“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Declaration of Independence | July 2, 1776
Life. Liberty. Pursuit of Happiness.
Our American heritage is based on those three fundamental rights as debated and adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. Those three rights are as fundamental to our freedom today as they were in 1776 when we separated ourselves from the grip of King George II’s tyranny. Those same rights were later enshrined into the Bill of Rights ratified by the States in 1791.
In writing the Declaration of Independence, particularly the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Thomas Jefferson was arguably influenced by John Locke’s 1689 essay entitled Two Treatises of Government, and most likely by the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason.
That phrase also has its roots in the writings of, amongst others:
Sir Edward Coke, an English barrister
Adam Ferguson, a Scottish philosopher
Richard Cumberland, an English philosopher and cleric
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a Genevan legal and political theorist
William Blackstone, an English jurist
All of these writers posited that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are basic and fundamental rights granted to us by God. That, in fact, absent these rights, we cannot be free and independent people. Absent these rights, we will be subjugated.
Absent these rights, hundreds of millions of people around the globe have been subjugated. Absent these rights, millions upon millions of people have been murdered by tyrannical governments.
Joseph Stalin killed 9 million people, Hitler and his Natzi regime murdered 17 million people, and Mao Zedong slaughtered 78 million people. All of those people were denied their fundamental rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in their lives, which all ended brutally! Those 100,000,000+ people, whose lives were snuffed out by three brutal dictators are why we need to defend our rights that were announced in the Declaration of Independence and built into our Constitution.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”