Description
“Sacred? No.” The book opens by staging an editorial revision, Franklin’s heavy backslash cutting Jefferson’s first draft. It is the right opening for what the book seems to promise: a close, patient, word-by-word reading of a single sentence, the second one in the Declaration of Independence, on its 250th birthday. The method is philological. The subject, as the title stakes it out, is not just any sentence but “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.” The book will do the archaeology.
For its first sections, it does. Franklin’s substitution of “self-evident” for “sacred and undeniable” opens onto Hume’s fork; the phrase “all men” opens onto Abigail Adams, George Mason, and the amendment inserting a “state of society” clause meant to exclude enslaved people; “created equal” opens onto Jefferson’s six hundred enslaved men, women, and children, Adams’s queasy compromise, Franklin’s slow moral turn. This is Walter Isaacson at his most useful — the biographer’s instinct trained on a text of one sentence. The Franklin-and-Hume material in particular, the sheep’s-head soup in Edinburgh and the month of conversation, gives the reader a texture of intellectual friendship that most Declaration histories skip.
And then the method breaks.
The section on “Certain Unalienable Rights” runs a few paragraphs, and most of them are about whether Jefferson wrote inalienable or unalienable and which is more felicitous. The section on “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — the sentence’s most famous phrase, the one thinkers from Aristotle onward have been arguing over — receives roughly one paragraph. Jefferson’s clause, we are told, is “just a simpler way to say all of that”: the right to seek fulfilment however one personally sees fit. That is the entire reading. A phrase philosophers have spent two and a half centuries fighting over, the phrase that separates Locke’s property from Jefferson’s revision, gets a definition a well-meaning civics teacher might paste onto a poster.
What replaces the philology, in the second half, is a homily. Chapters titled “Common Ground,” “The American Dream,” and “Going Forward” borrow Michael Sandel’s word “skyboxification” and take up meritocracy, offshoring, mobility statistics (kids born in 1950 versus the 1980s), the crisis of the free-trade consensus. None of this is bad on its own terms. Isaacson is fluent and fair-minded. But it belongs to a different book. It is not, in any recognisable sense, close reading. It is what Isaacson wanted to say about America in 2026, hung on a sentence written in 1776 that does not obviously invite the argument. The commons is not in Jefferson’s sentence. Neither is the American Dream. Neither is Sandel.
I kept turning back to compare the pages. “Created Equal” runs some three thousand words and does grapple with the moral contradiction at the founding. “Pursuit of Happiness” runs perhaps one hundred and fifty and does not grapple at all. If the promise of a word-by-word reading is that every word bears scrutiny in proportion to its weight, the sentence’s most philosophically dense phrase gets the lightest touch.
There is a smaller displacement to notice. The title is about a sentence Jefferson drafted. The book’s moral protagonist is Franklin. Franklin edits the sentence, corresponds with Hume, evolves on slavery, founds the library and the fire brigade, is quoted at the closing. Jefferson is present, contradictorily, but he does not carry the argument’s warmth. When Isaacson reaches for a model of the civic virtue he wants to recover, he reaches past Jefferson to Franklin. Whether that displacement is a critique of Jefferson — the man who could write the sentence and hold six hundred people in bondage — or simply the biographer’s preference, the book does not quite say.
The exegesis works best where it is patient with what it does not know. In Franklin’s letter to Ezra Stiles a month before his death, allowing that he expected “soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble” on the question of Jesus’s divinity, the book gives us a small perfect thing: a founder holding a metaphysical question at arm’s length with humour. Isaacson’s warmth for that moment, and his willingness to let Franklin be witty and unresolved, is what the close reading looks like when it is working. The trouble is that this care thins out just as the sentence reaches what most people remember it for. A reader curious about “the pursuit of happiness” as a philosophical claim, and not as a phrase to salute, will find the book has already moved on.
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