“Since the identity of the United States as a nation remains unusually fluid and elusive, we Americans have had to look back repeatedly to the Revolution and the Founding (as we call it) in order to know who we are.” The eminent historian Gordon S. Wood wrote those words in “The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States” (2011). Now, with the country locked in an endless, vicious battle over American values — and as we celebrate its 247th birthday — it’s a suitable time to return to the founding documents and the events that led to their creation. British writer Peter Moore’s new book, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” examines the prehistory of the Declaration of Independence and the transatlantic currents that bore it to the shore of legend on July 4, 1776. Is there anything we can apply to our present tribulations?
Moore follows in the footsteps not only of Wood but also Wood’s teacher Bernard Bailyn, author of the seminal, Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” (1967). Moore’s approach, however, is less exhaustive. Most of the Founding Fathers remain offstage, and he instead enlists a smallish, mostly British cast of characters to play out his narrative history of the period, including the ambitious printer William Strahan, the genius lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the firebrand Parliamentarian John Wilkes, the radical historian Catharine Macaulay and a former tax collector named Thomas Paine. The most prominent American in the book is a Zelig-like Benjamin Franklin, who, whether attending the coronation of George III or providing a letter of recommendation for the emigrating Paine, finds himself present for numerous turning points in Anglo-American relations. These figures, Moore argues, “thought just as long and hard about life, liberty, and happiness as Thomas Jefferson did.”
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Arranging these actors into entertaining, Hogarthian tableaux, Moore shines a light on the personalities that dominated the Georgian “attention economy” and the impact they had on the colonies. The writings and actions of these figures, among others, demonstrate that “these truths” the Founding Fathers held to be self-evident, far from emerging sui generis from the godhead of Jefferson’s genius, were already in the waters.
Franklin’s sojourns in London, and the people he befriended there, are a major focus. His connection to Strahan was initially long-distance, with the two developing a commercial bond by mail that gradually became a deep and (almost) abiding friendship. In their various publishing endeavors — Strahan, “the inky-fingered businessman,” printed Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”; Franklin, through Strahan, became Johnson’s first American publisher — we see the crucial role both men played in the passage of ideas across the Atlantic. Franklin was a well-placed nexus: As a successful printer and pioneer of lending libraries in Philadelphia, he knew about colonial taste, while his time in London gave him a close-up perspective on the end of the Seven Years’ War, George III’s accession and, in time, the leveraging of controversial taxes on the colonies to help pay off war debts.
Britain, in the wake of its own revolutions, seemed a paragon of progress to Franklin. New frontiers in science, philosophy and exploration had been breached, prompting fresh inquiries into the nature of being. John Locke’s ideas about life and happiness coincided with political revolution as well as scientific and medical advances that seemed to make possible a move away from life as endurance, Earth as a “vale of tears.” Johnson, too, when not lassoing the English language and cramming it into a dictionary, wrote often of the pursuit of happiness, however fleeting or illusory. Meanwhile, Macaulay made waves with her political salons and histories of England, which she interleaved with her takes on contemporary politics and the status of liberty in Britain. “Of all the various models of republics,” she wrote, in a sonorous pre-echo of Jefferson, “it is only the democratical system, rightly balanced, which can secure the virtue, liberty and happiness of society.”
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History can sometimes read like a steady procession of inevitable incidents. Not in Moore’s rollicking account. Setting aside the duels and the bad-tempered letters and some acid encounters between the era’s glitterati, the book’s compulsive readability is a tribute to Moore’s skill at cracking open the pre-revolutionary period and reanimating the contingencies that eventually drove the settlers to embrace independence. This was far from a certain outcome, even well into 1776. Indeed, contrary to the popular vision of colonists furiously shrugging off the yoke of a tyrannical monarchy, “for much of the century the colonists generally wanted more of Britain than less of it.”
It wasn’t just rage at the impositions of the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties or the so-called Intolerable Acts that spurred the colonists to revolt. Reports of the draconian treatment by the British government of Wilkes, a member of Parliament who had published satirical writings about then-Prime Minister (and crony of the king) Lord Bute, had already given rise to concerns in America about the behavior of George III. The king’s bellicose missteps demonstrated his fatal misreading of his subjects’ needs, desires and resolve. But it ultimately took the serendipitous arrival of a Brit — a fresh-off-the-boat Paine — to set off the spark for the independence cause with the publication in January 1776 of “Common Sense.” “Unanswerable” was George Washington’s judgment of the pamphlet; six months later, the Declaration was signed.
Moore’s book, in focusing on the complexity of the politics of the 1760s and 1770s, makes a strong case for understanding the founding documents primarily through close historical reading. In this way, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” can be read as a refutation of originalism, or the contention that we should still live in a world governed by the putative beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Though this has long been a fashionable strain in American political thinking, from Calvin Coolidge to Antonin Scalia and beyond, it seems faintly absurd when considered in light of what was happening at the time. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t just a statement of timeless, noble ideals; it was a conspectus of specific grievances felt by colonists repulsed by governmental overreach. Along with the Constitution, with its “three-fifths compromise” and its equal-born men (the word “women” is elided completely), the Declaration is a document rooted in a historical moment, however eternally we may want some of its themes to resonate.
Today, with the Founding Fathers’ intentions and beliefs being invoked to justify curbs on voting rights, a woman’s right to privacy and the liberties of trans people, the meaning of the Revolution continues to be a flash point. When the musical “1776” was revived on Broadway last year with a cast of women, nonbinary and trans actors playing the Founding Fathers, its co-director Diane Paulis said that the idea was “to hold history as a predicament, rather than an affirming myth.” Conversely, Adam Hochschild reported recently on the “1776 Curriculum” compiled by Hillsdale College, a small Christian institution in Michigan with ties to the Trump administration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ginni Thomas. The Declaration, per the Hillsdale syllabus, “should be both the beginning and end for students’ understanding of their country, their citizenship, and the benefits and responsibilities of being an American.” It’s easy to see the appeal to some of such a facile and self-mythologizing course (Hochschild calls it “a vast effort to prove that we have nothing to be ashamed of”) in an age of “woke” attacks on American history. But it’s also a striking reminder of how intellectually inert the discourse around constitutional matters can be.
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Though there are fleeting references to “the traumas and antagonisms of our current age,” Moore’s enthusiasm for Georgian culture and politics inhibits him from drawing the sort of comparison between then and now that one could. Revisiting Paine on monarchy in today’s Britain, for instance, is a bracing experience — there were no talking heads, as perhaps there should have been, during the coverage of Charles III’s coronation who came close to Paine’s withering rhetoric when he wrote, “If there are any so weak as to believe [in hereditary right], let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion.” More dramatic and most plain, though, is the renewed threat of absolute power and the need for adequate checks and balances — represented then by George III and today, at least in ambition, by Donald Trump. An incident Moore relates of window-smashing public tumult following one of Wilkes’s arrests contains a particularly striking parallel between past and present: “The size of the crowds; their rage; their meaningful embrace of the number 45; their sheer audacity and total disrespect to people even of the highest class.” Though the number 45 here refers to the year of a pro-Stuart uprising and the issue of the North Briton periodical that sparked the explosion in Wilkes’s notoriety, the uncanny foreshadowing of the chaos that attends the “45” of our own time is thought-provoking. What follows smashed windows?
There’s no denying that the founding documents contain much that is enduringly poetic and inspirational. But it’s also irrefutable that the United States was built on betrayed promises. Johnson’s skepticism about the “loudest yelps for liberty” emanating from men who were themselves enslavers is a reminder that soaring rhetoric and cuddly maxims, however enduring, cannot hide the stain of hypocrisy. Nearly 250 years later, while it seems doubtful that Johnson would consider the outcome of the American experiment to have been especially happy, there at least persists a shimmer of hope in the word “pursuit.” The compromises made to produce a Declaration that could be ratified by the 13 colonies, and the commitment to robust argument exemplified by the debate over the Constitution — outside the scope of Moore’s book — offer lessons to today’s politicians that they’d be wise to heed.
Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Britain and the American Dream
By Peter Moore
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 593 pp. $35
