I'd like to make one personal comment on your expressed discomfort early on with the Founders’ wording as to the unalienable rights of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
I, too, have always been uncomfortable with the ‘pursuit of happiness’ wording.
I teach our adult Sunday school class at church, which generally consists of between forty and sixty adults, ranging in age from about twenty-five to eighty.
In one of my lessons about three years ago, I brought up the fact that I hold our Founders in deep reverence, but that I do take issue with that portion of their wording in the Declaration.
I explained that, in my own personal experience, any time I ‘pursued’ happiness, I rarely, if ever, achieved my goal. And the happiest times in my life have always occurred simply as a by-product of making ‘right’ choices (as opposed to convenient, self-serving, or popular ones), rather than seeking happiness (a nebulous term, to begin with) as a goal in and of itself.
During that particular Sunday school lesson, my reference to that portion of the Declaration was only intended to be mentioned in passing. But, once that subject was opened to discussion, we spent the entire remainder of the hour focused right there, with many of the class members relating (sometimes very heart-rending) stories of their own that seemed to support the notion that happiness generally cannot be ‘pursued,’ but rather that it is a natural (and sometimes unexpected) result that occurs when we are willing to choose the ‘right’ path in pivotal life situations.
I do wish the Founders had acceded to the ‘right to property’ wording instead, as it appears in several other colonial documents. Under the rights established by the First Continental Congress: Declaration of Colonial Rights (1774), the first ‘right’ established for the English Colonies in North America is that they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever a right to dispose of either without their consent. And Boston's 1772 Rights of the Colonists echoed the same: Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First, a right to life; secondly to liberty; thirdly to property.
I, for one, believe that the Founders’ (albeit small) divergence from Locke’s wording in his magnificent treatises on liberty was, in this particular case, a dilution rather than an improvement.
Again, Jean, many thanks for your superb essay at the head of this thread, and for inviting, and contributing to, the extraordinarily insightful comments that followed!
~ joanie …