Delete comment from: Boston 1775
John Adams was definitely a big fan of “happiness” in the spring of 1776, as shown by his “Thoughts on Government” essay—look how many times he uses the word there. As with Jefferson’s “self-evident” rhetoric, Adams was echoing what many people around him claimed, and using those echoes to suggest that the point was obvious.
Allen is correct that Jefferson left out George Mason’s property rights in the Declaration’s big three phrase, moving away from Mason’s more common phrasing. That made the Declaration less of an expression of economic self-interest and more abstract, which might have been helpful in framing the American cause both locally and abroad.
I think Allen is particularly interested in finding the universal in the document given that she’s a woman of some African ancestry—i.e., just the sort of person the Continental Congress did not have in mind when they wrote about equality and rights in 1776. But her argument might be that Adams’s contribution didn’t fully flower until years later as people read the Declaration’s words in new contexts.
There’s a lot of irony in Adams's emphasis on happiness instead of property given (a) his Puritan cultural background; (b) his often grumpy personality; and (c) his belief in preserving some privileges for people with more property.
As for nominating George Washington to be commander-in-chief, the only person to give Adams credit for that was Adams. Others, including Adams himself at times, recalled that Thomas Johnson of Maryland proposed Washington as general. And it was a unanimous choice and thus a group decision (though Adams preferred to recall that he had to argue against great odds, as usual).
Jul 8, 2014, 2:33:19 PM
Posted to Our Declarations