Why Does the Declaration of Independence Refer to the “Pursuit of Happiness,” not Property?

Thomas Jefferson had his reasons — and we ignore them at our peril

(Wikimedia Commons)

In 1776, one of the most influential political documents ever written was published to justify the American Revolution against the British crown. The American Declaration of Independence was a guiding work for people and places as varied as the leaders of the French Revolution and authors of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), as well as the Decembrist revolt against the Russian Empire.

The Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (1790) was the direct first foreign derivation of the Declaration, as was the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811), the Liberian Declaration of Independence (1847), the declarations of secession by the Confederate States of America (1860–61), and the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence (1945). Sections have been copied verbatim in the Declarations of the Haitian Revolution (1804), the United Provinces of New Granada in 1811, the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the Chilean Declarati…