The Pursuit of Comfort: The Modern and the Material in the Early Modern British Atlantic World

Abstract

No one knows with certainty what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when in 1776 he wrote that pursuit of represented a universal and inalienable right. Yet the enigmatic nature of the phrase has not stopped historians from weighing in on its meaning. Indeed, like any good mystery, it invites interesting speculation. Pursuing happiness could mean the search for security, individual freedom, or worldly goods. It could represent the distillation of Scottish Enlightenment thought, or it could embody in a few catchy words the sum total of Lockean liberalism. However we define Jefferson's vision of happiness, though, it would seem to imply a modern sensibility that had more universal appeal than the inviolability of property, which along with life and liberty comprised Locke's God-given rights.' When Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, the colonies were not only caught in the throes of a war, but were also grappling with what it meant to be modern. Historians have long argued that in the decades before the Revolution Americans witnessed a consumer revolution, increased secularization, the growing influence of new ideas, and developing class-consciousness. More recently, studies such as Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America (1992) and Jon Butler's Becoming America (2000) have pinpointed the birth of modern sensibilities like pursuing happiness in the rise of a consumer culture. In this development, America lagged only behind Britain, which had already become a society inhabited by, in the words of Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (1992). Indeed, as John Brewer contends in The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), a mania for the consumption of things material and ethereal defined the English eighteenth century. While Jefferson's original intent eludes us, the thrust of his vision of happiness does not. Pursuing happiness stood for something new and different; in some way it reflected the emergence of a modern sensibility of consumption that marked a larger