When our Founders signed the Declaration of Independence they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. And they placed their heads on the chopping block. If the revolution had failed, they would have lost it all. For these treasonous acts their heads would have been cut off and displayed on pikes.
Let us consider that most revolutionary second sentence in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Now I’ll do a bit of lawyering here as we go a bit further into this.
Self-evident: No proof is needed: no oral, written, or demonstrative evidence, as would be in a court of law as a case is being tried.
Endowed by their Creator: This was a revolutionary idea. Your rights are yours at birth. They are natural rights. No king, nor parliament grants them. You have them because you have been born human.
Unalienable rights: The core legal definition of “alienable” means “transferable,” as with property, real or personal. But here Jefferson is applying this concept to those special rights given us by our Creator. These cannot be transferred, cannot be given away.
Pursuit of Happiness: This summer I spent a week at Chautauqua Institution and heard Ken Burns and Jeffry Rosen discuss this greatest of all sentences and pursuit of happiness. We know Ken Burns from his documentary series on the American Revolution. Rosen’s recently published book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America considers how our Founding Fathers would have viewed this pursuit. According to Rosen, they did not intend it to mean a selfish, appetite-driven mission. Instead, our founders believed that pursuing happiness meant being good and doing good.
As we celebrate 250 years of our existence as a nation, let’s remember this possibly greatest sentence ever written, along with its fellow declarations, as a raised fist at King George III. It was a defiant statement which ultimately led to war, but it was also a moral statement. Perhaps we should consider that the Founders have hit on something we might want to emulate, doing good and being good as we pursue happiness and cherish those unalienable rights granted to us by our Creator.
