Excellent article. Thank you.
Hannah Arendt, in following your same line of historical interpretation, taught that Jefferson saw happiness as an end of all human drives unlike property which is a means. And by that he meant not private, individualist happiness which belongs to the sphere of the economy satisfying the basic, but lesser drive for livelihood to sustain life. He meant public happiness in the sphere of politics that creates the space whereby all persons are citizens with the ability to act in concert; Arendt's definition of power. Happiness is an aspirational ideal experienced, but never completely achieved, in its pursuit. (Certainly Jefferson's own life demonstrated that he put the drive to public happiness, politics, higher than the management of his own property, economics. He died an almost penniless man.) He can be a staunch critic of American, now global, capitalism and the great transformation described by Polanyi which puts government subservient not to public happiness but to private greed.