These are the rights you are born with, that no government grants and no government can rightfully take away. The Declaration calls them unalienable, and built a revolution on them.
Natural rights are rights that belong to every human being simply by virtue of being human, not granted by any government, ruler, or law. Because no government gives them, the argument goes, no government can legitimately take them away.
The idea was sharpened by John Locke, who named life, liberty, and property as the core natural rights that exist before any government and that government is created to protect. They come first; the state comes second, to serve them.
Thomas Jefferson borrowed and reshaped the idea for the Declaration of Independence. He wrote that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, swapping Locke's property for a broader, more aspirational goal.
The concept became the moral engine of expanding freedom. If rights are natural and universal, then denying them to anyone, the enslaved, women, the excluded, is a violation of something deeper than law, an argument abolitionists and reformers would wield for centuries.
