NOTES

PREFACE

  1  Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, with Marion D. Pratt and Lloyd A. Dunlap (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:168–69. Note: In quotations of primary sources throughout this book, I observe original spellings, punctuation, and treatment of words.

INTRODUCTION

  1  James Madison, Federalist No. 14, in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1961), 89. All subsequent references to The Federalist are to this edition.

  2  John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 455; John Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1865), 10:282–83. Adams’s dating of the birth of the American Revolution to 1760 is curious given that most scholars typically begin their narratives with the American reaction to either the passage of the Sugar Act in 1764 or the Stamp Act of 1765. Why 1760? There seem to be two likely explanations. First, Adams knew that the American reaction to the Stamp Act in 1765 did not happen randomly. The Stamp Act violated the Americans’ most deeply held moral and political principles—principles that began to come into full consciousness in the years before 1765. Second, Adams is also making room in his narrative for the speech delivered by James Otis before the Superior Court of Massachusetts at the writs of assistance case in 1761, which Adams argued was the moment when the Americans’ revolutionary mind was given its birth. According to Adams, British imperial officials initiated the case in late 1760 by ordering that American customs officials use a new kind of writ of assistance against American smugglers after they had received word of General James Wolfe’s victory over the Marquis de Montcalm at Montreal, thereby effectively ending the Seven Years’ War with France. Otis’s speech was the first act of American resistance to the designs of British imperial officials. Decades later, Adams, who was a witness to the courtroom case, argued—figuratively rather than literally—that Otis’s speech “produced the American Revolution.” He described the impact of Otis’s speech this way: “Otis was a flame of fire! … American independence was then and there born; the seeds of patriots and heroes were then and there sown…. Every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776, he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free.” See Adams to William Tudor Sr., December 18, 1816, and March 29, 1817, Works of Adams, 10:233–34, 247–48.

  3  Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 21. (Emphasis added.)

  4  Thomas Paine, Letter to the Abbé Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in which the Mistakes in the Abbé’s Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up (Philadelphia, 1782), in The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, ed. William M. Van der Weyde (New Rochelle, NY: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925), 4:171, 174.

  5  Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Part the Second: Combining Principle and Practice (1792), in Life and Works of Paine, 6:232, 236.

  6  Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1792), 20–21.

  7  Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders, 23.

  8  Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), 16:117–19.

  9  The contours of this new approach to history writing are laid out in C. Bradley Thompson, “The American Revolution and the New Moral History,” American Political Thought 8, no. 2 (2019): 175–201.

10  Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 193–94.

11  See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

12  Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818, Works of Adams, 10:282–83.

13  Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, November 29, 1825, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5693. Spelling and other irregularities in the original.)

CHAPTER 1

  1  Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, Writings of Jefferson, 16:181–82.

  2  Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, Writings of Jefferson, 16:181–82.

  3  Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: Anderson and MacDowall, and James Robertson, 1818; repr., London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 31.

  4  For general accounts of the revolution initiated by the Enlightenment, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Norton, 1966), and vol. 2, The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  5  Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Penguin, 1975), 434–35.

  6  John Adams, diary entry, April 9, 1754, in The Earliest Diary of John Adams: June 1753–April 1754, September 1758–January 1759, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Wendell D. Garrett (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 60, 63; John Adams, Autobiography (November 30, 1804), in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, and Wendell D. Garrett (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 3:262.

  7  See Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:11, 32–33, 38, 40, 43–44, 98–99.

  8  Adams to Jonathan Sewell, February 1760, in Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 1:42–43.

  9  James Wilson, Lectures on Law, in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:225–26, 213–14.

10  Standard works on the modern revolution in science include E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1954); Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1977); and Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington, Frame of the Universe: A History of Physical Cosmology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

11  Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (New York: Daniel Adee, 1845), 384.

12  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London: Dent, 1961), bk. IV, chap. xii, para. 11. Hereafter cited as ECHU followed by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers.

13  Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, 365–66.

14  ECHU, I.iv.25.

15  On the relationship between Locke’s epistemology and his moral and political thought, see Richard I. Aaron, John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955); John W. Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding: A Selective Commentary on the “Essay” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Peter A. Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

16  ECHU, I.i.2, I.i.6, IV.xxi.1, IV.xxi.3.

17  ECHU, I.i.6, IV.xxi.3.

18  The Cambridge Platonists were a group of seventeenth-century English philosophers and theologians at Cambridge University, the best known of whom were Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Henry More (1614–1687).

19  ECHU, I.iv.2, I.i.2; “Epistle to the Reader,” ECHU, p. xxxv.

20  See ECHU, II.ix.13. In the secondary literature, see Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding, 17, and Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, 38–39. Also see John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the “Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 87–88, 95.

21  John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), First Treatise, para. 58. Hereafter cited as either First Treatise or Second Treatise, with paragraph number.

22  ECHU, IV.xix.14.

23  ECHU, IV.xvii.9, I.i.7.

24  See Hugo Grotius, “The Preliminary Discourse Concerning the Certainty of Right in General; and the Design of His Work in Particular” (1625), in The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, from the edition by Jean Barbeyrac (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:89; Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betts (New York: Penguin, 1973), 162.

25  ECHU, I.i.2. On Locke’s moral-political theory, see Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Peter C. Myers, Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

26  John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. George W. Ewing (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), 174.

27  ECHU, I.iii.13, IV.iii.18, I.iv.26.

28  ECHU, III.xi.16. Locke speaks of his project to build a demonstrative science of morality in at least three other places in the Essay: IV.iii.18, IV.iv.7, and IV.xii.8.

29  ECHU, IV.iii.18, IV.xii.8 (emphasis added), III.xi.16, and IV.iii.18 (emphasis added). See chapter 3 for a discussion of Locke’s understanding of self-evident truths. Interestingly, Thomas Reid, the philosopher described by Garry Wills in his Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) as one of the leading eighteenth-century Scottish opponents of Locke, wrote an entire chapter supporting (with some reservations and corrections) Locke’s attempt to establish a morality capable of demonstration. See Reid, “Whether Morality Be Capable of Demonstration,” in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell and G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1785; repr., New York: Garland, 1971), 678–88.

30  ECHU, IV.xii.11, IV.xii.11.

31  ECHU, IV.iii.18.

32  Second Treatise, para. 135.

33  Second Treatise, para. 4–5.

34  Second Treatise, para. 27.

35  Second Treatise, para. 123, 172, 54.

36  See ECHU, II.xxvii.9–25.

37  ECHU, II.xxi.29.

38  Second Treatise, para. 6.

39  ECHU, I.iii.6, I.iv.9, II.xxviii.8, III.ix.23.

40  ECHU, I.iii.13; Second Treatise, para. 6.

41  ECHU, I.1113, I.xxi.47.

42  Second Treatise, para. 63.

43  Second Treatise, para. 16, 57.

44  Second Treatise, para. 6.

45  ECHU, I.iii.4–5; Second Treatise, para. 13, 27; ECHU, I.iii.12.

46  Second Treatise, para. 142, 10, 12.

47  See Second Treatise, para. 124.

48  ECHU, II.xxviii.6, I.iii.13, II.xxviii.5.

49  ECHU, I.iii.3, I.iii.6. (Emphasis added.)

50  ECHU, II.xxviii.6.

51  Second Treatise, para. 124.

52  ECHU, II.xxviii.10, II.xxviii.9.

53  ECHU, II.xxxviii.10.

54  ECHU, II.xxviii.10–11, II.xxviii.12.

55  Second Treatise, para. 10, 16, 8, 16.

56  Second Treatise, para. 135.

57  In order to gain a “knowledge of virtue” and to be “instructed in the natural rights of men, and the origin and foundations of society, and the duties resulting from thence,” Locke recommends that boys and young men study Cicero’s De Officiis (44 BCE), Samuel von Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (1673) and Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672), and Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625). See John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), in Some Thoughts Concerning Education; and, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996), 139.

In “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman,” Locke divides the study of politics into two branches, “the one, containing the original of societies, and the rise and extent of political power; the other, the art of governing men in society.” With regard to studying the “original of societies, and the rise and extent of political power,” beyond what Locke recommends in Some Thoughts Concerning Education he adds Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594–97), Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698), Peter Paxton’s Civil Polity: A Treatise Concerning the Nature of Government (1703), and of course his own Two Treatises of Government (1690). As for the “art of government,” Locke says it “is best to be learned by experience and history, especially that of a man’s own country.” See John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman,” in The Works of John Locke (London: C. Baldwin, 1824), 2:408.

Eighty-seven years later, John Adams drew a similar distinction, between what he called “principles of liberty,” which he associated with Locke’s Second Treatise, and the “principles of political architecture,” which he associated with Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. See Adams to Samuel Adams, September 12, 1790, Works of Adams, 6:411–12. For a discussion of Adams’s distinction between the “principles of liberty” and the “principles of political architecture,” see C. Bradley Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 174.

58  Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 185–87.

59  Second Treatise, para. 12, 42.

60  Second Treatise, para. 3, 124–26.

61  On Locke’s influence in America, see Merle Curti, “The Great Mr. Locke, America’s Philosopher, 1783–1861,” Huntington Library Bulletin (1937), 107–51; John Dunn, “The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century,” in Political Obligation in Its Historical Context: Essays in Political History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53–77; Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism; Steven M. Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Jerome Huyler, Locke in America: The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); and Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).

62  The term “Whig,” as opposed to “Tory,” is used here to describe those colonial and revolutionary Americans who were distrustful of political power and who believed that the purpose of government is to expand the sphere of individual freedom by protecting the citizen’s natural and civil rights. The term “Patriot,” as opposed to “Loyalist,” is used here to describe those colonial and revolutionary Americans who opposed efforts by British imperial officials to legislate for the colonies and who supported the American cause during the War of Independence.

63  John Bulkley, preface to Poetical Meditations, by Roger Wolcott (New London, CT: T. Green, 1725), xii; A Virginian [pseud.], Pennsylvania Gazette, September 29, 1768; Anon., “To the Inhabitants of Queen’s County, Long Island,” Constitutional Gazette, November 29, 1775; John Tucker, A Sermon Preached at Cambridge, before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson … and the Honorable House of Representatives, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay … (Boston: Richard Draper, 1771), 19.

64  Boston Gazette, March 1, 1773.

65  See Massachusettensis [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, December 5, 1771, and August 27, 1772. (This is not the same Massachusettensis who inspired John Adams to write his Novanglus letters.)

66  Samuel Briggs, ed., The Essays, Humor, and Poems of Nathaniel Ames, Father and Son, of Dedham, Massachusetts, from Their Almanacks, 1726–1775 (Cleveland: Short & Forman, 1891; New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970), 450. For just one example of a newspaper that devoted its pages to quoting long extracts from Locke’s Second Treatise, see Massachusetts Spy, August 22, 1771, which reproduced the entirety of the eighteenth chapter on “Tyranny.”

67  Jonathan Boucher, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1797; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 531. Boucher, like most American Loyalists and British Tories, rejected Locke’s core political principals that the origin of government will be found in equality, consent, and contract. Such a dangerous view, Boucher held, would be the end of all government. Interestingly, some Loyalists thought the Americans had misinterpreted Locke’s political philosophy and claimed that they were the true Lockeans. On Lockean Loyalists, see Joseph Galloway, A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great-Britain, and the Colonies: With a Plan of Accomodation, on Constitutional Principles (New York: James Rivington, 1775). See also the views of Peter Van Schaack, of New York, in H. C. Van Schaack, The Life of Peter Van Schaack (New York: D. Appleton, 1842), 54–60, 73–76, 87, 26–61. Some of the most interesting debates during the Revolutionary period were between American Whigs and Loyalists over the nature and meaning of Locke’s philosophy for America. For an example of such a debate, see the Loyalist Thomas Bradbury Chandler, A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, on the Subject of Our Political Confusions … (Boston: Mills and Hicks, 1774) versus the Whig Philip Livingston, The Other Side of the Question: or, A Defence of the Liberties of North-America (New York: James Rivington, 1774).

CHAPTER 2

  1  Much has been written since the late twentieth century on the Declaration’s philosophic sources. In addition to several works already cited, including Zuckert’s Natural Rights Republic, see Hans Eicholz, Harmonizing Sentiments: The Declaration of Independence and the Jeffersonian Idea of Self-Government (New York: P. Lang, 2001); Paul Eidelberg, On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and Morton White, The Philosophy of American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  2  On Newton’s influence on the Declaration and the political thought of the American founding period, see Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 24–79; Wills, Inventing America, 93–110; and I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison (New York: Norton, 1995).

  3  Nathanael Emmons, “The Dignity of Man,” in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1990), 893; Samuel McClintock, “A Sermon on Occasion of the Commencement of the New-Hampshire Constitution,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 803–804.

  4  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 211.

  5  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 425.

  6  The revolutionaries’ charge that imperial officials were driven by a conspiracy to enslave them is examined in much greater detail in chapter 9.

  7  John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, ed. C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 34.

  8  John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768), in The Political Writings of John Dickinson, 1764–1774, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1970), 355–56.

  9  Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: Norton, 1975), 231.

10  John Adams quoting Daniel Leonard in the “Massachusettensis Letters,” in The American Crisis: The Daniel Leonard–John Adams Letters to the Press, 1774–1775, ed. Bernard Mason (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 33–34, 39.

11  See David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 37–45.

12  See Wills, Inventing America, 71.

13  Jefferson to James Maury, June 16,1815, Writings of Jefferson, 14:319.

14  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768), in Political Writings of Dickinson, 348.

15  Continental Congress, Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (July 6, 1775), Colonies to Nation, 255.

16  Jefferson to James Smith, December 8, 1822, Writings of Jefferson, 15:409; Richard Bland, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1983), 1:69.

17  Jefferson to Lafayette, February 14, 1815, Writings of Jefferson, 14:245; Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13,1814, Writings, 14:139; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), Q17, Writings, 2:223; Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819, Writings, 15:180; Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings, 14:490; Jefferson to John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, Writings, 16:43; Jefferson to Richard Rush, October 20, 1820, Writings, 15:284; Jefferson to David Harding, April 20, 1824, Writings, 16:30; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801), Writings, 3:321.

18  Jefferson to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, Writings of Jefferson, 15:441; Jefferson to Judge John Tyler, June 28, 1804, Writings, 11:33; Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, March 6, 1813, Writings, 13:225; Jefferson to the Rev. Samuel Miller, January 23, 1808, Writings, 11:429; Jefferson to John F. Watson, May 17, 1814, Writings, 14:136; Jefferson to William Duane, March 28, 1811, Writings, 13:26.

19  Jefferson to James Madison, March 21, 1786, Writings of Jefferson, 6:10; Jefferson to Joseph Priestly, June 19, 1810, Writings, 10:324; Enos Hitchcock, “An Oration: Delivered July 4, 1788, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Providence, in Celebration of the Anniversary of American Independence … ” (Providence, RI: Bennett Wheeler, 1788), 11.

20  Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:231; 7:97; 6:226, 225, 231.

21  Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:232, 322.

22  Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness among the Human Species (New York, 1802), 242, 7, 243, 244, 134.

23  ECHU, IV.iii.18.

24  See John Locke, “Essays on the Laws of Nature,” in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79–133.

25  Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 33. The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a direct tax on Britain’s American colonies by requiring the colonists to purchase stamped paper for various legal documents, magazines, newspapers, and many other types of paper used by the colonists. The purpose of the tax was to help offset British war expenses acquired during the recently concluded Seven Years’ War.

26  Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted (February 23, 1775), in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1:86.

27  James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 441.

28  John Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches (excerpt), in Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 252–67.

29  Abraham Williams, “An Election Sermon” (1762), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:8.

30  See, for example, Charles Turner, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson … and the House of Representatives, of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay (Boston: Richard Draper, 1773), 31.

31  Quoted from the 1768 “Preface” to Thomas Bradbury, The Ass: or, The Serpent, with a Preface by Concionator [pseud.] (London: N. Cliff and D. Jackson, 1712; repr., Boston: Edes and Gill, 1768); An American [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, December 5,1771.

32  Anon. from the County of Hampshire, “To the Inhabitants of Massachusetts-Bay, No. 1,” Massachusetts Spy, February 9, 1775; The Monitor [pseud.], New-York Journal, November 16, 1775.

33  Adams, diary entries, August 22, 1756, Summer 1759, May 11, 1756, Diary and Autobiography, 1:43–44,117, 26.

34  Adams, draft of a letter to Jonathan Sewell, Diary and Autobiography, 1:123. (Emphasis added.) Compare with Locke, ECHU, I.i.5–9.

35  Adams, draft of a letter to an unidentified correspondent (1758), Earliest Diary, 7l-72.

36  Adams, diary entry, March 3, 1756, Diary and Autobiography, 1:11.

37  The proposition that the laws of nature were known through inductive reasoning was not uniform, however, among the founding generation. In the years after the Revolution, some founders such as James Wilson argued that certain moral laws of nature were known to man through an innate moral sense. In his Lectures on Law (1790–91), Wilson advanced a very different view of how the moral laws of nature are known from the one presented here: “If I am asked … —how do you know that you ought to do that, of which your conscience enjoins the performance? I can only say, I feel that such is my duty. Here investigation must stop; reasoning can go no farther. The science of morals, as well as other sciences, is founded on truths, that cannot be discovered or proved by reasoning…. We cannot, therefore, begin to reason, till we are furnished, otherwise than by reason, with some truths, on which we can found our arguments. Even in mathematicks, we must be provided with axioms perceived intuitively to be true, before our demonstrations can commence. Morality, like mathematicks, has its intuitive truths, without which we cannot make a single step in our reasonings upon the subject.” Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:133.

38  Adams, diary entry, August 14, 1756, Diary and Autobiography, 1:41.

39  Adams, diary entry, December 3 or 4, 1758, Diary and Autobiography, 1:61; Earliest Diary, 77. This paragraph is partly drawn from Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, 19–20.

40  Ethan Allen, excerpt from Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1785), in Kerry S. Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 149, 164.

41  Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. C. J. Betts (Harmondsworth, UK, and Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 162–63.

42  Benjamin Franklin, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, in American Deists, 59.

43  A Philadelphian [pseud.], “To the Freeman of America,” Pennsylvania Gazette (n.d.); repr., Massachusetts Spy, June 2, 1774.

44  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:85, 75.

45  Elihu Palmer, excerpt from Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species (1801), in American Deists, 266.

46  For a similar application of the conditional imperative to the ideas and actions of the American Revolution, see Randy E. Barnett, The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4–12, and Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (New York: Broadside Books, 2016), 46–51.

47  Jonas Clark, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency John Hancock … and the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, 1781), 8–9.

48  Abraham Williams, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:7; Anon., “On the Perversion of Law from Its Constitutional Course,” Massachusetts Spy, February 20, 1772; Massachusettensis [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, November 18, 1773; William Whiting, “An Address to the Inhabitants of Berkshire County, Mass.” (1778), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:466.

49  Anon., Boston Gazette, September 28, 1767; Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies … (1765), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 554; “A Dialogue Between a Ruler and a Subject,” Massachusetts Spy, June 18, 1772; Richard Wells, A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the Consideration of the British Colonies, (Philadelphia, 1774), in Colonies to Nation, 393–96; “To the Inhabitants of Massachusetts-Bay, No. V,” Massachusetts Spy, March 9, 1775.

50  Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:87–88.

51  Elizur Goodrich, “The Principles of Civil Union and Happiness Considered and Recommended” (1787), Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 914. (Emphasis added.)

52  Goodrich, “Principles of Civil Union and Happiness,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 915, 914. (Emphasis added.)

53  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:145–46. (Emphasis added.)

54  Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties,” April 28, 1793, Writings of Jefferson, 3:228.

55  Zuckert draws a similar conclusion in Natural Rights Republic, 57–66.

56  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 425–26.

57  Hamilton, Farmer Reefuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:87–88. The William Blackstone quotation is from his Of the Rights of Persons (1765), in Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 1:41.

58  Samuel Cooke, The True Principles of Government (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), 21–22. (Emphasis added.)

59  Jefferson to Georgetown Republicans, 1809, Writings of Jefferson, 16:349; Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, April 19, 1814, Writings of Jefferson, 19:210; Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties,” Writings of Jefferson, 3:228; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 228. Zuckert has referred to what I am calling metaphysical law as the “ultimate realities.” See Zuckert, Natural Rights Republic, 57–58, 61.

60  Hugo Grotius, Prolegomena, in De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625), trans. Francis W. Kelsey, vol. 2 of The Classics of International Law, ed. James Brown Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925).

61  Allen, Reason the Only Oracle of Man, in American Deists, 177.

62  Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature, in American Deists, 264. (Emphasis added.)

63  See Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, in Puritan Political Ideas, 251–67; Abraham Williams, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:3–18; Goodrich, “Principles of Civil Union and Happiness,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 909–40.

64  See John Adams, Discourses on Davila (1791), in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 310–15.

65  Anon., “To the People of Massachusetts-Bay,” Independent Chronicle, April 17,

66  Some customary law is in accord with the law of nature and some is not. For the best discussion of the distinction and relationship between natural, customary, and statutory law and their practice in different countries around the world, see Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

67  Anon., “To the People of Massachusetts-Bay.”

68  Cooke, True Principles of Civil Government, 7–8; Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 22.

69  Clark, Sermon Preached before His Excellency John Hancock, 20.

70  John Joachim Zubly, The Law of Liberty (Philadelphia: Miller, 1775), 3–4, 6–7.

71  Benevolus [pseud.], Continental Journal (Boston), April 15, 1779.

72  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 449, 454; Samuel Adams, “The Rights of the Colonists: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting,” November 20, 1772; James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), in Works of Wilson, 2:723; Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress (1774), Colonies to Nation, 244.

73  Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:136.

74  Joseph Warren, An Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, 1772). (Note: This is one of three orations commissioned for this occasion; the others, cited below, are by Benjamin Church and Thomas Dawes.)

75  Anon., “To the Inhabitants of Queen’s County, Long Island,” Constitutional Gazette, November 29, 1775.

CHAPTER 3

  1  Jefferson to John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, Writings of Jefferson, 16:44.

  2  Adams, Preface, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in Works of John Adams, 4:292.

  3  Taylor quoted in Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), 167.

  4  Enos Hitchcock, “An Oration: Delivered July 4,1788,” 14.

    5  Scholars have differed over the number of self-evident truths in the Declaration. Michael Zuckert counts six. See Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic, 17–18. Danielle Allen counts five, but then reduces the number to three. See Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (New York: Liveright, 2014), 151–55.

  6  ECHU, IV.vii.10.

  7  ECHU, IV.ii.1. See also I.ii.19–20, I.iii.4, IV.vii.1–20, IV.xviii.5.

  8  See Wilbur Samuel Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1961): 463–84, and Howell, “The Declaration of Independence: Some Adventures with America’s Political Masterpiece,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 62, no. 3 (1976): 221–33. See also Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, 41–42.

  9  Quoted in Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” 474.

10  See ECHU, IV.vii.4.

11  Garry Wills argues that Locke’s view of self-evidence was limited to the narrow definition. He argues without evidence that Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense provided the greatest influence on Jefferson’s view of self-evidence and other principles. The truth of the matter is that Reid’s view is an extension of Locke’s more capacious view of self-evident truths. See Wills, Inventing America, 182–83. For sharp rebukes of Wills, see Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, William and Mary Quarterly, 36, no. 4 (1979): 503–23; and Harry V. Jaffa, “Inventing the Past: Garry Wills’s Inventing America and the Pathology of Ideological Scholarship,” chap. in American Conservatism and the American Founding (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1984), 76–109.

12  ECHU, IV.ii.14.

13  ECHU, IV.ii.1, I.iii.1.

14  ECHU, IV.ii.3.

15  ECHU, IV.x.1, IV.xii.7 (emphasis added).

16  ECHU, IV.ii.1, IV.ii.3, IV.ii.4.

17  ECHU, I.iii.1.

18  ECHU, I.iii.4.

19  ECHU, IV.vii.2–3.

20  ECHU, I.iv.26. For Locke’s deductive “prof” for the existence of God, see ECHU, IV.x.1–6.

21  ECHU, I.ii.12.

22  Quoted in Howell, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” 474.

23  Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 683–84, 688, 685.

24  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, Explained in Their Different Meanings and Authorized by the Names of the Writers in Whose Works They Are Found, vol. 2 (London: A. Millar, 1766), available at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl02johnuoft.

25  The London Encyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics, Comprising a Popular View of the Present State of Knowledge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), 22:249–50, available on Google Books, https://tinyurl.com/yd8b2chg.

26  Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828), 2:809, available at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/americandictiona02websrich#page/n807/mode/2up.

27  ECHU, IV.v.2, IV.v.8.

28  Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 576.

29  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:369; 2:503, 703; 1:374, 371, 374.

30  Quoted in Charles Francis Adams, Life of John Adams, in Works of Adams, 1:113.

31  Jefferson, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Portable Thomas Jefferson, 253.

32  Jefferson, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Portable Thomas Jefferson, 251; Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:232; Jefferson to David Harding, April 20, 1824, Writings of Jefferson, 16:30.

33  In the pamphlet, the author claims that it was originally written in 1779.

34  A Moderate Whig [Stephen Case?], “Defensive Arms Vindicated and the Lawfulness of the American War Made Manifest,” in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 717, 719.

35  Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 193–94.

36  Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 193–95.

37  Hamilton, Federalist No. 31, 146–47.

38  James Madison uses almost identical reasoning in Federalist No. 44, where he argues: “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it, is included” (304–5).

39  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:136–37.

40  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:137–38.

41  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:210, 395.

42  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 2:505.

43  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:210. On the connection to Locke’s Essay, see ECHU, IV.ii.3.

44  Michael Zuckert is the first scholar to pay attention to the word “hold” in the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” (See Zuckert, Natural Rights Republic, 41–55.) This is an important insight. For Zuckert, the word “hold” implies or imparts a near religious and political meaning to the Declaration; it is synonymous with “believe.” Most men can believe in the Declaration’s principles without knowing them. Zuckert’s Declaration might be less ambiguous if it were to read, “We believe these truths to be self-evident.” He is right to emphasize the importance of the word “hold” in the Declaration’s first sentence, but I interpret it in a different way. I interpret “hold” epistemologically—i.e., to “hold” an idea is to grasp its meaning conceptually, which implies an active process of thought.

45  Adams to Jefferson, August 24, 1815, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 455.

46  Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 34.

47  Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings, 33,32–33.

48  Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 33.

49  Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, 1765, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 610.

50  Jefferson to Thomas Earle, September 24, 1823, Writings of Jefferson, 15:470.

51  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 4.

52  In his chapter on “Whether Morality Be Capable of Demonstration,” Reid deepens but supports Locke’s understanding of equality when he writes that men are “endowed with those faculties which make them moral and accountable agents.” See Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 683. See also Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 112–13.

53  Second Treatise, para. 5.

54  Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, Writings of Jefferson, 16:117–119.

55  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 20.

56  Samuel Cooper, “A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock” (1780), Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 637.

57  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Writings of Jefferson, 6:257.

58  Jefferson viewed the Declaration’s moral and political truths as available to all men with eyes to see regardless of their education. He is well known for having argued that the ploughman is equally if not better equipped to address moral problems than a professor. See Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Writings of Jefferson, 6:256–62.

CHAPTER 4

  1  Abraham Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce and others, April 6, 1859, in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy P. Basler (New York: DaCapo, 1990), 488–89.

  2  Lincoln, “Speech in Reply to Douglas at Chicago, Illinois,” July 10, 1858, Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 402–3, 401.

  3  For Harry V. Jaffa and M. E. Bradford, the equality question was the centerpiece of their debate over the nature of modern conservatism. See Harry V. Jaffa, “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 8 (June 1775): 471–505; M. E. Bradford, “The Heresy of Equality: Bradford Replies to Jaffa,” Modern Age 20 (Winter 1976): 62–77; Jaffa, “Equality, Justice, and the American Revolution: In Reply to Bradford’s ‘The Heresy of Equality,’” Modern Age 21 (Spring 1977): 114–24.

  4  Democraticus [pseud.], “Loose Thoughts on Government,” June 7, 1776, in American Archives: Documents of the Revolutionary Period, 1774–1776, ed. Peter Force (Washington, 1837–56), 4th ser., 6:730. The digital version of American Archives is at Northern Illinois University Digital Library, https://digital.lib.niu.edu/amarch.

  5  David Ramsay, “An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence,” in Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America, ed. Hezekiah Niles (Baltimore: William Ogden Niles, 1822; Maywood, CA: Kunkin-Turner Publications, 1961), 375.

  6  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 6, 4

  7  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 54.

    8  See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

  9  Wise, A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, in Puritan Political Ideas, 259–60.

10  Bulkley, preface to Poetical Meditations, xii–xiii.

11  Daniel Dulany, The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of English Laws (Annapolis, MD: W. Parks, 1728). Reprinted in The English Statutes in Maryland, by St. George L. Sioussat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1903), appendix 2, available at HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044019882695;view=1up;seq=7. Dulany’s pamphlet is discussed in Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 142–57.

12  Elisha Williams, “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants” (1744), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 56–57,59.

13  Abraham Williams, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:6–7, 9.

14  Anon., Boston Gazette, August 24, 1767.

15  Gad Hitchcock, “An Election Sermon” (1774), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:288.

16  See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), and Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

17  On the role of the equality principle in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, see J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Richard D. Brown, Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rightsfrom the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

18  Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont (¡794), 2nd ed. (Burlington, VT: Samuel Mills, 1809), 2:374–75.

19  Tocqueville, “How Individualism Is Greater at the End of a Democratic Revolution Than in Any Other Period,” in Democracy in America, 485.

20  In an otherwise excellent overview of the Revolutionary period, Edmund S. Morgan errs in suggesting that the principle of equality was not discovered until 1776 with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which propelled the Americans, he argues, “into the great discovery of human equality toward which they had been moving unwittingly ever since they first denied Parliament’s right to tax.” The Americans discovered and developed the principle of equality in the 1760s, and they did so fully conscious of what they were doing. See The Birth of the Republic, 1763–1789 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 67, 76.

21  The question and status of the colonists’ English rights, liberties, and privileges is the principal theme in John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986–93).

22  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 440; The Virginia Resolves (1765), Colonies to Nation, 61; The Declaration of the Stamp Act Congress (October 19, 1765), Colonies to Nation, 64; Silas Downer, “A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty” (1768), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:98.

23  Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of Colonies Examined (1764), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:49–50; Britannus-Americanus [pseud.], Boston Gazette, September 24, 764; Adams, The Earl of Clarendon [pseud.] to William Pym (III, January 27, 1766), in Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 54.

24  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:82–83. See also David S. Lovejoy, “Rights Imply Equality: The Case against Admiralty Jurisdiction in America, 1764–1776,” William and Mary Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1959): 459–84.

25  Camillus [pseud.], “To the Printers of the Pennsylvania Gazette,” March 1775, American Archives, 4th ser., 2:11.

26  Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), in Works of Wilson, 2:723,732, 741; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 231.

27  This is the interpretation of Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 155. The problem with their interpretation is that it stops halfway and does not credit Jefferson’s more complete view of equality.

28  Jefferson to Adams, October 28, 2013, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:387–92.

29  Daniel Leonard, writing as Massachusettensis, December 26, 1774, in Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763–1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 287; Thomas Hutchinson, “Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia in a Letter to a Noble Lord” (1776), available at Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence.

30  Jonathan Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Nonresistance” (1775), in A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (London, 1797), available at Constitution Society, http://www.constitution.org/bcp/nonresis.htm.

31  An Englishman [pseud.], “The Uncommon Sense of the Americans: Notes on the Declaration,” in A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence, ed. Robert Ginsberg (New York: Crowell, 1967), 6–8; John Lind, “An Answer to the Declaration,” A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence, 9–17.

32  See Harry V. Jaffa, The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 152–56.

33  The Essex Result (April 29, 1788), and Return of Northampton, Massachusetts (May 22, 1780), in The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, ed. Oscar and Mary F. Handlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 330, 580.

34  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 438, 440; Dickinson, “Instructions from the Committee to the Representatives in Assembly Met,” July 21, 1774, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 1:309, quoting Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principle of Natural and Politic Law, ed. Petter Korkman, trans. Thomas Nugent (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), 301; Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 4:380.

35  Paine, Rights of Man, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:67. (Emphasis added.)

36  For a particularly poignant analysis of the role of inequality as a function of the human condition, see the exchange between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the naturalness of the natural aristocracy: Adams to Jefferson, September 2, 1813; Jefferson to Adams, October 28, 1813; and Adams to Jefferson, November 15, 1813, in Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:370–72,387–92,397–402.

37  Democraticus [pseud.], “Loose Thoughts on Government,” American Archives, 4th ser., 6:730.

38  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 1:240–41.

39  Samuel Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2:374–75.

40  Jefferson, Opinion on Residence Bill, July 15, 179。, in Writings of Jefferson, 3:60. Jefferson’s view of equality has its root in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: “Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.” See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,1994), 74.

41  Jefferson to Henri Grégoire, February 25, 1809, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 5工7.

CHAPTER 5

  1  Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at a Republican Banquet, Chicago, Illinois,” December 10, 1856, Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:385. Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” November 19, 1863, Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 734.

  2  See Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), 211; and Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, 44,46–48,112–13.

  3  Continental Congress, Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms, Colonies to Nation, 255–59.

  4  Madison, Federalist No. 10, 58.

  5  This chapter is concerned with the meaning of equality in the light of slavery. For reasons of space, it does not take up the no less interesting and important question of whether the revolutionary generation meant to include women in the truth that “all men are created equal.” A quick review of the primary source literature from the period demonstrates conclusively, however, that by “men” the revolutionary generation meant “mankind,” that is, humankind. See Thomas G. West, Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), chap. 3. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, criticized various Native American tribes for their treatment of women and for their failure to recognize the fact that women are equal to men in the rights they retain by nature. Jefferson wrote: “The [Native American] women are submitted to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. With such, force is law. The stronger sex therefore imposes on the weaker. It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality. That first teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves.” See Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1783), Query 6, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 96–97.

    6  On the origins of slavery in America, see Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Donald R. Wright, African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1990); Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); and William M. Wiecek, “The Statutory Law of Slavery and Race in the Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1977): 258–80.

  7  Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Slavery, No. 1,” in Antislavery Political Writings, 1833–1860: A Reader, ed. C. Bradley Thompson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 26.

  8  On this point, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

  9  On American slavery during the Revolutionary period, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983); and Jack P. Greene, “‘Slavery or Independence’: Some Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty, Black Bondage, and Equality in Revolutionary South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 3 (1979): 193–214.

10  Benjamin Franklin, “An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage” (1789), in The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (New York: Putnam, 1904), 12:157–58; George Washington to Robert Morris, April 12, 1786, in The Writings of George Washington, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Putnam’s, 1891), 11:25; James Madison, speech at Constitutional Convention, June 6, 1787, in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison, ed. Adrienne Koch (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 77; Adams to Robert Evans, June 18, 1819, Works of Adams, 380.

11  Many prominent historians support the view that Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence meant to apply the equality principle only to whites. See, for instance, Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 53; Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); and Gordon S. Wood, “Equality and Social Conflict in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1994): 707. Notable exceptions to this view include Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 232–46; West, Vindicating the Founders, chap. 1; Herbert J. Storing, “Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, 3rd ed., ed. Robert H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 313–32; and Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 617–41.

12  For a general overview of the founding fathers’ view of slavery, see William W. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77, no. 1 (1972): 81–93.

13  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 439–40, 446, 439.

14  Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America (Philadelphia, 1773), 1–2, 19–20, 25–26.

15  Wells, A Few Political Reflections, in Colonies to Nation, 393–96.

16  On the Somerset case in America, see William M. Wiecek, “Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World,” University of Chicago Law Review 42, no. 1 (1974): 86–146. In 1773–74, several slaves in Massachusetts brought suit against their masters for their freedom. The colony’s General Court supported the petitions, but the royal governor of the colony eventually overruled them.

17  Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” (March 23, 1775), available at the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp.

18  Patrick Henry to Robert Pleasants, January 18, 1773, in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:517.

19  Henry, speaking to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 24, 1788, in Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Virginia (3), ed. John P. Kaminski et al., vol. 10 of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. Merrill Jensen (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1993), 1476–77.

20  For a stinging analysis of Jefferson’s views on slavery, see Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 105–67. The best monograph on Jefferson and slavery remains John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: Free Press, 1977).

21  Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 234.

22  On the first draft of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s deleted passage on slavery, see Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text, rev. ed., ed. Gerard W. Gawalt (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1999), 15–37; Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 135–93; and Maier, American Scripture, 146–47.

23  Jefferson, Sixth Annual Message (1806), in Writings of Jefferson, 3:421. Scholarly interpretations since the 1970s of Jefferson and his relationship to slavery can be divided into two categories: those who seek to expose and condemn Jefferson as a slaveholder, and those who emphasize the paradoxical nature of Jefferson’s views and actions on the slavery question. For the former, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Peter S. Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Lucia C. Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello) (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012). For the latter, see Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage, 1998); Robert M. S. McDonald, Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017); and Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 2017).

24  Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 568; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, in Writings of Jefferson, 2:192.

25  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, in Writings of Jefferson, 2:192.

26  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18, in Writings of Jefferson, 2:225–27.

27  Jefferson to Henri Grégoire, February 25, 1809, Writings of Jefferson, 12:255.

28  Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London, 1775), http://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html; Thomas Hutchinson, Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia in a Letter to a Noble Lord (London, 1776), in Eicholz, Harmonizing Sentiments, 182.

29  Alexander Hamilton, A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, December 15, 1774, in The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Carson Holloway and Bradford P. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 1:8–9.

30  Rush to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, quoted in Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 274.

31  Quoted in Jordan, White Man’s Burden, 289.

32  A Constant Customer [pseud.], “Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to His Friend” (1773), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:183.

33  [John Allen], The Watchman’s Alarm to Lord N—H … (Salem, MA: E. Russell, 1774), 27.

34  Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended: In a Sermon Preached to the Corporation of Freemen in Farmington (1775), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:312–15; “Darien Resolutions” (January 12, 1775), American Archives, 4th ser., 1:1136; Massachusetts legislature, quoted in Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 9; John Jay to Richard Price, September 27, 1785, in Founders’ Constitution, 1:538.

35  Samuel Hopkins, A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of Africans (New York: Judah P. Spooner, 1776), i, 16, 37–38.

36  [David Cooper], A Serious Address to the Rulers of America on the Inconsistency of Their Conduct Respecting Slavery: Forming a Contrast Between the Encroachments of England on American Liberty, and American Injustice in Tolerating Slavery (Trenton, NJ: Isaac Collins, 1783), 4, 6,12–13,17–18.

37  “Anti-Slavery Petitions Presented to the Virginia Legislature by Citizens of Various Counties,” Journal of Negro History 12 (Oct. 1927): 670.

38  Benjamin Franklin, “Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery” (February 3, 1790), available at UShistory.org, http://www.ushistory.org/documents/antislavery.htm. I thank José Piñera for bringing this petition to my attention.

39  Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken Before the Connecticut Society, for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage (1794), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 2:884–85; St. George Tucker, On the State of Slavery in Virginia (1796), in View of the Constitution of the United States, with Selected Writings, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 428.

40  The best treatment of the proslavery argument is Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), and Michael O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860: An Abridged Edition of Conjectures of Order (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

41  Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of1787, Reported by James Madison, 504.

42  On Jefferson’s moral failures with regard to slavery, see C. Bradley Thompson, “The Relevance and Irrelevance of Gordon S. Wood,” Law & Liberty, May 15, 2018, https://www.lawliberty.org/2018/05/15/the-relevance-and-irrelevance-of-gordon-s-wood/.

43  On the steps taken to abolish slavery during and after the Revolution, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Allen Nevins, American States during and after the Revolution, 1775–1789 (New York: Macmillan, 1924); and J. Franklin Jameson, American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1926).

44  Constitution of Vermont (July 8, 1777), available at the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/vt01.asp. (Emphasis added.)

45  See Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 126–29; and Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 26.

46  Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

47  Preamble, “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (March i, 1780), in Life and Works of Paine, 4:47–49; the full text of Chief Justice Cushing’s remarks is printed in John D. Cushing, “The Cushing Court and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts: More Notes on the ‘Quock Walker Case,’” American Journal of Legal History 5, no. 2 (1961): 132–33; “An Act Authorizing the Manumission of Negroes, Mulattoes, and others, and for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (1784), in A Necessary Evil? Slavery and the Debate Over the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1995), 28. On the movement to end slavery in the wake of the American Revolution, see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

48  Hamilton to John Jay, March 14, 1779, in Papers of Hamilton, 2:17–19.

49  See Wilentz, No Property in Man. The efforts of slaves to secure their freedom during the Revolutionary era can be seen in Benjamin Quarles’s The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Douglas R. Egerton’s Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

50  Quoted in Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 276.

51  Quoted in Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 291.

52  Roberts Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1817), 26.

53  See James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 22–23; and Davis, Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 24.

54  Jay to the President of the [English] Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, June 1788, in Founders’ Constitution, 1:550.

55  Winthrop Jordan, the distinguished historian of slavery, has argued that the natural-rights philosophy embedded in the Declaration “led inescapably to [the] realization that Americans were indulging in a monstrous inconsistency.” See Jordan, White Over Black, 289.

56  Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:405–6.

CHAPTER 6

  1  Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, Writings of Jefferson, 16:117–19.

  2  The dual nature of the founders’ use of the natural-rights philosophy is nicely captured in Pauline Maier’s American Scripture. See also Robert H. Webking, The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).

  3  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 444; Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 75; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 228–29, 237; Jefferson to Samuel Adams Wells, May 12, 1819, Writings of Jefferson, 15:200.

  4  Democraticus [pseud.], “Loose Thoughts on Government,” American Archives, 4th ser., 6:730; Thomas Jefferson to James Sullivan, February 9, 1797, Writings of Jefferson, 9:379; Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, September 7, 1797, Writings of Jefferson, 9:422; James Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 2:609.

  5  See Bernard Schwartz, “Revolutionary Declarations and Constitutions,” in his The Great Rights of Mankind: A History of the American Bill of Rights (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1992), 53–91.

  6  Thomas Jefferson to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, Writings of Jefferson, 16:48. The Virginia Bill of Rights is available at the Constitution Society, http://www.constitution.org/bor/vir_bor.htm; the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 is available at the National Humanities Institute, http://www.nhinet.org/ccs/docs/ma-1780.htm.

  7  Quoted in Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Rights, 3.

  8  Anon., Boston Gazette, March 1, 1773; Wells, A Few Political Reflections, in Colonies to Nation, 393–96.

    9 See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism; Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); and John Witte Jr., The Reformation of Rights: Law, Religion, and Human Rights in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10  See George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (New York: Macmillan, 1960).

11  See Gilman Ostrander, The Rights of Man in America: 1606–1861 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960); Michael J. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen, eds., A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law—1791 and 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James R. Stoner Jr., Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic; Tibor R. Machan, ed., Individual Rights Reconsidered: Are the Truths of the U.S. Declaration of Independence Lasting? (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001); Barry Alan Shain, ed., The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); and Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

12  Benjamin Rush, A Vindication of the Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1773), 24–25.

13  Elisha Williams, “Essential Rights and Liberties,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 56; Daniel Shute, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, i:iii; A Well-Wisher to Mankind [John Perkins], Theory of Agency: or, An Essay on the Nature, Source and Extent of Moral Freedom, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:139, 148. (Perkins, a physician, was best known in New England for having authored pamphlets on earthquakes, comets, and various other natural phenomena.)

14  Matthew Robinson-Morris, 2nd Baron Rokeby, Considerations on the Measures Carrying on with Respect to the British Colonies in North America (London, 1774), 7; Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14:490; Jefferson to Georgetown Republicans, 1809, Writings, 14: 349.

15  Democraticus [pseud.], Loose Thoughts on Government, in American Archives, 4th ser., 6:730.

16  Dan Foster, A Short Essay on Civil Government (Hartford, CT: Eben. Watson, 1774), 6 (emphasis added); Moses Mather, “America’s Appeal to the Impartial World” (1787), Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 444, 446. Born into a famous New England family of divines, Mather was the congregational minister for Darien, Connecticut, from 1742 to 1806, and was one of America’s most vocal religious leaders in support of liberty and independence.

17  Jacob Green, Observations: On the Reconciliation of Great-Britain, and the Colonies … (Philadelphia: Bell, 1776), 9.

18  New York Gazette, April 4, 1765, quoted in Bernard Friedman, “The Shaping of the Radical Consciousness in Provincial New York,” Journal of American History 56, no. 4 (1970): 789–90; An American [pseud.], Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), March 11, 1780; Americanus [Timothy Ford], The Constitutionalist: or, An Inquiry How Far It Is Expedient and Proper to Alter the Constitution of South Carolina, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 2:924; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 502,359.

19  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 504; William Findley, Observations on “The Two Sons of Oil”: Containing a Vindication of the American Constitutions, ed. John Caldwell (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2007), 198; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 501.

20  Jefferson to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:24.

21  The Declaratory Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1766. Its purpose was to assert the authority of Parliament over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” despite its face-saving repeal of the Stamp Act.

22  This is not to say, as Karl Marx suggested, that the eighteenth-century natural rights philosophy turns men into “an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.” (Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: Norton, 1972], 40.) The purpose of rights is to serve as a bridge between individuals and civil society. Rights are the mechanism by which men can live together peacefully and form voluntary associations.

23  Jefferson, Opinion on the Residence Bill, 1790, Writings of Jefferson, 3:60; Jefferson to Colonel James Monroe, May 20, 1782, Writings of Jefferson, 4:196; Jefferson to Henri Grégoire, February 25, 1809, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 517; Alexander McCleod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable: A Discourse (New York, 1802), 8–9, 23.

24  Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, August 4, 1818, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 334.

25  Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies … , in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 559; Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 22; John Mackenzie, “To Freeman” (October 18, 1769), in The Letters of Freeman, etc.: Essays on the Nonimportation Movement in South Carolina, Collected by William Henry Drayton, ed. Robert M. Weir (Columbia: University Press of South Carolina, 1977), 53; The Centinel [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, January 23, 1772; Resolutions by Inhabitants of Granville County Concerning Resistance to Parliamentary Taxation and the Provincial Congress of North Carolina, August 15, 1774, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, eds. Walter Clark, William Laurence Saunders, and Stephen Beauregard Weeks (Raleigh, NC: P. M. Hale, 1886–1914), 9:1034–36; Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 9; Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14:490.

26  Dickinson, “Speech on a Petition for a Change of Government of the Colony of Pennsylvania … ” (1764), Political Writings of Dickinson, 34; Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 33; Livingston, Other Side of the Question, 15; Jefferson, Opinion on the Residence Bill, 1790, Writings of Jefferson, 3:60; Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings, 14:490; Jefferson to the Republicans of Georgetown, March 8, 1809, Writings, 14:349 (emphasis added); Jefferson to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824 in Writings, 16:51; Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 2:609.

27  William Henry Drayton, Charge to the Grand Jury of Charleston (October 15, 1776), American Archives, 5th ser., 2:1047; Livingston, Other Side of the Question, 15; Jefferson to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, Writings of Jefferson, 15: 441.

28  Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 2:596; John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, in The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, ed. Thomas Miller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 181. Witherspoon’s Princeton lectures were first published in 1802, eight years after his death.

29  Lee, “Preface to Williamsburg Edition,” Political Writings of John Dickinson, 289–92; James Madison, “Property,” in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Marvin Meyers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 244.

30  Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14:490; Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, in Selected Writings of Witherspoon, 183.

31  Jefferson, Argument in the Case of Howell vs. Netherland (April 1770), in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York and London: Putnam, 1904–5), 1:376. (Emphasis added.)

32  Stephen Johnson, Integrity and Piety the Best Principles of a Good Administration of Government … (Connecticut, 1770), 5; Jefferson to Noah Webster, December 4, 1790, Writings of Jefferson, 8:112–13; Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Works of Wilson, 2:597, 609.

33  On the idea of rights as licenses and fences, see Jefferson to Isaac H. Tiffany, April 4, 1819, in Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings, ed. Joyce Appleby and Terrence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 224; Jefferson to Noah Webster, December 4, 1790, Writings of Jefferson, 8:112–13.

34  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 96–97; Jefferson to Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14:490; Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, in Selected Writings of Witherspoon, 181.

35  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 59.

36  Josiah Quincy, Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly called the Boston Port-Bill; with thoughts on Civil Society and Standing Armies (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1774), 30·

37  Dickinson, An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados … (1766), in Political Writings of Dickinson, 261–62; Johnson, Integrity and Piety the Best Principles of a Good Administration of Government, 5.

38  Abraham Williams, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:11,15; Whiting, “An Address to the Inhabitants of Berkshire County, Mass.,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:474 (emphasis added); [Silas Downer], “A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:100 (emphasis added); Jefferson to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:24 (emphasis added). Though his treatment is brief, Bernard Bailyn glimpsed the transition in American revolutionary thought from the “rights of Englishmen” to the “rights of man”: see Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 184–98.

39  [Samuel Adams], A State of the Rights of the Colonists, in Tracts of the American Revolution, 235; Dickinson, “An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados…,” Political Writings of Dickinson, 262. See also Dickinson’s reformulation of this logic in his Letters from a Farmer, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 400.

40  For claims that the rights doctrine of the Declaration either imposes positive moral obligations on individuals or that the rights of nature may conflict with one another when put into practice, see Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 75; Charles M. Wiltse, The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 70–71; Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1964): 325–27; Cecilia M. Kenyon, “The Declaration of Independence,” in Fundamental Testaments of the American Revolution (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1973), 37; and Patrick J. Charles, “Restoring ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’ in Our Constitutional Jurisprudence: An Exercise in Legal History,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 20, no. 2 (2011): 457–532.

41  The Centinel [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, March 12, 1773; Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:122.

42  For the view that Jefferson’s God is “Nature’s God,” see Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), 29ff.; Jean Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 7; and Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic, 25, 59–60.

43  Jefferson to Maj. John Cartwright, June 5, 1824, Writings of Jefferson, 16:43–44; Jefferson to Georgetown Republicans, 1809, Writings, 16:349; Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, April 19, 1814, Writings, 19:210; Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties,” Writings, 3:228; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 228; Samuel Adams, “Answer of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts to the Governor’s Speech” (October 23, 1765), in Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:18; Anon., “To the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts-Bay,” April 13, 1775, in American Archives, 4th ser., 2:332; Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties,” Writings, 3:228–29.

44  Otis, Rights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 426; “The Massachusetts Resolves” (October 29, 1765), in Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 56; Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:75; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 237; “Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress” (October 14, 1774), Colonies to Nation, 244; Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:87–88.

45  Adams to William Tudor, March 29, 1817, Works of Adams, 10:246–47.

46  James Otis, quoted in Adams, “Abstract of the Argument,” Petition of Lechmere, Boston Superior Court, February 1761, in Legal Papers of John Adams, ed. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:141–43; Otis, quoted in Adams, “Minutes of the Argument,” Petition of Lechmere, Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, February 24, 1761, in Legal Papers of Adams, 2:127–28.

47  Adams to H. Niles, January 14, 1818, Works of Adams, 10:276.

48  Massachusetts Assembly, Instructions to Jasper Mauduit (1762), in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 74:39; see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 22.

49  William Pierce, “Oration, Delivered at Christ Church, Savannah” (July 4, 1788), in Commentaries on the Constitution: Public and Private, vol. 6,10 May to 13 September 1788, ed. John P. Kaminski et al., vol. 18 of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. Merrill Jensen (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995), 249; Warren, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700,19–20; Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 1:7.

50  Martin Howard Jr., A Letter from a Gentleman of Halifax (1765), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 534–36,538. The English member of Parliament, Anthony Bacon, similarly mocked the Americans for their use of the concept “natural rights,” which, he noted, has no meaning “for men are born members of society, and consequently have no rights, but such as are given by the laws of that society to which they belong. To suppose anything else, is to suppose them out of society, in a state of nature.” Quoted in John Phillip Reid, “The Authority of Rights at the American Founding,” Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond, 96.

51  Otis, A Vindication of the British Colonies … (1765), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 554,558–63. See Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory.

52  Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994), 1:154.

53  Lee, quoted in “Notes of Debates in the Continental Congress,” September 8, 1774, in Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:128–30,3:309. Richard Henry Lee made his point forcefully in his preface to the Virginia edition of John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. There, Lee noted that the Americans’ “possession” of property and freedom has its “foundation on the clearest principle of the law of nature, the most evident declarations of the English constitution, the plainest contract made between Crown and our forefathers, and all these sealed and sanctified by the usage of near two hundred years.” Lee adds a possible fifth source for their rights: the argument from purchase, i.e., the idea that the colonists’ forefathers purchased their property and freedom with sweat and blood and bequeathed the gift to their descendants, who now have a moral obligation to “guard the sacred deposit committed by their fathers to their care, as well to bless posterity as to secure the happiness of the present generation.” Lee, “Preface to Williamsburg Edition,” Political Writings of Dickinson, 289–92.

54  Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774, Colonies to Nation, 244.

55  For a very different interpretation of the role of rights in the American Revolution, see John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, and Reid, “The Irrelevance of the Declaration,” in Law in the American Resolution and the Revolution in the Law: A Collection of Review Essays on American Legal History, ed. Hendrik Hartog (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 46–89. See also Shain, “Rights Natural and Civil in the Declaration of Independence,” in his The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond, 116–62. Reid and Shain downplay the influence of natural-rights theory in the American Revolution and instead see American revolutionaries as being more influenced by the English common-law tradition.

56  Anon., Boston Gazette, October 28, 1765; Anon., Boston Gazette, September 14, 1767; Wells, A Few Political Reflections, in Colonies to Nation, 393–96.

57  American rights talk is not, as Mary Ann Glendon has argued, a dialect. It is, instead, metaphorically speaking, a grammar. Rights are principles that organize and order man’s social relations. It is the traditional civil or common-law rights of different places and times (e.g., the rights of Englishmen) that provide the dialect of rights. See Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), 109.

58  Washington, Circular Letter Addressed to the Governors of All the States on Disbanding the Army, June 8, 1783, in Writings of Washington, 10:256.

59  For an examination of the new society created by the American Revolution, see Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

CHAPTER 7

  1  For a helpful discussion of the subsidiary natural rights, see Philip A. Hamburger, “Natural Rights, Natural Law, and American Constitutions,” Yale Law Journal 102, no. 4 (1993): 907–60.

  2  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 6–7.

  3  Jonathan Mayhew, “The Snare Broken,” in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 263; Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 54; Anon., “To the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts-Bay” (April 13, 1775), American Archives, 4th ser., 2:332; Drayton, Address to the Grand Jury at Charleston, South Carolina (April 23, 1776), American Archives, 4th ser., 5:1028; Plain Truth [pseud.], “Letter to Justices in Massachusetts Empowered by the Court to Deal with the Tories” (July 11, 1776), American Archives, 5th ser., 1:210; Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties” (April 28, 1793), Writings of Jefferson, 3:228–29. For revolutionary Whigs who also saw self-preservation as the first law of nature, see Simeon Howard, “A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:191; Gad Hitchcock, “An Election Sermon,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:294; Charles Turner, A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson … and the Honorable House of Representatives, of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay … (Boston: Richard Draper, 1773), 31; Richard Wells, A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the Consideration of the British Colonies (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1774), 1,4–5; A Philadelphian [pseud.], Every Friend to the Americans … (Philadelphia, 1774), 2.

  4  Jefferson to Colonel Humphreys, March 18, 1789, Writings of Jefferson, 7:323.

  5  Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-Americans, in Colonies to Nation, 238; Anon., Independent Advertiser, April 10, 1749; Anon., Boston Gazette, August 24, 1767; Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 6; Thomas Dawes, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700 (Boston: Fleets, 1781), 8. On the Americans’ recognition of the importance of liberty, see John Allen, An Oration, upon the Beauties of Liberty, or the Essential Rights of the Americans (New London, CT: T. Green, 1773); and Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:257–76.

    6  Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:259. (Emphasis added.)

  7  Anon., Independent Advertiser, April 10, 1749.

  8  A Well-Wisher to Mankind [John Perkins], Theory of Agency: Or, An Essay on the Nature, Source and Extent of Moral Freedom (1771), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:138–140, 142–143.

  9  Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:308.

10  Adams to John Taylor of Caroline, April 15, 1814, in Political Writings of Adams, 369.

11  Freeborn American [pseud.], Boston Gazette, March 9, 1767; Simeon Howard, A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:187; Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:310.

12  Anon., Independent Advertiser, April 10, 1749.

13  Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty (1774), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:270; Zubly, Law of Liberty, 6–7; Jefferson to Isaac Tiffany, April 4, 1819, in Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings, 224 (emphasis added). For one of the most philosophically sophisticated treatments of liberty written during the Revolutionary period, see [John Perkins], Theory of Agency, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:137–57.

14  Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 5–6.

15  Anon., Independent Advertiser, April 10, 1749.

16  Anon., Independent Advertiser, April 10, 1749.

17  Poplicola [pseud.], Rivington’s New York Gazetteer, December 2, 1773.

18  The notion that Jefferson and other revolutionary founders did not regard property to be a natural right seems to date to Vernon L. Parrington’s 1927 claim that the “substitution of ‘pursuit of happiness’ for ‘property’ marks a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that Locke had bequeathed…. It was this substitution that gave to the document the note of idealism which was to make its appeal so perennially human and vital.” (Main Currents in American Thought [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927; repr., 1954], 1:350.) Others have followed in Parrington’s wake. For instance, see Wills, Inventing America, 250–51, 255; and Richard Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 27.

19  Wilson, On the History of Property (n.d.), in Works of Wilson, 2:712; Madison, “Property,” Mind of the Founder, 243. (See Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 2:2.)

20  Jefferson to Samuel Dupont de Nemours, April 24, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14:490.

21  Madison, “Property,” Mind of the Founder, 243–44.

22  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 27, 44, 87.

23  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 7–8.

24  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 8–9.

25  Samuel Adams, “The House of Representatives of Massachusetts to Henry Seymour Conway” (February 13, 1768), and “The House of Representatives of Massachusetts to Dennys de Berdt” (January 12, 1768), in Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:190, 137.

26  Massachusettensis [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, November 18, 1773.

27  Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 237; Anon., Boston Gazette, February 2, 1768; Warren, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 6.

28  Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, VT: J. Lyon, 1793), 178

29  Lee, quoted in James W. Ely Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 26.

30  Warren, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 6; Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 16.

31  Hampden [pseud.], “The Alarm, Number 1,” New York, October 6, 1773.

32  The phrase “sacred and undeniable” as it applies to the concept “rights” comes from Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence. The phrase was later revised to “self-evident.” Jefferson, “Instructions for the Deputies Appointed to Meet in General Congress on the Part of This Colony” (August 1774), Writings of Jefferson, 1:213; Jefferson, First Inaugural, 1801, Writings, 3:320; Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in Writings, 15:36.

33  Madison, “Note to His Speech on the Right of Suffrage,” in Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 3:450.

34  Jefferson, The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1926), 107–8.

35  Jefferson, Autobiography (1821), in Writings of Jefferson, 1:122.

36  Wilson, On the History of Property, in Works of Wilson, 2:718–19.

37  Madison, Federalist No. 10,58; Madison, “Property,” in Mind of the Founder, 244; Adams, diary entry, June 30, 1772, Diary and Autobiography, 2:61.

38  Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 6:8–9; Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works, 5:453–54.

39  Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 6:8–9, 65.

40  Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 14: 466; Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, Writings, 3:382.

41  Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government, 180.

42  General analyses of the historical meaning of happiness include: Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Ursula M. von Eckardt, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Democratic Creed: An Analysis of Political Ethics (New York: Praeger, 1959); and Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006). On the intellectual sources of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration, see McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, ix–x.

43  Paine, “Common Sense,” Life and Works, 2:147; Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 287; Jefferson to General Thaddeus Kosciusko, February 26, 1810, Writings of Jefferson, 12:369–70.

44  The one notable exception to this trend is a series of articles published in 1773–1774 in the Virginia Gazette (ed. Alexander Purdie and John Dixon). See, e.g., from that newspaper: “On the Motives to Virtue From Personal Happiness,” January 28, 1773; “The Pursuit After Happiness,” November 18, 1773; “The Character of a Happy Life,” December 3, 1773; “Happiness,” January 20, 1774; and “Essay on Happiness,” February 10, 1774. These essays are available in digital form in the collection of Early American Newspapers (a website maintained by Readex, a division of News Bank, Inc.). Unfortunately, however, the quality of these electronic versions is poor.

45  George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, Colonies to Nation, 333.

46  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.51. (Emphasis added.)

47  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.43–44.

48  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.47.

49  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.54–55, 60, 47.

50  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.51.

51  Locke, ECHU, II.xxi.51.(Emphasis added.)

52  Samuel Adams to Joseph Allen, November 7, 1771, and Samuel Adams to Andrew Elton Wells, October 21, 1772, in Writings of Samuel Adams, 2:268, 337–38.

53  Jefferson to John Manners, June 12, 1817, Writings of Jefferson, 15:124–25.

54  Jefferson to Francisco Chiappe, September 9, 1789, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 15:405; Franklin, “Proposals and Queries for Consideration of the Junto,” in Works of Franklin, 1:338; Jefferson to John Page, July 15, 1763, Writings of Jefferson, 4:10.

55  Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Writings of Jefferson, 5:430–48.

56  Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Writings of Jefferson, 5:430–48.

57  Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 6:219.

58  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, Writings of Jefferson, 5:82–87.

59  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, Writings of Jefferson, 5:82–87.

60  Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787, Writings of Jefferson, 6:256–62; Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, November 24, 1808, Writings, 12:196–202.

61  Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 20, 1780, in Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 3–4, April 1778-September 1782, ed. L. H. Butterfield and Marc Friedlaender (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1973), 3:310–13. (Emphasis added.)

62  See Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in Works of Franklin, 1:189–92; Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, Writings of Jefferson, 5:82–87.

63  John Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 18, 1781, Adams Family Correspondence, 3:117; John Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 19, 1783, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 5–6, October 1782-December 1785, ed. Richard A. Ryerson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 5:162–63; John Adams to John Quincy Adams, January 23, 1788, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 8, March 1787–December 1789, ed. Margaret A. Hogan et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 8:219–20.

64  Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786, Writings of Jefferson, 5:443; Jefferson to J. Correa de Serra, April 19, 1814, Writings, 19: 210; Jefferson to Amos J. Cook, January 21, 1816, Writings, 4: 405; Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819, Writings, 15: 223–24.

65  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 196–97; Jefferson to Amos J. Cook, January 21, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 4:405; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 196–97; Jefferson to Miles King, September 26, 1814, Writings, 19:197–98. See also Jefferson to John Adams, October 14, 1816, Writings, 15:76–77.

66  Franklin, “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” Works of Franklin, 1:322; Franklin, Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard’s Almanack (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 17; Adams, Thoughts on Government, in Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 287–88; George Washington, First Inaugural Speech, and Washington to Marquis de Lafayette, January 29, 1789, in George Washington: A Collection, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988), 462, 428; Washington to the Bishops, Clergy, and Laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church, August 19, 1789, Writings of Washington, 12:162.

67  Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, January 26, 1811, Writings of Jefferson, 13:18; Scipio [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, April 25, 1771.

68  Jefferson to Ellen W. Coolidge, August 27, 1825, Writings of Jefferson, 18:341; Jefferson to David Howell, December 15, 1810, Writings, 12:436; Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 19, 1802, Writings, 10:342.

CHAPTER 8

  1  John Montague, Arguments Offer’d to the Right Honourable Lords Commissioners for Trade & Plantation, in Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and Craig B. Yirush (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2018), 1:210–11, 207.

  2  Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 59,56.

  3  Elisha Williams, Essential Rights and Liberties, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 56–57.

  4  Elisha Williams, Essential Rights and Liberties, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 57–58.

  5  Elisha Williams, Essential Rights and Liberties, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 59, 58. (Emphasis added.)

  6  Mayhew, The Snare Broken, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 239–40, 245.

  7  Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776, Works of Adams, 9:375; Benjamin Church, An Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770 (Boston, 1773), 14.

  8  See Boston Gazette, August 17 and 24, 1767; New-York Journal, September 3, 1767.

  9  See Boston Gazette, August 17 and 24, 1767; New-York Journal, September 3, 1767.

10  A Virginian [pseud.], Pennsylvania Gazette, September 29, 1768; Hampden [pseud.], “The Alarm, Number 1,” New York, October 6, 1773. For similar American views on property and consent, see also “A View of the British Constitution,” Essex Gazette, October 11, 1768; Anon., “To the Inhabitants of Queen’s County, Long Island,” Constitutional Gazette, November 29, 1775.

11  Warren, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 10.

12  Moses Mather, America’s Appeal to the Impartial World (1775), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 443–44,446.

13  Mather, America’s Appeal to the Impartial World, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 473–74.

14  Boston’s Instructions to Its Representatives, May 30, 1776, in Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of1780, 95.

15  Mather, America’s Appeal to the Impartial World, in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 490.

16  Anon., “To the Inhabitants of Queen’s County, Long Island,” Constitutional Gazette, November 29, 1775, and December 2, 1775; New York Petition to the House of Commons, October 18, 1764, Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 9–10.

17  “The New York Petition to the House of Commons” (October 18, 1764), Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 9–10, 13–14.

18  “The Virginia Resolves: The Resolutions as Recalled by Patrick Henry,” Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 48.

19  Quoted in Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976), 3:100. The story of Henry’s daring speech was dramatized, promulgated, glorified, and made into legend in William Wirt’s famous biography of the Virginian, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817). The only contemporary account of Henry’s speech was recorded by a visiting Frenchman, who stood with Thomas Jefferson in the lobby of the Virginia House of Burgesses listening to it. See “The Virginia Resolves: The French Traveller’s Account,” Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 46.

20  Jefferson, Autobiography, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 6; Stan V. Henkels, “Jefferson’s Recollections of Patrick Henry,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 34, no. 4 (1910): 389.

21  An excellent account of Henry’s speech can be found in Webking, The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty, 30–40. Also see Merrill Jensen, “Commentary,” in Randolph G. Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1958), 12. The best accounts of the American response to the Stamp Act are Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 3:96–137, and Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Collier, 1962), 120–54.

22  “The Pennsylvania Resolves” (September 21, 1765), and “The Massachusetts Resolves” (October 29, 1765), Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 51, 56.

23  “The Massachusetts Resolves” and “The Maryland Resolves” (September 28, 1765), Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents, 56,52; “The Declaration of the Stamp Act Congress” (October 19, 1765), Colonies to Nation, 64.

24  Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:105.

25  On Whately’s argument, see Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, 104–9.

26  Robert Whately, The Regulations Lately Made … (1765), in Colonies to Nation, 47–50.

27  Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, in Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. Francis Canavan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 4:11.

28  Whately, Regulations Lately Made, in Colonies to Nation, 47–50.

29  Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue (New York, 1765), in Colonies to Nation, 52.

30  Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes, in Colonies to Nation,

31  Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes, in Colonies to Nation,

32  Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1972), 181, 183. On the American development of actual representation, see J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

33  On the medieval origins of the American view of representation, see H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), and Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 161–75.

34  Anon., “A Dialogue between a Ruler and a Subject,” Massachusetts Spy, June 18, 1772; Church, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770, 14–15. See also A Virginian [pseud.], Pennsylvania Gazette, September 29, 1768, arguing that the most “celebrated English writers” on parliamentary power “meant the English representatives of Englishmen, the actual, not the virtual representative only, of the people.”

35  Granville Sharp, A Declaration of the Peoples Natural Right to Share in the Legislature, Which Is the Fundamental Principle of the British Constitution of State (London, 1774; repr., Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1774), 7–10.

36  Mutius Scaevola [pseud.], Boston Gazette, March 4, 1771.

37  A Son of Liberty [Silas Downer], A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty (1768), in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:100.

38  John Joachim Zubly, An Humble Inquiry into the Nature of the Dependency of the American Colonies upon the Parliament of Great-Britain and the Right of Parliament to Lay Taxes on the Said Colonies (1769), in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 285, 290.

39  On Bland’s argument, see Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, 143–48, and Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 248–80.

40  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 74–75.

41  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 75–76; Bland, The Colonel Dismounted, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 323.

42  On Adams’s argument, see Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, 66–87.

43  Novanglus [John Adams], VIII, March 13, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:328.

44  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 115.

45  Novanglus [Adams], VIII, March 13, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:328,330.

46  Novanglus [Adams], VII, March 6, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:317. (Emphasis added.)

47  Edward Coke, “Prologue” to The Second Part of the Institutes, in The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke, ed. Steve Sheppard (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), 2:748; see Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 454.

48  Novanglus [Adams], VIII, March 13, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:353,328. Here I dissent from Charles McIlwain’s otherwise superb history of the Revolution (The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation [1923; New York: Da Capo, 1973]). McIlwain argues that the most important colonial constitutional argument against Parliament was contained within an imperial context. His point here is to downplay colonial arguments based on the charters and fundamental law. From Adams’s perspective, the imperial, charter, and fundamental law arguments were inextricably intertwined.

49  On this distinction in Hamilton’s thought, see Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 26.

50  Novanglus [Adams], XII, April 17, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:373–74. (Emphasis added.)

51  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 6.

52  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 6, 8, 7.

CHAPTER 9

  1  See Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic, 18.

  2  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 6, 124, 34.

  3  Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 8–9.

  4  Democraticus [pseud.], “Loose Thoughts on Government,” American Archives, 4th ser., 6:730; Church, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700,5–6.

  5  Dawes, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 7–8.

  6  Spartanus [pseud.], “The Interest of America,” New-Hampshire Gazette, June 15, 1776. For another American view of the state of nature that seeks to reconcile the Hobbesean-Lockean account with the biblical account, see Levi Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era 1:305–17.

  7  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 11.

  8  “An Address of the Inhabitants of the Towns … ,” July 31, 1776, in State Papers of New Hampshire, ed. Nathaniel Bouton et al. (Concord, NH: Edward A. Jenks, state printer, 1877), 10:234; “A Public Defence of the Right of the New Hampshire Grants (So Called) on Both Sides Connecticut-River, to Associate Together, and Form Themselves into an Independent State,” 1779, in State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:299; The Republican [pseud.], January 30, 1777, in Frederick Chase, A History of Dartmouth College and the Town of Hanover New Hampshire (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1891), 431–32.

  9  “Address of the Town of the New Hampshire Grants to the Assembly,” June 11, 1777, State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:455–56; Republican [pseud.], “Observations on the Right of Jurisdiction Claimed by the States of New York and New Hampshire, Over the New Hampshire Grants,” 1778, State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:264; “A Public Defence of the Right of the New-Hampshire Grants,” State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:312–13. For a fuller discussion of the controversy over the New Hampshire Grant towns and their battle for recognition, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 287–89.

10  Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2:164.

11  Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 231; Henry, “Notes of Debates in the Continental Congress” (September 6, 1774), quoted in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:124; Gage, quoted in Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1996), 425; Warren to John Adams, October 16, 1774, Papers of Adams, 2:190–92. For an excellent discussion of the various ways in which Americans used Locke’s state of nature metaphor to justify a range of activities from starting new governments to claiming large tracts of royal land, see McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 144–59.

12  Adams to James Burgh, December 28, 1774, Papers of Adams, 2:205–8; Adams to A Friend in London, January 21, 1775, Papers, 2:214–16.

13  Petition of Pittsfield, December 26, 1775, and Petition of Pittsfield, May 1776, in Massachusetts, Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Formation of Its Constitution, 1775–1780, ed. Robert J. Taylor (New York: Norton, 1961), 17–19. See Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1954).

14  Whiting, “An Address to the Inhabitants of Berkshire County, Mass.,” in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:466–69.

15  Republican [pseud.], “Observations on the Right of Jurisdiction Claimed by the States of New York and New Hampshire, State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:263–66.

16  Pacificus [Timothy Walker], “An Address to the Inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants (So Called) Lying Westward of the Connecticut River,” July 18, 1778, State Papers of New Hampshire, 10:270–71.

17  Samuel Lockwood, Civil Rulers an Ordinance of God, for Good to Mankind (New London, CT: Timothy Green, 1774), 6; Quincy, Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port-Bill, 32; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 76.

18  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 13; Zubly, The Law of Liberty, 4; Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 8; John Hurt, The Love of Our Country: A Sermon, Preached Before the Virginia Troops in New-Jersey (Philadelphia: Styner and Cist, 1777), 8.

19  See Locke, Second Treatise, para. 124.

20  Warren, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 5; Church, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 1770,5–6 (emphasis added).

21  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 220.

22  “Return of Lexington” (June 15, 1778), in Massachusetts, Colony to Commonwealth: Documents on the Formation of Its Constitution, 1775–1780, 66.

23  On Locke’s doctrine of consent, see Peter Josephson, The Great Art of Government: Locke’s Use of Consent (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). See also Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke.

24  Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 9; Church, Oration … to Commemorate the Bloody Tragedy of the Fifth of March, 17700, 6–7.

25  Oliver Wolcott to Samuel Lyman, May 16, 1776, in Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund C. Burnett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1921), 1:449; Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:308; Anon., “Some Thoughts on the Constitution of the British Empire, and the Controversy between Great Britain and the American Colonies” (June 12, 1775), American Archives, 4th ser., 2:962.

26  John Locke [pseud.], Boston Gazette, November 18, 1765; “At a Legal Town-Meeting of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Mendon,” Boston Gazette, June 7, 1773; [Theophilus Parsons], The Essex Result, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:488; “The Report of a Constitution, or Form of Government, for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” in Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 297–98.

27  Boston Gazette, August 24, 1767.

28  On social contract theory in revolutionary America, see Thad W. Tate, “The Social Contract in America, 1774–1787: Revolutionary Theory as a Conservative Instrument,” William and Mary Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1965): 375–91. In what is otherwise a competent article, Tate errs in arguing that the contribution of American revolutionaries to social contract theory was minimal to nonexistent.

29  Thomas Dawes, An Oration … in Celebration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1787), 10–11; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 13, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 164; Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, Writings of Jefferson, 16:181–82.

30  Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 53; Archibald Kennedy, An Essay on the Government of the Colonies (New York: J. Parker, 1752), 13.

31  Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 13–14.

32  Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 8–10; Anon. from Hampshire County, “To the Inhabitants of Massachusetts-Bay, Number II,” Massachusetts Spy, February 16, 1775.

33  Spartanus [pseud.], New-Hampshire Gazette, June 15, 1776.

34  “The American Whig” [pseud.], “To the Inhabitants of the State of Rhode Island on the Subject of Altering the Constitution, Number III,” Providence Gazette, April 3, 1779.

35  Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 210.

36  Drayton, Charge to the Grand Jury of Charleston (October 15, 1776), American Archives, 5th ser., 2:1047.

37  Anon., Massachusetts Spy, February 16, 1775. This Massachusetts writer, in contrast to the “American Whig” in Rhode Island, reduced the social-contract process from three to two steps.

38  Lockwood, Civil Rulers an Ordinance of God, 7.

39  Anon. from Hampshire County, “To the Inhabitants of Massachusetts-Bay, Number II,” Massachusetts Spy, February 16, 1775.

40  Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 16; Thomas Paine, “The Forester’s Letters to Cato” (1776), in Life and Works of Paine, 2:230.

41  Jefferson to John Taylor, May 28, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:19, 22.

42  Paine, Rights of Man, in Life and Works of Paine, 6:268; Samuel Williams, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1774), available at Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-discourse-on-the-love-of-our-country/.

43  The view of American revolutionary republicanism described in these pages is very different from the influential view presented in Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 46–90.

44  Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government, in Works of Adams, 4:370–71; 403–5; 370–71; 5:453–54.

45  Madison, Federalist No. 10, pp. 57, 61, 60–61.

46  Madison, Federalist No. 10, pp. 62, 64 (emphasis added).

47  Madison, Federalist Nos. 48 and 51, 334, 348–50.

48  Madison, Federalist No. 51, 351.

49  Madison, Federalist No. 55, 374.

50  For an examination of the new society created by the American Revolution, see Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

51  Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, June 19, 1802, Writings of Jefferson, 10:324–25. The best discussion of Jefferson’s republicanism can be found in Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.

52  Jefferson to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:24.

53  Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, Writings of Jefferson, 15:36.

54  Quoted in Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, 76.

55  Jefferson, “Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia” (August 4, 1818), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 334.

56  Lockwood, Civil Rulers an Ordinance of Good, 7.

57  Kennedy, Essay on the Government of the Colonies, 11–12; Jefferson, “Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital” (June 18, 1779), in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:492.

58  Cooke, True Principles of Civil Government, 8–9; Foster, Short Essay on Civil Government, 27–28, 35, 36.

59  Turner, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, 17; Jefferson to Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819, Writings of Jefferson, 15:213.

60  An American [pseud.], “Addresses to the People of Maryland” (n.d.), American Archives, 4th ser., 6:1095; Massachusettensis [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, December 12, 1771.

61  Jefferson to Ursuline Nuns of New Orleans, July 13, 1804, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jeiferson/99–01-02-0068. (This is an early access document from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. It is not an authoritative final version.)

62  Madison, Federalist No. 51,349.

63  Madison, Federalist No. 51,349; Stephen Johnson, Integrity and Piety the Best Principles of a Good Administration of Government … (New London, CT: Timothy Green, 1770), 8–9; Boston Gazette, November 11, 1765.

64  Massachusetts Spy, May 2, 1771; Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 30.

65  Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, June 19, 1802, Writings of Jefferson, 10:325.

CHAPTER 10

  1  In The Anas, Jefferson called this the “catholic principle of republicanism” (Writings of Jefferson, 1:330), which he defined elsewhere as follows: “We certainly cannot deny to other nations that principle whereon our government is founded, that every nation has a right to govern itself internally under whatever form it pleases, and to change those forms at its own will” (Jefferson to Thomas Pinckney, December 30, 1792, Writings of Jefferson, 9:7). See also Jefferson to M. Staël-Holstein, July 16, 1807, 11:282.

  2  Zubly, Law of Liberty, 18.

  3  The Prohibitory Act of 1775, which declared and enforced a blockade on American commerce, was an effectual declaration of war, and thereby declared the king’s American subjects to be outside his protection. Putting the colonists outside the king’s protection effectively made them independent.

  4  On the Radical Whig tradition, see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 27–48.

  5  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 199, 201–2.

  6  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 202.

    7  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 207.

  8  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 208, 209, 210.

  9  It is important to note that the particular government Locke describes in this chapter is a thinly veiled version of the mixed and balanced English government, and Locke’s particular focus is on the tyranny of the king. American revolutionaries took Locke’s argument against monarchical tyranny and applied it to the actions first of Parliament and then of the king.

10  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 212, 214, 215, 216, 217.

11  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 221, 222.

12  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 223.

13  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 225.

14  Locke, Second Treatise, para. 226.

15  The best treatment of Mayhew’s thought is J. Patrick Mullins, Father of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).

16  Adams to Jefferson, July 18, 1818, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 527; Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818, Works of Adams, 10:288.

17  Mayhew, A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Nonresistance to the Higher Powers, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 215, 222, 226, 228, 231.

18  Mayhew, Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 237, 236, 231.

19  Mayhew, Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 237n, 231, 241, 232.

20  Mayhew, Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 235, 237.

21  Mayhew, Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission, in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 237n, 237–38.

22  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:69, 82; Novanglus [Adams], II, January 30, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:242; Dickinson, Two Letters on the Tea Tax (1773), in Political Writings of Dickinson, 461.

23  Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1:3.

24  Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 292.

25  Zubly, “An Humble Inquiry,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 298; Adams, notes for an oration at Braintree, Diary and Autobiography, 2:58–59; Jefferson to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787, Writings of Jefferson, 6:55–59.

26  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 356; Zubly, “An Humble Inquiry,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 298.

27  Jefferson, “The Kentucky Resolutions,” Portable Thomas Jefferson, 287–88.

28  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:82; Adams, diary entry, February 1765, Diary and Autobiography, 1:255–56; Adams, “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 22, 21.

29  Adams, diary entry, December 1765, Diary and Autobiography, 1:282.

30  This line of interpretation was first presented in Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 94–159. The implications of Bailyn’s original insights were subsequently worked out by Gordon S. Wood in two essays (first published in 1966 and 1982, respectively), “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution” and “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” in his The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011), 25–55, 81–123.

31  Dickinson, Letters to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1774), in Political Writings of Dickinson, 491; Mather, “America’s Appeal to the Impartial World,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 481.

32  See Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution” and “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style,” The Idea of America. For a contrary position, see John P. Diggins, “The Problem of Motivation and Causation,” in The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Ralph Lerner, “Prologue: Recovering the Revolution,” in The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 1–38.

33  Adams, “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of John Adams, 20.

34  We do a disservice to Adams and to the revolutionary generation if we do not attempt to understand the kind of moral reasoning that might have propelled them to this kind of reaction. We should be open to the possibility that the problem rests not with them but with us. Perhaps we lack the kind of moral knowledge and the historical imagination that are required to understand their perspective.

35  Adams, “Instructions of the Town of Braintree to Their Representative” (1765), Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 40; John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 17, 1775, Adams Family Correspondence, 1:215–17.

36  Dickinson, The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies (1765), in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 690.

37  Boston Town Meeting to Its Assembly Representatives (1770), in [Eighteenth] Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston Containing the Boston Town Records, 1770 through 1777 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1887), 26, available at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/reportofrecordco18bost/page/26.

38  Novanglus [Adams], I, January 23, 1775, Papers of Adams, 228, 233, 231.

39  Dickinson, Letters to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 473–74.

40  For the Suffolk Resolves, see America’s Home Page (site maintained by Steven Thomas), http://ahp.gatech.edu/suffolk_resolves_1774.html; quoted in Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, vol. 12: The Triumphant Empire: Britain Sails into the Storm: 1770–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1967), 150n.

41  Gipson, British Empire Before the American Revolution, 12:173; Ebenezer Baldwin, “An Appendix Stating the Heavy Grievances the Colonies Labor Under … (1774), Colonies to Nation, 213; “The Association and Resolves of the New York Sons of Liberty” (1773), Colonies to Nation, 198; Alexander Hamilton, A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress … (1774), in The Works of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: Putnam, 1904), 1:10.

42  Philadelphia merchants’ committee, quoted in Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 171–72; Wilson, “Speech Delivered in the Convention for the Province of Pennsylvania” (January 1775), Works of Wilson, 2:748–49.

43  Washington to Bryan Fairfax, July 4, July 20, and August 24, 1774, Writings of Washington, 2:418, 421–22, 434–35.

44  Richard Henry Lee to John Dickinson, April 4, 1773, in Letters of Richard Henry Lee, ed. J. C. Ballagli (New York, 1911), 1:84; Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British America, in Portable Thomas Jefferson, 9.

45  Adams to Horatio Gates, March 23, 1776, Papers, IV: 58–60.

46  Jefferson, Summary View of the Rights of British-America, in Colonies to Nation, 231.

47  Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Colonies to Nation, 31–32.

48  Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws, 1:157.

49  Bland, Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:82–84.

50  Jefferson to M. Staël-Holstein, July 16, 1807, Writings of Jefferson, 11:282.

51  Rush to James Cheetham, July 17, 1809, in The Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. Lyman H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 2:1008; Charles Lee and George Washington (letter to Joseph Reed, January 31, 1776), quoted in William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 120.

52  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 9, ii, 12.

53  On the ancient English or Cokean constitution, see Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, and Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.

54  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 16, 17, 19, 16.

55  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 47–48.

56  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 21, 27, 43.

57  Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 21, 27, 43, 52 (emphasis added).

58  See John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 19, 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, 1:363.

CHAPTER 11

  1  Adams to Mary Palmer, July 5, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, 2:34.

  2  William Whipple to John Langdon, July 16, 1776, American Archives, 5th ser., 1:368.

  3  Paine, Letter to the Abbé Raynal, in Life and Works of Paine, 4:134.

  4  See, e.g., Joseph Galloway to Richard Jackson, August 10, 1774, or John Dickinson, Arguments Against the Independence of the Colonies … , in Colonies to Nation, 239–240, 292–296.

  5  Adams to H. Niles, February 13, 1818, Works of Adams, 10:282–83.

  6  The social, political, and economic revolution that followed the moral revolution that occurred in the American colonies during the years of the imperial crisis is best captured in Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

  7  Hart, Liberty Described and Recommended, in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:306; Boston Gazette, September 14, 1767.

  8  Samuel Williams, The Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 1:7.

  9  Wells, A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the Consideration of the British Colonies, 10, 30; Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 43; John Hurt, The Love of Country: A Sermon Preached Before the Virginia Troops in New-Jersey (Philadelphia: Styner and Cist, 1777), 16.

10  Phillips Payson, “A Sermon” (1778), American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:525.

11  Samuel Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 1:6–7; Petition to the King (October 1774), in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Worthington C. Ford (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), 1:118; Tucker, Sermon Preached at Cambridge, 5–6.

12  Massachusettensis [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, December 12, 1771; Howard, “A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston,” American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1:197.

13  Quincy, Observations on the Act of Parliament Commonly Called the Boston Port Bill, 31; Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 32.

14  See The Centinel [pseud.], Massachusetts Spy, May 2, 1771; May 30, 1771; June 20, 1771; September 12, 1771; March 26, 1772; September 26, 1771.

15  A Freeman [pseud.], untitled, July 23, 1774, American Archives, 4th ser., 1:608; Vindex [Samuel Adams], Boston Gazette, January 21, 1771, quoted in Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 224.

16  Adams, “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” Revolutionary Writings of Adams, 20; Adams, “Governor Winthrop to Governor Bradford,” February 9, 1767, Papers of Adams, 1:200–1.

17  Adams, Notes for an Oration at Braintree (1772), Diary and Autobiography, 2:56–61; John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 7, 1775, Adams Family Correspondence, 1:241; Novanglus [Adams], I, January 23, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:229; Novanglus [Adams], III, February 6, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:245. This analysis of Adams’s views on the relationship between virtue and freedom is drawn from Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, 44–65.

18  Novanglus [Adams], I, January 23, 1775, Papers of Adams, 2:230.

19  Adams, on Independence of the Judges (1773–1774), Diary and Autobiography, 3:301.

20  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 388, 346–48, 402.

21  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 386–90. Machiavelli’s chapter in the Discourses on Livy (bk. 3, chap. 1) is titled “To Ensure a Long Existence to Religious Sects or Republics, It Is Necessary Frequently to Bring Them Back to Their Original Principles.”

22  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 355–56, 396–97, 382–83. Alexander Hamilton made a similar kind of argument: “How ridiculous then is it to affirm, that we are quarrelling for the trifling sum of three pence a pound on tea; when it is evidently the principle against which we contend.” See Hamilton, “A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress … ,” December 15, 1774, in Papers of Hamilton, 1:46, 48. Likewise, see the view of James Madison: “The people of the U.S. owe their independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprized in the precedent.” Quoted in Elizabeth Fleet, ed., “Madison’s ‘Detached Memoranda,’” William and Mary Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1946): 557.

23  Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, in Political Writings of Dickinson, 356–57; Madison, “Address of the General Assembly to the People of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” in The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Putnam, 1906), 6:336.

24  Burke, Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (March 22, 1775), in Select Works of Edmund Burke, 1:237–43.

25  Paine, The American Crisis, IV (September 12, 1777), in Life and Works of Paine, 2:363; Hurt, Love of Country, 15–16 (emphasis added).

26  Abraham Clark to Elias Dayton, July 14, 1776, in Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, ed. Edmund C. Burnett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1923), 2:10; Jonas Clark, Sermon Preached Before His Excellency John Hancock, 43; Washington, quoted in David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 273.

27  John Hancock to Certain States, July 6, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Paul H. Smith et al., vol. 4, May 16–August 15, 1776 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1979), 396.

28  On the reception of the Declaration around the United States, see John Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence: Its History (1906; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1970); Frank Donovan, Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration: The Story Behind the Declaration of Independence (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968); David Freeman Hawke, Honorable Treason: The Declaration of Independence and the Men Who Signed It (New York: Viking, 1976); and Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.

29  Scholars working on developing a new moral history of the American Revolution must examine not only the moral, constitutional, and political writings of the Revolution’s greatest thinkers, such as James Otis, Richard Bland, Daniel Dulany, John Dickinson, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine, but they must also connect ideas to the actions of leaders such as George Washington and the thousands of men who fought with Washington. To that end, they should start with the letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts of the soldiers of the Continental Army. See, e.g.: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (1957; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1987); and Frank Moore, comp., The Diary of the American Revolution, 1775–1781, ed. John Anthony Scott (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967).

30  Joseph Barton to Henry Wisner, July 9, 1776, American Archives, 5th ser., 1:139; Joseph Elmer, quoted in Diary of the American Revolution, 279–80; Tristram Dalton to Elbridge Gerry, July 19, 1776, in American Archives, 5th ser., 1:461; Rush to Charles Lee, July 23, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 4:527–28.

31  Hancock to George Washington, July 6, 1776, in The Papers of George Washington: The Revolutionary War Series, ed. Philander D. Chase (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 5:219–21, available at Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-05-02-0153. (Emphasis added.)

32  Washington, General Orders, July 9, 1776, in Papers of Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 5:246, available at Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/?q=Volume%3AWashington-03-05&s=1511311112&r=176.

33  James Thacher, The American Revolution, from the Commencement to the Disbanding of the American Army, Given in the Form of a Daily Journal (Cincinnati: Barnitz, 1856), 46–47; Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor: A Sermon Preached…May 8th, 1783 (New Haven, CT: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1783), 46.

34  Samuel Adams to Richard Henry Lee, July 15, 1776, and Samuel Adams to James Warren, July 16, 1776, in Writings of Samuel Adams, 3:297–98, 299; Samuel Adams, “Speech on the Declaration of Independence” (August i, 1776), Samuel Adams Heritage Society, http://www.samuel-adams-heritage.com/documents/speech-about-declaration-of-independence.html; Thacher, The American Revolution from the Commencement to the Disbanding of the American Army, 46–47; David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Philadelphia: R. Aitken, 1789; repr., Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1990), 1:322.

35  “Speech of a Farmer to an Assembly of His Neighbours of Philadelphia County,” in American Archives, 4th ser., 4:1525–26.

36  Samuel Adams, “Candidus,” Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771, Writings of Samuel Adams, 2:251.

37  Nathanael Greene to Samuel Ward, July 14, 1775, in The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ed. Richard K. Showman et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 1:99.

38  Washington, General Orders, August 23, 1776, in Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 6:109-110, available at Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0100.

39  Major General Nathanael Greene to George Washington, November 15, 776， in Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 7:162, available at Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-07-02-0117. For Magaw’s reply, see n1.

40  Charles Willson Peale, The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale, in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 5:50; William Heath, Heath’s Memoirs of the American War (New York: A. Wessels, 1904) 107.

41  Paine, The American Crisis, I (December 23, ijj6), in Life and Works of Paine, 2:263.

42  Drayton, Charge to the Grand Jury of Charleston, American Archives, 5th ser., 2:1048.

43  Paine, Letter to the Abbé Raynal, in Life and Works of Paine, 4:134.

44  Adams to Elbridge Gerry, December 6, 1777, Papers of Adams, 5:345–47; Continental Congress, Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, Colonies to Nation, 258.

45  Henry Knox to John Adams, May 16, 1776, Papers of Adams, 4:190. (Emphasis added.)

46  Joseph Reed to Esther Reed, September 2, 1776, quoted in McCullough, 1776, 201.

47  John Adams to Moses Gill, June 10, 1775, Papers of Adams, 3:21; Adams to Horatio Gates, March 23, 1776, Papers of Adams, 4:58–60; Adams to Moses Gill, June 10, 1775, Papers of Adams, 3:21; Novanglus [Adams], Papers of Adams, 2:293.

48  John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 2, 1775, Adams Family Correspondence, 1:192.

49  Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 11, 1776, quoted in McCullough, 1776, 134–35.

50  John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, 2:31.

CONCLUSION

  1  J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, and, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1981), 70.

    2  For an examination of the new society created by the American Revolution, see Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

  3  John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/taylor-an-inquiry-into-the-principles-and-policy-of-the-government-of-the-united-states; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 359.

  4  Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, February 2, 1816; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 371; Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.

  5  Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, February 2, 1816; Madison, Federalist No. 48,332; Jefferson to Colonel Carrington, May 27, 1788.

  6  Jefferson, “The Kentucky Resolutions,” Portable Jefferson, 288.

  7  Hamilton, Federalist No. 23, 146–47; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, Portable Thomas Jefferson, 293; Madison, “Property,” Mind of the Founder, 244.

  8  Jefferson, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” (1777), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 252.

  9  William Leggett, “True Functions of Government,” in Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy, ed. Lawrence H. White (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1984), 3–4. On Leggett, see Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 185–205. On the Locofocos, see Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 190–209.

10  John L. O’Sullivan, “The Democratic Principle,” published in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, quoted in Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 177–78. (Emphasis added.)

11  Leggett, “The Legislation of Congress,” Democratick Editorials, 20. On the role of government in nineteenth-century America, see Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1955), esp. chap. 6; Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Bernard W. Wishy, Goodbye, Machiavelli: Government and American Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

12  William Sampson, Memoirs of William Sampson: An Irish Exile (London, 1832), 282; Leggett, “The Reserved Rights of the People,” Democratick Editorials, 8; Warren, quoted in Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 287.

13  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 288.

14  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 290–91.

15  On the Americans’ westward movement, see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

16  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 387,512.

17  George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., 1882), 29.

18  For a particularly unimpressive and dogmatic critique of the idea of the self-made man, see Carol Nackenoff, The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

19  Frederick Douglass, “Self-Made Men,” in Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass, ed. James Daley (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2013), 128, 134.

20  Charles Nisbet, quoted in Samuel Miller, Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, D.D., Late President of Dickinson College, Carlisle (New York: Carter, 1840), 249, 167.

21  Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 489.

EPILOGUE

  1  Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois” (July 10, 1858), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:499–500.

  2  Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” (June 26, 1857), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:405–6.

  3  Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” (July 5, 1852), Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass, 30.

  4  Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, April 6, 1859, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, 488–89.

  5  Cong. Globe, 33d Cong., 1st Sess., appendix (1854), 310. Pettit’s speech was partly responsible for awakening Abraham Lincoln from his political slumbers. See Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria” (1854), “Fragment: Notes for Speeches” (1858), “Seventh and Last Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois” (1858), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:275,3:205,3:301–2.

  6  Rufus Choate to E. W. Farley, August 9, 1856, in The Works of Rufus Choate, with a Memoir of His Life, ed. Samuel Gilman Brown (Boston: Little, Brown, 1862), 1:215.

  7  Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:265–66.

  8  On proslavery thought, see Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). On the abolitionist movement, see Thompson, Antislavery Political Writings, 1833–1860.

  9  For the influence of Hegel’s thought on the antebellum Southern thinkers, see Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860: An Abridged Edition of Conjectures of Order (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

10  Jesse Burton Harrison, “English Civilization,” Southern Review 8 (February 1832): 463. See O’Brien, Intellectual Life and the American South, 272–73.

11  James Warley Miles, God in History: A Discourse (Charleston, SC: Steam-Power Press, 1863), 7, 8, 10, 14, 19, 24.

12  Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., appendix (1860), 113–17. Lamar was quoting from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 98–99.

13  See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

14  William Harper, “Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics,” in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E. N. Elliott (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860), 558–59; Harper, “Memoir on Slavery,” in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 83.

15  Harper, “Memoir on Slavery,” 81, 84–85, 91, 134.

16  James Henry Hammond, “Letter to an English Abolitionist,” in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 172–73.

17  James Henry Hammond, “Laws of Nature—Natural Rights—Slavery” (manuscript, January 26, 1847), Tucker-Coleman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and Mary.

18  On the “cunning of reason,” see Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 33, and Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 633.

19  John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Oregon Bill” and “Speech on the Reception of the Abolition Petitions,” in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992), 565–70, 474.

20  George Fitzhugh, “False Philosophy of the Age,” in Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 54; Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” in The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 279.

21  Fitzhugh, “The Reformation—The Right of Private Judgment,” in Cannibals All!, 135; Fitzhugh, “Declaration of Independence and Virginia Bill of Rights,” in Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1854), 175,179; Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” 292.

22  Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Liberty and Slavery: or, Slavery in the Light of Moral and Political Philosophy, in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E. N. Elliott (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860), 286–88.

23  Harper, “Memoir on Slavery,” 93.

24  Fitzhugh, “Centralization and Socialism,” De Bow’s Review (June 1856): 692–94.

25  Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” 294; Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 79, 32, 36.

26  Fitzhugh, “Free Trade,” Sociology for the South, 25.

27  Fitzhugh, “Free Trade” and “Slavery Justified,” Sociology for the South, 25, 245.

28  Fitzhugh, “Free Trade,” “Failure of Free Society and Rise of Socialism,” and “Slavery Justified,” Sociology for the South, 25–26,72, 245.

29  Edmund Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery; or, The Institution Considered in Regard to Its Influence on Public Wealth and the General Welfare (Washington, DC: Lemuel Towers, 1857), 9.

30  Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 2.

31  Northern postbellum intellectuals were, like their Southern antebellum counterparts, deeply influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history. See John Kaag and Kipton E. Jensen, “The American Reception of Hegel (1830–1930),” in The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, ed. Dean Moyar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 670–96. See also William Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Knopf, 1973).

32  Richard T. Ely, quoted in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America: A Study of the Era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 25.

33  See Benjamin Rand, “Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University from 1636 to 1906, II,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 37 (December 1928), 188–200, and “Philosophical Instruction in Harvard University from 1636 to 1906, III,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine 37 (March 1929), 296–311.

34  See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

35  William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” and “What Pragmatism Means,” in Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Alburey Castell (New York: Hafner, 1948), 159–76, 147–53. On James’s philosophy, see Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James, vol. 1, Eclipse of Certainty, 1820–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

36  John Dewey, “The Problem of Truth,” in John Dewey: The Political Writings, ed. Debra Morris and Ian Shapiro (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 10, 12, 14, 16, 17. On Dewey’s philosophy, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1997).

37  Dewey, “The Future of Liberalism,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 11: 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 290–91.

38  Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (1935; repr., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 28.

39  On the new liberalism, see John Chamberlain, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1932); Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); and Ekirch, Progressivism in America.

40  Woodrow Wilson, “The Author and Signers of the Declaration,” North American Review 186 (Sept. 1907): 22–33.

41  Wilson, “The Author and Signers of the Declaration,” 22–33. On Wilson’s political thought, see Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

42  Wilson, “Address to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur Link, vol. 23,1911–1912 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 33–34.

43  Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; repr., New York: Dutton, 1963), 152.

44  Croly, Promise of American Life, 190, 209,438–39,418, 282–83.

45  See Morton G. White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949).

46  Becker, Declaration of Independence, 277 (emphasis added).

47  Becker, Declaration of Independence, 277, 278.

48  Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tate, 1843), 2:501.

49  Becker, Declaration of Independence, 265. For a similar critique of Becker, see Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, 83–107.

50  Amy B. Wang, “‘Post-Truth’ Named 2016 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries,” Washington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/post-truth-named-2016-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries/?utm_term=.d556b4eb9a6c.

51  Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” (June 26, 1857), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:407, 406.

52  Lincoln, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:407.

53  Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, & others, April 6, 1859, Collected Works of Lincoln, 3:375.

54  Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, & others, April 6, 1859, Collected Works of Lincoln, 3:375–76.

55  Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois” (October 27, 1854), Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:283–84.

56  Becker, The Declaration of Independence (new ed., New York: Vintage, 1941), xviii–ix.

57  Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage,” available at Bartleby.com, https://www.bartleby.com/118/7.html.

58  Lydia Maria Child, The Patriarchal Institution, as Described by Members of Its Own Family, in Antislavery Political Writings, 1833–1860, 23.