June 1776. A 33-year-old Virginian sits at a portable writing desk of his own design, in a rented second-floor room at Seventh and Market in Philadelphia, drafting the sentences Americans would come to treat as scripture. What was in his head while he wrote? For two centuries the standard answer was Locke. Carl Becker made it official in 1922, and the textbooks have repeated it ever since: natural rights, the social contract, life, liberty, and property with “the pursuit of happiness” swapped in as a Virginian flourish.
Garry Wills’s Inventing America (1978) says we have been reading over the wrong shoulder.
The Scottish Jefferson
Wills’s Jefferson took his moral philosophy from the Scots, Francis Hutcheson above all, with Thomas Reid and Lord Kames in the chorus. The idea everything else rests on is the moral sense: a faculty of sympathy that every human being possesses, and possesses equally. Jefferson believed a plowman would decide a moral case as well as a professor, and said so; Wills takes the remark seriously. On this reading “all men are created equal” is a claim about human equipment, an empirical statement rather than a legal fiction. And the pursuit of happiness stops being a private chase after property. Hutcheson’s happiness was public, the welfare of a people, something a government could be measured against and found wanting. The Declaration becomes less a lawyer’s brief for secession than an Enlightenment instrument with a signature block.
Whether or not you end up convinced, the reading pays for itself. Phrases worn smooth by two hundred years of recitation suddenly have edges again.
What Congress cut
The book’s most durable service is to pry apart the document Jefferson wrote and the one Congress passed. The delegates cut roughly a quarter of his draft, including the long furious paragraph blaming George III for the slave trade, and Jefferson sat there and suffered through every excision. Franklin, seated beside him, consoled him with the story of the hatter whose sign, edited by helpful friends, shrank from a proud sentence to a picture of a hat. Jefferson never forgave the editing. He copied out his own version for friends so that posterity could judge the difference. Wills judges it, clause by clause, and the chapters comparing the two texts are as close and patient as anything he later did with Lincoln’s 272 words.
The Hamowy problem
Now the honest part. The thesis did not survive contact with the specialists. Ronald Hamowy’s 1979 essay in the William and Mary Quarterly went through the argument claim by claim: the evidence that Jefferson read Hutcheson closely is thin, the Locke he supposedly ignored was everywhere in his world, and some of the parallels Wills drew turn out to prove too much or nothing. Most historians sided with Hamowy. Wills had corrected an orthodoxy by erecting its mirror image, which is the reviser’s occupational disease.
A book can lose its thesis and keep its value. What survives is the method and the recovered subject: an eighteenth-century Jefferson with actual books on his shelves and actual arguments in his head, in place of the marble abstraction. Read Inventing America the way Wills reads the Declaration, attentive to what the author was trying to do rather than what the verdict said, and it remains one of the best things ever written about the text.
The prequel
This was the first panel of what became a triptych on the founding documents, with Explaining America on the Federalist and Lincoln at Gettysburg on the Address. Set beside the last panel, it produces a fine irony. In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Wills shows Lincoln refounding the country on the Declaration’s central proposition. Inventing America shows that the proposition was never stable to begin with: the text Lincoln treated as scripture had been contested since the moment Congress took a knife to it, and the meaning Lincoln found in it was not Jefferson’s. Lincoln did not recover the Declaration. He invented it again, and Wills wrote a book about each invention. Together they make a single argument. Founding documents do not hold still, and every generation that swears by the text rewrites it in the act of swearing.
One of an ongoing series on Garry Wills. The rest are under the Garry Wills tag.