Why Does the Declaration of Independence Refer to the “Pursuit of Happiness,” not Property?
In 1776, one of the most influential political documents ever written was published to justify the American Revolution against the British crown. The American Declaration of Independence was a guiding work for people and places as varied as the leaders of the French Revolution and authors of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), as well as the Decembrist revolt against the Russian Empire.
The Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (1790) was the direct first foreign derivation of the Declaration, as was the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811), the Liberian Declaration of Independence (1847), the declarations of secession by the Confederate States of America (1860–61), and the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence (1945). Sections have been copied verbatim in the Declarations of the Haitian Revolution (1804), the United Provinces of New Granada in 1811, the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the Chilean Declaration of Independence in 1818, Costa Rica in 1821, El Salvador in 1821, Guatemala in 1821, Honduras in 1821, Mexico in 1821, Nicaragua in 1821, Peru in 1821, Bolivian War of Independence in 1825, Uruguay in 1825, Ecuador in 1830, Colombia in 1831, Paraguay in 1842, Dominican Republic in 1844, the Texas Declaration of Independence in March 1836, the California Republic in November 1836, the Hungarian Declaration of Independence in 1849, the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand in 1835, and the Czechoslovak declaration of independence in 1918.
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