In the Declaration of Independence, published on 4 July 1776, Thomas Jefferson declared: "we hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He thereby designated happiness the quintessential American emotion. Yet what did it mean to insert a seemingly private feeling into a public document? What were the personal and political meanings of happiness in the years from 1754 to 1829?
Jefferson's invocation of happiness reflected ideas and traditions well established by 1776. The English had long believed that promoting general happiness, in the sense of material well-being and prosperity, was one of the key functions of government. Many colonial charters made mention of this concept, from the Virginia charter of 1611, which promised to "tender" the "good and happy Success" of the colony "in Regard of the General Weal of human Society," to the Massachusetts Bay charter of 1691, which declared an intention to "incorporate" the king's subjects in the way "thought most conducive]" to their "Welfare and happy State." In seventeenth-century usage, public happiness and the common good were more or less synonymous. Far from being a matter of personal fulfillment, happiness most often referred to the communal prosperity of country or kingdom.
By the eighteenth century, moral philosophers of the Scottish common-sense school began to focus on the problem of how to assure maximum happiness for the most people. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, published in 1725, Francis Hutcheson proclaimed, "that Action is best which accomplishes the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers." Following in Hutcheson's footsteps, philosophers like Adam Ferguson emphasized that happiness could have complementary private and public components. In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson explained, "if the public good be the principle object with individuals, it is likewise true that the happiness of individuals is the great end of civil society." By the time Jefferson wrote the Declaration, the idea that happiness involved individual satisfaction as well as common good had become entrenched in British America.
Practically speaking, the emerging eighteenth-century emphasis on happiness as an individual matter as well as a common concern meant that people began to focus as much on private sources of happiness as on public ones. Historians argue that the desire for happiness helped foster the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. In Britain only one-quarter of the population participated in this revolution, whereas in America as many as two-thirds of the people entered the market for such luxury staples as tea and sugar, as well as for fashionable items like tea sets, engraved prints, and fine imported fabrics. This process may have occurred more quickly in Virginia, where individualism sooner took hold, than in Massachusetts, where people clung longer to Puritan communalism. People in search of happiness also began to turn inward to family life as a source of personal satisfaction, focusing on nurturing deeper emotional ties with spouses and with smaller numbers of children.
By the early nineteenth century, the idea that happiness should relate to the common good had become almost entirely eclipsed by the quest for private gain. In one mark of the ever-increasing role of consumerism in the definition of happiness, Independence Hall, the statehouse in which Jefferson had first written the Declaration, found new use in the 1830s as a clothing store. To attract customers, the owner of the store published an advertisement announcing, "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal—that [here] they can obtain Clothing as rich, as cheap, and as durable as at any other establishment in the nation." Happiness, understood as a public concept in the seventeenth century, had been almost entirely privatized by the nineteenth.
When Jefferson promised people the right to the pursuit of happiness, he offered them no guarantee of social equality. But he did pledge them the opportunity to strive for a social condition that would bring them contentment. He tried, in other words, to balance the public and private meanings of happiness. In the years after the Declaration, the understanding of happiness was rapidly further reduced from its origins as a social ideal for the common weal to an individual search for material riches. In the process, the concept of happiness became impoverished to the point that in the early twenty-first century it seems surprising to include such an emotion in a political text.