LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

A nation rises out of the Enlightenment.

Like Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men and Leo Damrosch’s The Club, Moore’s vibrant group biography brings to life the intellectual and political currents, in Britain and Colonial America, that gave rise to the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” words that “were destined one day to become an evergreen mantra for politicians, and a shorthand for that ideal we call the American Dream.” Moore’s central figures are Philadelphian printer, scientist, and politician Benjamin Franklin, aspiring to “gentlemanly credentials”; Scottish-born printer and publisher William Strahan; the irascible Samuel Johnson; “political agitator” John Wilkes; historian Catharine Macaulay, whose romantic liaisons inspired salacious gossip; and outspoken British émigré Thomas Paine. In tracing their lives and interconnections in the decades leading up to 1776, Moore depicts a British nation increasingly focused on commerce and geopolitics, with a new generation of Britons “beginning to see themselves as masters of their own destiny,” talking of liberty “as a rare and fragile thing.” As the author writes, “liberty meant freedom from tyranny. More distinctly, people thought of it as the right to live with some independence, within a legal system that protected them from the malignant reach of arbitrary power, in a property of their own possession that was safe from intruders.” To Britain’s colonies, liberty meant independence from a king who was quashing free speech, imprisoning opponents, and extorting money from its possessions through taxation. They would not be enslaved by Britain, although they did not include their own slaves in their cry for freedom. “How is it,” Johnson remarked acerbically, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” It was Paine who urged his fellow colonists to send a “manifesto” to Britain outlining their intentions to break with the motherland, in effect providing a prototype for the committee that met to draft that declaration, and it was Jefferson who summarized the yearnings of the age in a simple phrase.

An energetic and meticulously researched history.