more years for women to gain the right to vote (with the 19th Amendment in 1920), but the seed planted at Seneca Falls was directly watered by the ideas of 1776.

Even in the legal realm, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” has made its mark. While the Declaration is not law, its principles seeped into American jurisprudence. Courts occasionally invoke the spirit of 1776 when interpreting rights. For example, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a state law banning foreign-language instruction, opining that the “liberty” protected by the 14th Amendment includes various rights “long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”supreme.justia.com. Here the Court essentially acknowledged that to pursue happiness, individuals must be free to acquire knowledge, engage in one’s chosen occupation, marry, raise children, and worship freely – all extensions of the basic rights to life and liberty. At the state level, many state constitutions to this day explicitly guarantee the pursuit of happiness in their equivalent of a Bill of Rights. For instance, the current Massachusetts Constitution (adopted 1780) still declares the right of enjoying and defending life and liberty, “obtaining happiness and safety.” The notion is woven into the fabric of American political culture: government exists to create conditions wherein people can pursue happiness – not as hedonism, but as the fulfillment of human potential.

By the 20th century, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” had assumed the status of an American credo – a shorthand for the nation’s core values. It also became a rallying cry for those demanding America cash the check it wrote in 1776. During the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the Declaration’s language with prophetic power. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King said the founding fathers “signed a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men… would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”avalon.law.yale.edu. Speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King lamented that “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” but he refused to believe the dream was deadavalon.law.yale.edu. He urged the nation to “live out the true meaning of its creed” – that all are created equalavalon.law.yale.edu. King’s words resonated because nearly two centuries after Jefferson’s pen stroke, Americans of all backgrounds still saw their personal struggles and hopes reflected in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The phrase had traveled from a revolutionary slogan to a measure of American progress. When Lyndon B. Johnson pushed landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s, or when later leaders advocated for the rights of disabled Americans or LGBTQ+ Americans, they too framed their causes as part of the continuing journey toward securing those inalienable rights for every citizen.

In the grand sweep of American history, the meaning of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has both expanded and been refined. Initially a rallying principle against imperial tyranny, it evolved into a universal ideal gradually applied to all people, not just propertied white men. At its core, however, the phrase has retained its fundamental essence: “Life” connotes the right to exist and be safe from harm; “Liberty” means freedom from oppressive constraints; and “the Pursuit of Happiness” means the right to seek a fulfilling life as one defines it – to pursue one’s dreams, talents, spiritual and material well-being, so long as it does not trample others’ rights. These values have become the ethical north star of American democracy. They impart a normative standard by which we often judge our laws and leaders. As one journalist observed on the eve of the Declaration’s 200th anniversary, “The pursuit of happiness – what Jefferson understood as a collective right to societal well-being – remains a work in progress, the unfinished symphony of the American experiment.”

Conclusion: The Caterpillar’s Transformation

In 1776, the United States was little more than a fragile collection of rebellious colonies, yet it boldly announced a set of principles that would shape modern history. The Declaration of Independence’s ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the caterpillar stage of America’s founding metamorphosis – a revolutionary creature full of energy and promise, not yet tested by time. These ideals provided the moral and philosophical DNA for what would follow. But as the young nation soon learned, declaring rights is one thing; implementing and safeguarding them in a sustainable government is another. The caterpillar would have to undergo transformation. In the years immediately after 1776, the United States confronted the practical challenges of constructing a republic that could live up to its founding creed. Part II of this series will explore the “chrysalis” stage – the debates of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers – where the founding ideals were rigorously examined, contested, and codified (or at times constrained) in the design of the U.S. Constitution. There, we will see how figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton sought to translate the promises of 1776 into institutions and checks and balances, while others feared the loss of liberty and demanded a Bill of Rights.

For now, in reflecting on Part I, we remember that the Declaration’s opening words were not a perfect realization of Enlightenment ideals, but they set in motion a dynamic process. They lit a fuse for egalitarian and libertarian sentiments that would ignite movements for change. The document’s most significant deletion – the condemnation of slavery – hinted that the new nation’s journey toward justice would be fraught and incompletehistory.com. “Removing Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery,” writes one historian, “exposed the hollowness of the words ‘all men are created equal.’ Nonetheless, the underlying ideals of freedom and equality expressed in the document have inspired generations of Americans to struggle to obtain their inalienable rights.”history.com In other words, the pursuit of the Declaration’s happiness has been an ongoing endeavor – an American evolution. Each generation has, in a sense, rediscovered the caterpillar’s declaration and prodded it further toward the butterfly of a “more perfect Union.”

As we conclude this first part, we stand in awe of the enduring power of those simple, elegant phrases penned by Jefferson and polished by his compatriots in 1776. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – these words have outlived the revolutionaries themselves, continuing to challenge the nation to broaden their scope. They began as a revolutionary protest against colonial rule; they have become a universal creed that defines America’s highest aspirations. And like a living creature, those ideals have grown and adapted, though their essence remains intact. In the next chapters, we will witness how the caterpillar of 1776 entered the Constitutional convention chrysalis and, through fierce debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, emerged with new wings – the Constitution and Bill of Rights – to carry the promise of American liberty into the modern age. The pursuit of happiness, it turns out, is a journey — one that America set out on in 1776 and continues to navigate today, guided by the star that first rose in Philadelphia’s summer sky almost 250 years ago.

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