‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ Review: America’s British Creed

The youth of the American republic is one of its oldest traditions. Its unique origins will always make it younger than any other nation. Yet the United States is also the world’s oldest democracy. Britain in the time of George III was a liberal monarchy, but Britain democratized only by degrees in the 19th century. France was neither liberal nor democratic before the revolution of 1789, and the French are now on their fifth republic. The American ideal of democratic self-governance looks ever more exceptional as it creaks toward its 250th birthday.

Britain has a kind of old-fashioned pseudo-constitution: an accumulation of legal precedent and patchwork legislation, standing on unwritten assumptions and topped by a hollow crown. Americans were the first to spell out their social contract and specify the rights of individuals in plain English. But what did the magic words of the Declaration of Independence—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—mean to their authors?

History is best written by the losers. In “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” Peter Moore, a historian who teaches at Oxford, shows how Britain exported its highest ideals to the Americans who rejected it.

Mr. Moore breaks the American creed into three sections and examines each in context. “Life” explores how Benjamin Franklin embodied colonial intellectual potential in the 1740s, and how he developed in London in the 1750s and 1760s. “Liberty” shows how the London rabblerouser John Wilkes catalyzed the politics of liberty in the 1760s, and why he resonated so loudly in the Colonies. “Happiness” explains what the Enlightenment blend of action and emotion meant in England in the early 1770s, and how Americans understood it on the cusp of their reinvention.

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Bible reading made colonial Americans perhaps the most literate population on the planet, but the “life” of the American mind was rooted in London. In 1740, Philadelphia was the Colonies’ leading city, with a modern street grid and a handy location on the post road between Boston and Charleston, but its population of 10,000 was half that of Bristol in England. London’s coffee-house culture, and periodicals such as Addison and Steele’s short-lived Spectator, were the templates for Benjamin Franklin’s self-improving “Junto” book club, his Pennsylvania Gazette, and the Almanack that he published under the pseudonym Richard Saunders.

All American roads led to London, and back. A London printer, William Strahan, supplied British news for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Strahan’s protégé, David Hall, emigrated to Philadelphia and worked in Franklin’s print shop. In 1747, Franklin retired from trade, passed the shop to Hall, and commissioned his “coming-out” portrait as a gentleman. Franklin’s scientific studies were not just an expression of practical polymathy. England’s aristocracy of the mind were fascinated by science. When Franklin went to London in the 1750s, his electrical speculations were his calling card.

Meanwhile in London, Strahan was printing Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary” in installments. Johnson was writing his own one-man periodical, the Rambler. Franklin launched Johnson in America, publishing excerpts in “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” Though Strahan linked the leading minds of American and British letters, Franklin and Johnson’s “division of perspectives” anticipated the parting of imperial ways. Franklin presented himself carefully, playing the “Gentleman in Philadelphia” for his London correspondents, just as he would later play the noble savage for Parisian admirers during the American revolution. Johnson was a tic-ridden social bumbler. Franklin was irreligious but believed in progress. Johnson, a prayerful Anglican, thought that “all change is of itself an evil.”

Mr. Moore describes their differences in the 1750s as “liberalism against conservatism,” but neither of those terms existed in those happy days before everyone had an “ideology.” The only word that made the king and his ministers “sit up and think hard about America,” Mr. Moore writes, was “France,” and that made the colonists want “more of Britain than less of it.” The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) brought London and the colonists together, but the subsequent tax burden demonstrated how unequal the relationship was. Americans began to sour on the distant mother country, especially after George III and his ministers tried to ruin John Wilkes.

Wilkes was a radical journalist, a defender of free speech, a well-connected Whig parliamentarian, and possibly the ugliest man in England. In 1763, George III demanded his trial for libeling the prime minister. Wilkes won his case, raised the ante by issuing a pornographic and blasphemous poem, and then skipped the country. He returned, won a seat in Parliament, and was imprisoned in 1768. The London mob cried “Wilkes and Liberty!” and rioted. The army, in a prequel to the Boston Massacre, fired into the crowd.

The Wilkes saga helped convince the colonists that George III wanted “absolute Tyranny.” The continuities with modern populism are obvious. In 2016, just after the British had voted to leave the European Union, I asked Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Brexit, to name his political hero. His answer was not Churchill or Thatcher but Wilkes. Likewise, Donald Trump’s rhetoric of “deep state” conspiracies echoes that of the Sons of Liberty. No wonder the French see modern British and American politics as an “Anglo-Saxon” continuum, just as it was when Franklin first set sail for London.

“Liberty” was the single word uniting “freeborn Britons”—including those in the Americas. Liberty, like the British state, was patriotic and Protestant. Whigs invoked its origins in the Magna Carta, the Anglican church, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights passed by Parliament in 1689. As Voltaire saw when he fled to London in the 1720s, liberty was simply the English way of life. Freeborn Britons knew liberty when they saw its enemy, the monarchical despotism and religious obscurantism of “Popery,” exemplified by France.

Londoners, Daniel Defoe wrote, were “stout fellows that would spend their last drop of blood against Popery, that do not know whether it be a man or horse.” The same went in the Colonies. The apprentices of Boston held an anti-Catholic revel on Nov. 5 every year—Pope’s Day, which the British still celebrate as Guy Fawkes Day. When the Quebec Act of 1774 legalized Catholicism in Canada, the Congress called this decision “impolitic, unjust and cruel, as well as unconstitutional.” As late as 1826, Thomas Jefferson dog-whistled that the Declaration had “burst the chains” of “monkish ignorance and superstition.”

Mr. Moore does not mention the religious origins of secular liberty, the anti-Catholic bigotry that was then considered progressive, or the British Whigs’ distrust of Protestant “Enthusiasm,” which they considered a kind of democratic dynamite. Without this context, we cannot understand what “liberty” meant to Wilkes and Franklin, why the London mob rallied to Wilkes, or why the American rebels, who were in many ways freer than their British contemporaries, thought taxation a harbinger of “Arbitrary government.”

The belief in a “conspiracy against liberty” crossed the Atlantic along with ideas about its antidote, a new social contract. Mr. Moore rightly avoids ascribing undue importance to French Enlightenment thought or the philosophy of John Locke. The rebels, or at least their intellectual leaders, took these ideas up instrumentally.

The American revolution was a civil war over the Whig constitutional inheritance. British republicans such as the historian Catharine Macaulay and the pamphleteer Tom Paine helped to push Whig complacency to its logical but surprising American outcome. Social alignments in London shifted as the battle lines developed. Dining at Macaulay’s house in the early 1770s, Samuel Johnson had demolished the host’s “levelling doctrine” by inviting the footman who was standing behind her chair to sit at the table. The footman did not dare. Macaulay flushed and was lost for words. “She has never liked me since,” Johnson told Boswell.

Edmund Burke, who in 1770 had endorsed Wilkes’s claim that English liberty was thwarted by a ministerial “Cabal,” sympathized with the Americans’ objections but saw secession as treason. William Strahan, who had risen from the printing house to the House of Commons, agreed. Benjamin Franklin’s last letter, written on July 5, 1775, accused Strahan of having “the Blood of your Relations” on his hands. On the same day, Strahan wrote to Franklin, begging him not to tear “the most glorious Fabric of Civil and Religious Government that ever existed on this Globe.”

Franklin did not reply. By 1775, the Lady’s Magazine in London was reporting three categories of current affairs: home news, foreign news, and a new, third category that could not be fitted into either because it stemmed from both: “America.”

—Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.