Made In America - Bill Bryson [29]
‘Pursuit of happiness’ may be argued to be a succinct improvement over ‘pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety’, but even that compelling phrase wasn’t original with Jefferson. ‘Pursuit of happiness’ had been coined by John Locke almost a century before and had appeared frequently in political writings ever since.
Nor are the words in that famous, inspiring sentence the ones that Jefferson penned. His original version shows considerably less grace and rather more verbosity:
We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal and independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.31
The sentence took on its final resonance only after it had been through the hands of the Committee of Five and then subjected to active debate in Congress itself. Congress did not hesitate to alter Jefferson’s painstakingly crafted words. Altogether it ordered forty changes to the original text. It deleted 630 words, about a quarter of the total, and added 146. As with most writers who have been subjected to the editing process, Jefferson thought the final text depressingly inferior to his original, and, like most writers, he was wrong. Indeed, seldom has a writer been better served. Congress had the wisdom to leave untouched those sections that were unimprovable – notably the opening paragraph – and excised much that was irrelevant or otiose.
Though now one of the most famous passages in English political prose, the preamble attracted far less attention then than later. At the time the listing of grievances against the king, which takes up some 60 per cent of the entire text of the Declaration, was far more daring and arresting.
The twenty-seven charges against the king were mostly – sometimes recklessly – overstated. Charge four, for instance, accused him of compelling colonial assemblies to meet in locales that were ‘unusual, uncomfortable and distant ... for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures’. In fact, in only three of the thirteen colonies were the assemblies ever compelled to move and in two of those it happened on only one occasion each. Only Massachusetts suffered it for an extended period and there the assembly was moved just four miles to Cambridge – hardly an odious imposition.
Or consider charge ten: ‘He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.’ In fact, the swarms numbered no more than about fifty, and much of their activity, such as trying to stop smuggling (an activity which, incidentally, had helped to make John Hancock one of the richest men in New England), was legitimate by any standards.32
In Britain, the Declaration was received by many as arrant hogwash. The Gentleman’s Magazine mocked the assertion that all men are created equal. ‘In what are they created equal?’ it asked. ‘Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these. All men, it is true, are equally created, but what is this to the purpose? It certainly is no reason why the Americans should turn rebels.‘33 Though the writer of that passage appears to have had perhaps one glass of Madeira too many at lunch, there was something in his argument. No one in America truly believed that all men were created equal. Samuel Johnson touched on the incontestable hypocrisy of the American position when he asked, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?‘34
Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration contains several spellings and usages that strike