Inalienable

In honor of America's 250th birthday this year, I have been reading a number of books on the Revolutionary era and more specifically the United States Declaration of Independence.  One of the best books that I've read so far in this genre is The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson.  Isaacson takes a surprisingly in-depth look (the book is only 80 pages long) on the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Wait a minute...is this another example of the so-called "Mandela Effect" that I mentioned in an older post (see "I once knew a gold robot with a silver leg....")?  I could swear that the Declaration says that these rights are inalienable and not unalienable.  I looked again, and sure enough, it does say inalienable.  Have you ever made that mistake?  It's a nearly unavoidable one, as it's just a difference of the first letter (substituting i for u), and according to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, there is absolutely no difference in meaning between the two words.  Here's what Merriam-Webster's has to say about the derivation of the two words:

Alien, alienable, inalienable—it's easy enough to see the Latin word alius, meaning "other," at the root of these three words. Alien joined our language in the 14th century, and one of its earliest meanings was "belonging to another." By the early 1600s that sense of alien had led to alienable, an adjective describing something you can give away or transfer to another owner. The word unalienable came about as its opposite, but so did inalienable, a word most likely borrowed into English on its own from French. Inalienable is the more common form today, and although we often see both forms used to modify "rights," it was unalienable that was used in the Declaration of Independence to describe life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If you've ever visited the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., and only if you were really paying attention, you may have noticed that the panel bearing the Declaration's preamble also substituted the "i" for the "u", whether by mistake or by intention:

Importantly, while the final version of the Declaration of Independence used the word unalienable, some earlier drafts (including several of the early drafts in Jefferson's own handwriting) used the word inalienable instead.  It seems then that the Jefferson Memorial includes the version of the preamble that Jefferson himself had preferred.

There is a footnote from a classic 1922 book on the history of the Declaration (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas by Carl Lotus Becker that adds some additional context.  The footnote reads:

The Rough Draft reads "[inherent &] inalienable." There is no indication that Congress changed "inalienable" to "unalienable"; but the latter form appears in the text in the rough Journal, in the corrected Journal, and in the parchment copy. John Adams, in making his copy of the Rough Draft, wrote " unalienable." Adams was one of the committee which supervised the printing of the text adopted by Congress, and it may have been at his suggestion that the change was made in printing. "Unalienable" may have been the more customary form in the eighteenth century.

I know what you are probably thinking.  "Does any of this really matter?"  As I will cover in another post soon, there were other mistakes made in transcribing the Declaration from Jefferson's pen to the piece of parchment that we see displayed in the National Archives today.  For today's post, though, let's just say that my curiosity got the better part of me, and I actually jumped down the proverbial rabbit hole to find out more information on this particular part of our American history.

I came across an article written by Scott Barnes that appeared in the Panama City News Herald on July 13, 2013 ("Comparing inalienable to unalienable rights").  Apparently, there are at least some legal differences between the two words.  According to Black's Law Dictionary, which is the most frequently used law dictionary in the United States, unalienable means incapable of being alienated, that is, sold and transferred.  Black's Law Dictionary further states, "You can't surrender, sell or transfer unalienable Rights, they are a gift from the Creator to the individual and can't (under any circumstances) be surrendered or taken."  Conversely, according to another, albeit less commonly cited legal reference, Morrison v. State, Mo. App., 252 S.W.2d 97, 101, inalienable rights are rights which are not capable of being surrendered or transferred without the consent of the one possessing such rights.  In other words, unalienable rights are ours for eternity and can never be taken away from us.  Neither can we given them away, even voluntarily.  If we wanted to do so, we could surrender our inalienable rights.

Not to confuse things even more, the 17th century English philosopher John Locke wrote about what he called natural rights in his Second Treatise of Government.  Natural rights are in essence the same as inalienable rights (or unalienable rights).  Locke argued that all individuals are naturally born with fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property, which exist independently of government.  Note that Jefferson borrowed heavily from Locke when he wrote the Declaration's most famous passage; however, he substituted pursuit of happiness for property (more on that in a future post, perhaps).  Locke also argued that individuals are equal with regards to these natural rights, in that these rights are part of what it means to be a human being, no individual or group of individuals could take away or limit these rights, and governments were legitimate only to the extent that they protected these rights.  Here was the fundamental point that America's Founders used to justify breaking away from England.  King George III had violated this principle by taking away or limiting some of their natural, God-given rights.  As a result, King George III (i.e. "government") had violated the principle that governments existed to protect natural rights.  Hence, King George III's government was no longer legitimate, and the American colonists could declare their independence ("...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...").

In his Panama City News Herald article, Barnes goes on to explain that he had stumbled across some original letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  Remember that Jefferson, Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were part of the five-man committee that the Second Continental Congress had chosen to write the Declaration of Independence (just so you have it for pub trivia night, the other two members were Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston).  Jefferson originally used the word inalienable, but Adams greatly preferred the stronger unalienable to suggest that these God-given rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) could never be taken away or surrendered voluntarily.    Barnes goes on to suggest that Adams had refused to sign the Declaration unless this subtle change was made (which is completely in character - Adams was notorious for having a thin skin, short temper, and the need to always have the final word).

As it turns out, the question on whether natural rights could be taken away was not as clear-cut as Adams had suggested.  The 18th century English jurist and judge William Blackstone added an important clarification here when he defined natural rights in his Commentaries on the Law of England, writing:

Those rights, then, which God and nature have established, and therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable.  On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.

For example, if someone commits a crime (which usually infringes on someone else's natural rights), they are punished in some way (e.g. required to pay a fine or serve time in jail).  Blackstone recognized this point, as did America's Founders.  In fact, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution clarifies this point rather succinctly, stating that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Ultimately, I agree with Merriam-Webster's dictionary that there is probably no real difference between inalienable and unalienable.  The important point is this - all of us have rights based on the fact that we are individuals and as humans.  Whether we choose to call these rights natural, inalienable, or unalienable probably doesn't matter.  What does matter, is that these rights are sacrosanct, inviolable, hallowed, and untouchable.  With only rare exception, these rights can never be taken away from us.  As such, we too can never violate someone else's rights, for to do so would de-legitimize their humanity.  

I can't end this post without at least mentioning what the historian and author Joseph Ellis calls one of the greatest contradictions involving the Declaration of Independence in his most recent book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding.  By failing to end slavery, America's Founders contradicted their own views on natural or unalienable rights.  It was left to the future 16th President to redefine the principles written down in America's founding document and which define the essence of what it means to be an American today.