![]() “Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.…The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. John Adams, in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), reminds us: The normal “trio” of essential rights was “Life, Liberty and Property.” We find property mentioned in most “rights” documents from the founding period: “pursuit of happiness” is an outlier. We must also note that Jefferson’s use of “the pursuit of happiness” is unusual. The right to delegate power to government, through the people’s consent. ![]() The right to secure their unalienable and civil rights through the institution of government.The right “to alter or to abolish, and institute new government.” (Note: this right can also be seen as a duty!).The right of a people “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.”.While Jefferson directly lists only three unalienable rights, other rights, both individual and collective, are hidden in plain sight. As Thomas West argues, “ the founders shared a ‘theoretically coherent understanding’ of politics rooted in natural rights philosophy.” Early Americans almost never missed an opportunity to proclaim them. If there was one political principle which was ubiquitous during the founding period, it was the natural, unalienable rights of the colonists. And consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his Maker’s will.” This principle, therefore, has more or less extent and effect, in proportion as the superiority of the one and the dependence of the other is greater or less, absolute or limited. A being independent of any other, has no rule to pursue, but such as he prescribes to himself but a state of dependence will inevitably oblige the inferior to take the will of him, on whom he depends, as the rule of his conduct not indeed in every particular, but in all those points wherein his dependence consists. “Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being. Indispensably obligatory? Sir William Blackstone explains why: They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Emphasis added) This is what is called the law of nature … Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind … The Sacred Rights of Mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. “To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. In a 1775 newspaper essay entitled “The Farmer Refuted,” Alexander Hamilton explains the relationship between natural law and natural rights this way: ![]() “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Here Jefferson is of course referring to the “certain unalienable Rights” we have been “endowed by Creator.” These natural, unalienable rights derive from natural law. ![]() In his draft, I particularly prefer Jefferson’s more powerful: “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable” to the final, “ self-evident.” On the other hand, other sentences in Jefferson’s draft clearly benefited from the collaboration of the Congress, even while Jefferson later complained his work had been “mangled.” The judgment of historian Carl Becker was that “Congress left the Declaration better than it found it.” Most Americans have never encountered Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration and are not aware the Declaration went through significant “wordsmithing” on its path to approval on July 4, 1776. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, in his beautiful and insightful book: The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It,” writes: “The Founders understood to be connected, to supply together the principles and the details of government, to be a persuasive and durable unity.” “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As most Americans will recognize, these are words from the Declaration of Independence.ĭr.
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