Today people think of happiness as something that results from the pursuit of pleasure, but the Constitution’s Framers had other ideas.
In 1815, the head of a boarding school in Maine wrote to Thomas Jefferson asking for some wisdom to pass along to his students. Jefferson responded by sending a passage from a Stoic self-help manual, Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, that he had copied down as a teenager to console himself after his father’s death. “If the Wise, be the happy man, as these sages say,” Jefferson paraphrased, “he must be virtuous too; for, without virtue, happiness cannot be.”
Who were these other sages? And what was the connection Jefferson saw between virtue and happiness?
A reading list that Jefferson first drafted in 1771, five years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, provides the beginning of an answer. Jefferson sent the list to his friend Robert Skipwith, who had asked for books to include in a private library. There, under the category of “religion,” Jefferson listed his favorite moral philosophers—the “sages” of his letter. They included Cicero as well as the classical writers Xenophon, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca and the Enlightenment writers John Locke, David Hume, Lord Bolingbroke, and Lord Kames.
During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, I set out to read many of the books on this list, nearly all of which I had somehow missed. I’ve had the privilege of a wonderful liberal-arts education and have studied literature, history, political philosophy, and law with great teachers at great universities. But I’d never encountered the works of Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment moral philosophy on Jefferson’s reading list that offered guidance about how to live a good life—nor had I ever explored the ways the Founders incorporated these ideas into their own lives. What I learned changed the way I thought about the psychology of the Founders and, in particular, about how self-consciously they tried to use each moment of the day for emotional self-regulation and industrious self-improvement. By reading the books the Founders read and following their own daily attempts at self-accounting, I came better to understand the largely forgotten core of their moral and political philosophy: that moderating emotions is the secret of tranquility of mind; that tranquility of mind is the secret of happiness; that daily habits are the secret of self-improvement; and that personal self-government is the secret of political self-government.
In college, I remember yearning for this kind of guidance. The 1980s were the “greed is good” decade, and I was looking for an alternative to the unchecked hedonism and materialism celebrated by popular culture. Unconvinced by the rigors of Puritan theology, which I had been studying as an English major, I craved an answer to the question of whether spiritual and moral truth could be obtained by reason rather than revelation, by good works and reflection rather than blind faith. What I didn’t realize, because classical moral philosophy had fallen out of the core curriculum, was that this was precisely the question the ancient philosophers had set out to answer.
What I learned in my year of daily reading from March 2020 to March 2021 was transformative. Today we think of happiness as something that results from the pursuit of pleasure. But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue—as being good, rather than feeling good. The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith described virtue as “the temper of mind which constitutes the excellent and praiseworthy character.” The Founders believed accordingly that happiness results from the daily practice of mental and spiritual self-discipline, mindfulness, and rigorous time management. What they called virtue and character improvement we would call being a lifelong learner, with a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to self-regulation, emotional intelligence, flourishing, and growth. Understood in these terms, happiness is always something to be pursued rather than obtained—a quest rather than a destination.
Inspired by ancient philosophers, they described this quest as a dramatic struggle between reason and passion. The Greek words for reason and emotion are logos and pathos, respectively, so for the Founders, passion was a synonym for emotion. The Founders believed not that we should lack emotion, only that we should manage our emotions in productive ways. “The due Government of the passions has been considered in all ages as a most valuable acquisition,” Abigail Adams warned her son John Quincy Adams, emphasizing in particular the importance of using reason to subdue “the passion of Anger.” Her conclusion: “Having once obtained this self government, you will find a foundation laid for happiness to yourself and usefulness to Mankind.” In his writings on happiness, Plato argued that we should use our faculty of reason, located in the head, to moderate and temper our faculties of passion, located near the heart, and appetite, in the stomach. When all three faculties of the soul were in harmony, Plato maintained, the state that resulted was called “temperance,” but, as Adam Smith noted, it might be better translated as “good temper, or sobriety and moderation of mind.” Drawing on Smith’s “faculty psychology,” the Founders held that the goal of education was to strengthen our powers of reason so we could control our turbulent emotions, achieving the calm self-mastery and tranquility of mind that was key to personal and political happiness.
After reading the books that shaped the Founders’ original understanding of “the pursuit of happiness,” I set out to explore how they applied the ancient wisdom in their own lives. The Founders talked incessantly about their struggles for self-improvement and their efforts to regulate their anxieties, emotions, and perturbations of the mind. They created disciplined schedules for reading, writing, and exercise, and they kept detailed accounts of their successes and failures in living up to the ancient ideals. In his early 20s, for example, Benjamin Franklin made a list of 13 of the classical virtues and resolved each day to run through a checklist of whether he had lived up to each one. Daunted by all the marks on his checklist, he eventually abandoned the project. However, “on the whole,” he concluded, “tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
At times, of course, the Founders shamefully betrayed the moral ideals they set for themselves. Some of them spent their lives as enslavers and notoriously denied the humanity, equality, and inalienable rights of the people they enslaved. At least some of the enslaving Founders were aware of their own hypocrisies. Jefferson and other enslavers from Virginia recognized that craven greed kept them from freeing those they held in bondage, even as they called for the “total emancipation” of all enslaved people at some point in the future. In March 1775, weeks before war broke out at Lexington and Concord, Jefferson listened as the Virginia delegate Patrick Henry urged the Second Virginia Convention to send troops to support the Revolution. Henry considered it “amazing” that he and his fellow Americans, who were so “fond of Liberty,” also allowed slavery, a practice “as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive to liberty.” And Henry admitted that avarice made him choose not to follow his moral principles: “Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase!” Henry asked. “I am drawn along by [the] general inconvenience of living without them. I will not—I cannot justify it.”
In addition to changing the way I thought about the Founders, my reading also changed the way I thought about how to be a good citizen. Following the classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. When he read a draft of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson’s main concern was that an unscrupulous president in the distant future might lose an election by a few votes, falsely insist that the election had been stolen, mobilize his supporters, and refuse to leave office. “If once elected, and at a second or third election out voted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him,” Jefferson wrote to Madison in 1787. In Jefferson’s view, the only thing standing between America and a populist demagogue was the virtuous self-control of citizens who would find the emotional balance and tranquility of mind to choose virtuous leaders who would sustain the American experiment rather than destroy it. Recent events have vindicated his fears.
It’s not a surprise that the Founders often fell short of their own ideals of moral perfection. But what is a surprise is the seriousness with which they took the quest, on a daily basis, to become more perfect. In his autobiography, Franklin called the great moral errors of his life “errata,” or printers’ errors. And he remained hopeful, as he wrote in an epitaph he drafted for himself, that life was like a manuscript whose errors, in a “new & more perfect edition,” could always be “Corrected and amended By the Author.”
