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Jefferson got the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” from George Mason, who’d been using the locution for a while.1 Mason believed in this goal so much that he acted on it rather consistently—which is why you don’t know who he is. He was enough of a founder of this country to have schools named after him, but he wouldn’t leave his country estate much. History admires the Roman emperor Diocletian for retiring to a farm to raise cabbages. He was so in control of his ego that he could walk away from the most powerful position in the world in order to live out the last phase of his life among the seasons.2 As it was in imperial Rome, so it was in the Renaissance: Petrarch lamented that wise Cicero took part in politics. Late-Renaissance humanism was community oriented, and historians invented the term “civic humanism” to wall off Petrarch’s earlier, isolated version. And so it was in 1776: private happiness was lauded as a purer happiness than that found in civic service. Mason fought for the pursuit of happiness to be codified in the constitution. He lost. Though the phrase is in some thirty-three state constitutions, it never got into the U.S. Constitution. Mason wasn’t there enough to win his case.3

Ben Franklin wrote to a friend in 1764, “By the way, when do you intend to live?—i.e., to enjoy life. When will you retire to your villa, give yourself repose, delight in viewing the operations of nature in the vegetable creation, assist her in her works, get your ingenious friends at times about you, make them happy with your conversation, and enjoy theirs: or, if alone, amuse yourself with your books and elegant collections?”4 When asked how he lived while in France, Franklin described something similar. In a town half a mile from Paris he took walks in the garden and dined out six nights a week (Sundays he stayed home and welcomed any visiting Americans), and otherwise he played with his grandson Ben. Grandpa Ben bragged about this repose, this style of life, as if he were Epicurus or Petrarch, laying out fruitful tranquillity as the secret to a happy life. Here is George Washington, writing in 1797: “I am once more seated under my own Vine and fig tree, and hope to spend the remainder of my days, which in the ordinary course of things (being in my sixty-sixth year) cannot be many, in peaceful retirement, making political pursuits yield to the more rational amusements of cultivating the Earth.”5 Jefferson dreamed of retirement with reverence in a letter of 1796, going so far as to hope he lost an upcoming election so that “[t]he newspapers will permit me to plant my corn, peas, etc., in hills or drills as I please.”6 He did lose, to John Adams, but he accepted the vice presidency. Then he just barely beat Adams in 1800 and won handily in 1804. He wrote the following to a friend in 1810:

I am retired to Monticello, where, in the bosom of my family, and surrounded by my books, I enjoy a repose to which I have been long a stranger. My mornings are devoted to correspondence. From breakfast to dinner, I am in my shops, my garden, or on horseback among my farms; from dinner to dark, I give to society and recreation with my neighbors and friends; and from candle light to early bed-time, I read. My health is perfect; and my strength considerably reinforced by the activity of the course I pursue; perhaps it is as great as usually falls to the lot of near sixty-seven years of age. I talk of ploughs and harrows, of seeding and harvesting, with my neighbors, and of politics too, if they choose, with as little reserve as the rest of my fellow citizens, and feel, at length, the blessings of being free to say and do what I please, without being responsible for it to any mortal. A part of my occupation, and by no means the least pleasing, is the direction of the studies of such young men as ask it. They place themselves in the neighboring village, and have the use of my library and counsel, and make a part of my society. In advising the course of their reading, I endeavor