“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” Was Boilerplate Until Black Abolitionists Made It Sacred
Black abolitionists were the first to insist those opening lines were the real point.
Joys of Compounding · America at 250: The Ideas of 1776 - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 39]The words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were routine opening language in the Declaration of Independence, not the point of the document.
Historian Patrick Griffin said the point was to justify breaking with Britain after royal authority had collapsed. The listed rights carried little weight at the time. They were standard British ideas, used as agreed starting points before the document moved to its real argument for creating something new.
Black abolitionists were the first to single out that list of rights and treat it as the important part. By making those words central to their case against slavery, they began to treat them as sacred in the way Americans now take for granted. Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved abolitionist and writer, for example, called out the hypocrisy of a slaveholding republic while insisting that its principles mattered more than ever and had to be extended to more people.
Questions people ask
Who was Frederick Douglass?
Frederick Douglass was born enslaved in Maryland in 1818, escaped to freedom, and became a writer, speaker, and newspaper editor. He became the leading Black voice against slavery before the Civil War and later advised President Abraham Lincoln.
Did Jefferson invent the phrase?
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration, but he drew on widely shared ideas about natural rights. Similar phrases about life, liberty, and happiness appeared in British pamphlets, sermons, and earlier colonial statements.
Did anyone else use the abolitionists' reading?
Lincoln later used the same move during the Civil War era. He treated the Declaration's promise of equality as the true meaning of America in order to argue against the expansion of slavery.