"The Revolutionary Argument" — From the Rights of Englishmen to the Laws of Nature

Jeff Kellick

Oct 18

51 min read

SELF-EVIDENT · The Road to 1776 · Article 18 of 22

That the inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following Rights: Resolved, N. C. D. 1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, & property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent. — Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774¹

Sacred and Undeniable

On June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed five men to prepare a declaration that the colonies were independent: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. The committee gave the drafting to Jefferson, who was thirty-three and had been in Congress for about a year.² Over the next two weeks he wrote, showed his pages to Adams and Franklin, and reported them to the committee. The sheet he worked from survives in the Library of Congress, covered with his own revisions and a few in other hands.

The second paragraph of that rough draft began this way (and with this spelling):

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness;³

Before Adams made his own copy of the draft, the words sacred & undeniable were struck through and self-evident was written in over them. Tradition gives the change to Franklin. Julian Boyd, who edited Jefferson's papers, found that the attribution rests on no conclusive evidence and that the new words appear to be in Jefferson's own hand.⁴

The change, while small on the page, is very large in what it claims. Sacred describes the standing of a truth; self-evident describes how it is known. Locke had written that maxims and axioms are self-evident propositions, whose truth is perceived immediately, without the help of any proof.⁵ The Declaration did not set its theology aside in making the change; the adopted text still says that men are endowed with their rights by their Creator. What it claimed was that those rights did not have to be proved from charters, from Parliament, or from the ancient constitution of England. They could be seen.

Twelve years earlier the appeal to nature had already been made, and it had been made beside a pledge of obedience. In 1764 James Otis, a Boston lawyer, wrote that the colonists' rights stood on the law of God and nature as well as on the English constitution, and in the same pamphlet that the power of Parliament was uncontrollable and that the colonies must obey it. Between that pamphlet and Jefferson's interlined passages, natural rights did not arrive in the colonial case. They changed form, from a standard for judging the empire's laws to the ground for leaving the empire. The road ran, as our last article put it, first through the rights of Englishmen and then through something else.

An engraving from a portrait of James Otis, Jr, 1900. From the New York Public Library.

The Empire Looks Up

The war with France ended in February 1763 with the Treaty of Paris. Britain kept Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi, and it kept a national debt the war had greatly enlarged. Ministers in London concluded that the colonies should help pay for their own defense, and that the trade laws the colonists had long evaded should be enforced.

A royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, reserved the lands west of the Appalachian watershed "for the use of the said Indians" and forbade colonial governors to grant warrants of survey there "for the present, and until our further Pleasure be known."⁶ An act of April 1764, usually called the Sugar Act, cut the duty on foreign molasses from six pence a gallon to three and announced in its preamble that it was "just and necessary, that a revenue be raised" in America "for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same."⁷ The duty was lower than the one it replaced, which had been laid in 1733 and largely evaded. The difference was that this one was meant to be collected, and its stated purpose was revenue.⁸

In May 1764 the Boston town meeting adopted instructions for its representatives, drafted by a committee on which Samuel Adams sat, and they asked the question that would run through the next twelve years:

If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reducd from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?⁹

The instructions were English from end to end. They claimed a charter right to govern and tax themselves and "British Privileges" held in common with subjects born in Britain. Nothing in them appealed to nature.

That summer Otis published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. The pamphlet shows how far the colonial case had and had not traveled by 1764. He sent readers who wanted to understand the origin of government to "Mr. Locke's discourses on government" and to "M. De Vattel's law of nature and nations," and he called James Harrington, author of Oceana, "the great, the incomparable Harrington."¹⁰ He wrote that supreme power was "originally and ultimately in the people," held "in trust, and on a condition," and that the colonists' rights "as men and free born British subjects" stood "by the law of God, and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament."¹¹ He held that taxes could not be laid on the people "but by their consent in person, or by deputation."¹² He also wrote this:

The power of parliament is uncontroulable, but by themselves, and we must obey. They only can repeal their own acts.¹³

The two positions sat side by side in the same pamphlet, and Otis tried to reconcile them through the courts. "If the reasons that can be given against an act, are such as plainly demonstrate that it is against natural equity," he wrote, "the executive courts will adjudge such act void."¹⁴ He had said the same thing in February 1761, arguing against the customs officers' general search warrants, the writs of assistance, before the Superior Court in Boston. John Adams, then twenty-five, took notes in the courtroom: "An Act against the Constitution is void: an Act against natural Equity is void." The authority Adams recorded for the point, "8. Rep. 118. from Viner," is identified by the editors of his legal papers as Bonham's Case, which Otis cited from the extract of it in Viner's Abridgment.¹⁵

When we referenced Sir Edward Coke previously in this series, we noted his influence would arrive later in America. This is where it arrived: in a Boston courtroom, in the mouth of a lawyer who wanted judges to hold Parliament to a standard above Parliament.

The editors of Adams's legal papers add a qualification. Modern scholars, they note, read Coke's dictum in context as a familiar canon for construing statutes. Otis made it a constitutional rule about the limits of legislative power, and even so he asked the courts for less than later American judicial review would claim.¹⁶ The inherited words were being made to do new work.

One line is missing from the 1761 notes. The sentence most often credited to Otis — that taxation without representation is tyranny — appears nowhere in Adams's courtroom notes or in Otis's pamphlet of 1764. It appears in William Tudor's Life of James Otis, published in 1823, where it is Tudor's own sentence about what Otis argued.¹⁷ The slogan in its familiar form, No Taxation without Representation, first appears in print, as far as one historian has been able to trace it, as a headline in a London magazine in February 1768, over a reprinted speech by Lord Camden.¹⁸ The colonists said the same thing in other words, many times.

First as Englishmen

The Stamp Act

On March 22, 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, to take effect on November 1. It required stamped paper for newspapers, legal documents, licenses, and playing cards, and it was Parliament's first direct tax on the colonies for revenue.¹⁹

The Virginia House of Burgesses took up the act at the end of May, near the close of its session. Patrick Henry, newly elected to the house, offered a set of resolves. How many passed is uncertain, because the Burgesses' journal, the colonial newspapers, and the manuscript copies disagree: the journal records four, a fifth was passed and then expunged the next day, and two more that were never adopted were printed in the Newport and Annapolis papers as though they had been.²⁰ The third, which did pass, states the position of 1765 as cleanly as anything written that year:

Resolved, that the Taxation of the People by themselves, or by Persons chosen by themselves to represent them, who can only know what Taxes the People are able to bear and the easiest method of raising them, and are equally affected by such Taxes themselves is the distinguishing Characteristick of British Freedom and without which the ancient Constitution cannot subsist.²¹

British Freedom and the ancient Constitution. Taxation by consent, on this view, belonged to Englishmen wherever they lived.

The speech Henry gave that week has a history of its own. The only account by someone in the chamber comes from an unnamed French traveler. His journal records that a member invoked Tarquin's Brutus and Charles's Cromwell, that the Speaker called it treason, and that the member, "his name is henery," rose again to say that if he had affronted the house "he was ready to ask pardon."²² The version that ends "If this be treason, make the most of it" first appears in print in John Burk's History of Virginia in 1805, forty years later, and passed into general circulation through William Wirt's biography of Henry in 1817.²³ What the contemporary account supports is a member who went further than the house would follow and then retreated.

Boston, August 1765

In Boston the opposition did not stay in the assembly. On August 14 a crowd hanged and burned an effigy of the man appointed to distribute the stamps, Andrew Oliver, pulled down buildings of his, and attacked his house. On the night of August 26 a crowd broke into the house of the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and took it apart. Hutchinson had just enough warning to escape with his children. "Such ruins were never seen in America," he wrote four days later.²⁴ The violence belongs to the history of 1765 as much as the resolves do.

The Stamp Act Congress

In October 1765, delegates from nine colonies met in New York. On October 19 they adopted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, addressed in loyal terms to the king and Parliament, and its resolves set out the constitutional position in a short chain:

III. That it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives. IV. That the people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances cannot be, represented in the House of Commons in Great-Britain.²⁵

The fourth resolve answered a doctrine already in print. A pamphlet defending the ministry, published anonymously and generally attributed to Thomas Whately, had argued that the colonists stood where most Englishmen stood, without a vote for members: "none are actually, all are virtually represented in Parliament."²⁶ The doctrine was not a cynical invention. It described how the House of Commons understood itself, as the representative of the whole realm, and it was the strongest case the ministry had.

The most influential answer came from a Maryland lawyer, Daniel Dulany. The virtual representation of an Englishman without a vote, Dulany wrote, rested on an identity of interest: a tax that fell on him fell equally on the electors and the members who voted it. No English elector need be touched by a tax on America, and so the notion of a virtual representation of the colonies was, he wrote, "a mere cobweb, spread to catch the unwary, and intangle the weak."²⁷

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766. On the same day it passed the Declaratory Act, affirming that it had full power to make laws binding the colonies "in all cases whatsoever."²⁸ In our previous article on the Glorious Revolution and Its Limits, we found that the settlement of 1689 had chained the king and not the legislature. The Declaratory Act stated that conclusion in a sentence, and the colonists' victory over the stamps left the principle behind it untouched.

Nature Beside the Constitution

The protests of 1765 rested overwhelmingly on English rights, but the appeal to nature had not gone quiet. In the Boston Gazette, in essays later collected as A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, John Adams wrote that the people had rights "antecedent to all earthly government," and that these were "Rights derived from the great legislator of the universe."²⁹ In the same essays he urged his readers to "study the law of nature" and to search into the spirit of the British constitution, as two studies and not one. In 1765 the two still ran side by side, and nature was the higher court of appeal rather than the ground of the case.

Then as Something Else

Regulation and Revenue

The next round came with the Townshend duties of 1767, on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the colonies. The most widely read reply was John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in the newspapers in 1767 and 1768. Dickinson granted what Otis had granted. Parliament, he wrote, "unquestionably possesses a legal authority to regulate the trade of Great Britain, and all her colonies." What it had never done before was lay duties in America for the purpose of raising a revenue: "This I call an innovation; and a most dangerous innovation."³⁰

Dickinson's line between regulation and revenue could not hold. A duty can regulate and raise money at once, and Parliament had declared that its authority had no lines in it at all. Over the next six years the line came under increasing pressure. By 1774 Jefferson and Wilson were denying Parliament's legislative authority over the colonies altogether, even as the Continental Congress still consented to acts of Parliament "bonfide, restrained to the regulation of our external commerce."³¹

The Boston Committee

The network that turned thirteen separate grievances into one cause was built in those years, and much of it was built in Boston. At a town meeting that opened on October 28, 1772, the town appointed a committee of twenty-one to state the rights of the colonists.³² Samuel Adams had proposed it. On November 20 the committee reported a statement of rights, printed in the town's Votes and Proceedings, which opened in a tone the Stamp Act Congress had not used:

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First, a right to life; secondly to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.³³

The report went on to their rights as Christians and as subjects, and named Locke once, on toleration. Its first section is traditionally given to Samuel Adams, its list of infringements to Joseph Warren, and its letter to the towns to Benjamin Church; the attributions are traditional rather than documented.³⁴

Samuel Adams's exploits have become legend, even though contemporary evidence lacks sourcing for him personally giving a signal for the destruction of the tea in December 1773. And to note, the line about an irate, tireless minority attributed under his name or brand dates from 1987.³⁵ However, the sources certainly show a town politician who saw early that the colonies would need a network of their own, and who spent years building one. That network, in an era prior to telecommunications, was extremely consequential.

In March 1773 the Virginia House of Burgesses appointed a standing committee of correspondence of eleven members — among them Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson — to obtain "the most early and authentic intelligence" of British measures and to correspond with the other colonies.³⁶ The committees carried the same news, and increasingly the same language, across the colonies. When Parliament answered the destruction of the tea with the Coercive Acts of 1774, closing the port of Boston and rewriting the Massachusetts charter, the network was ready to call a congress.³⁷

The Ground Shifts

The pamphlets of 1774 show the shift in progress. Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America, written in the summer of 1774 as proposed instructions for Virginia's delegates, argued that the colonists' ancestors had exercised "a right which nature has given to all men" when they left England, and it told the king that the colonists were claiming "their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate." It ended with a sentence that anticipates the Declaration's second paragraph: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."³⁸

James Wilson, a Scot who had come to Philadelphia in 1765, published Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament the same year, though he had written it in 1768, during the Townshend crisis.³⁹ He opened from first principles:

All men are, by nature, equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it.⁴⁰

Wilson had set out, he wrote, "to trace some constitutional line between those cases in which we ought, and those to which we ought not, to acknowledge the power of parliament over us."⁴¹ He found none, and concluded that the colonies could not be bound by the legislative authority of Parliament at all.

The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774, with delegates from twelve colonies. On October 14 it adopted its Declaration and Resolves. Its claim of right rested on three grounds at once: the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts. Nature came first in the list. Its first resolve claimed life, liberty, and property, a sequence the Boston committee had used two years earlier.⁴² The Congress was still loyal, and it still petitioned the king. But it had put the laws of nature at the head of its list.

Allyn Cox Mural in oil on Canvas 1973-1974 Great Experiment Hall Cox Corridors

In February 1775 a student at King's College in New York, Alexander Hamilton, answering a loyalist pamphleteer, set the charters aside as unnecessary:

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.⁴³

A month earlier, writing as Novanglus in the Boston Gazette, John Adams had described the principles his own loyalist opponent called revolutionary. "They are the principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, of Sydney, Harrington and Lock. The principles of nature and eternal reason."⁴⁴ Adams named, in one breath, the classical writers, the republican martyr and the philosopher of Article 10, and the English commonwealth writer Otis had called incomparable. He was not citing them. He was naming the shelf.

How Thirteen Habits Became One Cause

Our last article conceded that the thirteen colonies did not share a political history and left open how their separate habits became a single cause. The years 1772 to 1775 give most of the answer, in three parts.

The first was the network: the committees gave scattered assemblies and towns a common supply of information, and the Congress of 1774 gave them a common voice.
The second was the enemy. The Coercive Acts fell on Massachusetts, and every other colony could read in them what Parliament might do to its own charter, since the Declaratory Act had said that Parliament's authority reached all cases whatsoever.
The third was the ground itself. A right resting on Massachusetts's charter could be answered by rewriting the charter, as Parliament did in 1774. A right resting on the laws of nature belonged equally to a Virginian, a Pennsylvanian, and a Bostonian. Raising the rights of men above the rights of Englishmen was a philosophical development, and it also gave colonies with different charters the ground on which they could most easily stand together.

Common Sense

On January 9, 1776, a Philadelphia printer named Robert Bell advertised that a pamphlet called Common Sense was "this day published." The advertisement named no author. The author was Thomas Paine, a former English excise officer who had come to Philadelphia late in 1774.⁴⁵

Paine wrote for readers who had never opened Vattel, and began by separating society from government: "Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness." He mocked hereditary monarchy at its source, calling the Conqueror "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti." He made the case for independence as a matter of plain sense: "there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." And he raised the stakes past the colonies themselves: "The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth."⁴⁶

The pamphlet does not cite Locke. The authorities Paine names include Milton, the Italian jurist Giacinto Dragonetti, a handful of English historians and political writers, among them James Burgh, and the Old Testament, which he used at length against kingship.⁴⁷ The ideas the Declaration would state are present in Common Sense in plain speech, without learned citation. By 1776 the propositions had passed out of the books and into common speech.

How many read it is not known. Paine later claimed 120,000 copies, and then 150,000; a nineteenth-century biographer suggested half a million. No sales records survive. Working from the surviving editions, the literary historian Trish Loughran put the upper limit at about 75,000 copies, and thought the real figure much lower.⁴⁸ The influence was real without the numbers. Washington wrote from Cambridge at the end of January that the "sound Doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning" of Common Sense, added to the burning of Falmouth and Norfolk, would leave few people "at a loss to decide upon the Propriety of a Seperation."⁴⁹

Not everyone was persuaded. John Adams admired the case for independence and distrusted the plan of government that came with it. Paine, he told Abigail in March, "has a better Hand at pulling down than building."⁵⁰ The loyalist reply, The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, published in Philadelphia by "An American" and generally attributed to the Anglican minister Charles Inglis, warned that independence would divide the colonists and that "the ruin of America must be the inevitable consequence."⁵¹ Inglis was wrong about the outcome of the war and right about the division.

The Question Decided

Through the spring of 1776 the colonies moved ahead of their delegates. On April 12 the North Carolina Provincial Congress at Halifax empowered its delegates to concur with the others in declaring independency. On May 15 the Virginia Convention instructed its delegates to propose it.⁵² Across the colonies, towns, counties, and provincial bodies adopted their own statements calling for independence; the historian Pauline Maier counted at least ninety of these other declarations from April to July 1776.⁵³

Congress itself took the step in stages. On May 10 it recommended that colonies lacking adequate governments form new ones, and on May 15 it adopted a preamble, written by John Adams, declaring that every kind of authority under the Crown should be "totally Suppressed." Adams recorded decades later that James Duane of New York called the preamble "a Machine to fabricate independence."⁵⁴ Adams himself thought the matter was settled. The resolve of the fifteenth, he wrote two days later, amounted to "a total absolute Independence, not only of her Parliament but of her Crown."⁵⁵

On June 7 Richard Henry Lee moved, on Virginia's instruction, that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States," that alliances be sought abroad, and that "a plan of confederation be prepared."⁵⁶ The debate on June 8 and June 10, as Jefferson recorded it, turned on timing more than principle. Wilson, Livingston, Edward Rutledge, Dickinson, and others argued for delay; they described themselves as "friends to the measures themselves" but were against adopting them at that time.⁵⁷ Congress postponed the vote to July 1 and appointed the committee of five.

What Was on Jefferson's Desk

Jefferson did not draft from nothing, and he never claimed he had. In the weeks before, he had drafted a constitution for Virginia that opened with a preamble listing the king's offenses. Boyd found the charges in that preamble and in the Declaration "very similar and in many cases identical in phraseology," and concluded that Jefferson's first draft of the constitution "must now be regarded as a single document adapted to two purposes."⁵⁸ And on June 6 the Pennsylvania Evening Post printed the draft of a declaration of rights reported to the Virginia Convention, written principally by George Mason. Its first article read:

THAT all men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.⁵⁹

Set it beside the rough draft. Equally free and independant becomes created equal & independant. Inherent natural rights becomes rights inherent & inalienable. Pursuing and obtaining happiness becomes the pursuit of happiness. The ideas were common property by June 1776, and Jefferson did not need Mason to think them. The resemblance in wording is closer than common property explains, and the Virginia draft was in print in Philadelphia three weeks before he reported.

Jefferson reported the draft to Congress on June 28. On July 1, in committee of the whole, John Dickinson spoke at length against declaring independence then; the speech survives only in his own partial draft and notes.⁶⁰ Adams answered him. Nine colonies voted for the resolution that day. On July 2, with South Carolina changing its vote, Pennsylvania's changed, and a third Delaware delegate arrived to carry his colony, twelve colonies voted for independence, and New York's delegates, still bound by their instructions, abstained. Adams wrote to Abigail the next day that "The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America."⁶¹

Congress then turned to Jefferson's text and revised it. In Boyd's estimate it cut about a fourth of the draft.⁶² Jefferson later wrote that passages censuring the people of England were struck because many members still hoped for friends there. Another passage Congress removed is taken up below.

The Bookshelf

Where did the second paragraph come from?

The participants gave answers, late in life and against each other. In 1822 Adams told Timothy Pickering that there was "not an idea in it, but what had been hackney'd in Congress for two years before," and that its substance was in the Declaration and Resolves of 1774 and in the Boston committee's pamphlet.⁶³ In 1823 Jefferson replied to Madison that he could not judge whether that was so, that Richard Henry Lee had charged the Declaration with being copied from Locke, and that he had "turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it."⁶⁴ Two years later, writing to Henry Lee, he said the Declaration was not meant "to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," and that its authority rested on "the harmonising sentiments of the day" — the passage that names Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney.⁶⁵

The record gives three kinds of evidence, and they are not of equal strength.

What Was Named

The first kind is a source a participant named. Jefferson's list of 1825 is retrospective and given as an example rather than an inventory, but it is the author's own. Adams's list in Novanglus names the same men a year before independence. Otis named Locke, Vattel, and Harrington in 1764, and Hamilton in 1775 told his opponent to read "Grotius. Puffendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlemaqui."⁶⁶ The natural-law jurists — Grotius, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Vattel — appear in these lists more often than in the popular memory of the Revolution.

Locke's place is the clearest, and the parallel can be shown in the text.

In the Second Treatise:

But if a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the People, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; 'tis not to be wonder'd, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which Government was at first erected.⁶⁷

The Declaration, as adopted:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.⁶⁸

What Was on the Shelf

The second kind of evidence is a book a participant demonstrably owned, read, or recommended, whether or not he ever said it shaped the Declaration. Here the evidence is much fuller, and it reaches the writers of the seventeen articles before this one.

In August 1771 Jefferson sent Robert Skipwith, who had asked for help in buying books, a catalogue for a private library. Under politics and trade it lists "Montesquieu's spirit of laws," "Locke on government," and "Sidney on government." Elsewhere on the list are Cicero's Offices and Tusculan questions, "Hume's essays" and Hume's History of England, three works of Lord Kames, "Smith's theory of moral sentiments," "Voltaire's works," Blackstone, Bolingbroke, and Milton.⁶⁹ In 1769 his merchants had invoiced him for "Locke on Government," Burlamaqui's Droit naturel, Montesquieu, and Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society. Within months most of his library burned with his mother's house at Shadwell; he wrote in February 1770 that he had lost "almost every book."⁷⁰ He had read his law in Coke, under George Wythe, and his legal commonplace book, begun as a law student and kept for decades, carries extracts from Coke, Kames, Montesquieu, and Beccaria.⁷¹ At William and Mary he had studied under William Small, a Scot educated at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Small, Jefferson wrote in 1821, was "what probably fixed the destinies of my life," and from his conversation Jefferson "got my first views of the expansion of science."⁷²

Adams's shelf is documented in his own hand. At twenty, keeping school in Worcester, he recorded "Reading Hutcheson's Introduction to moral Phylosophy." In 1760, taking stock as a young lawyer, he admitted that he had never read "any Part of the best authors, Puffendorf and Grotius." In 1776 he told William Hooper that in his early youth "the Works of Sidney, Harrington, Lock, Milton, Nedham, Neville, Burnet, Hoadley, were put into my Hands."⁷³ Hamilton, in the same pamphlet that recommended the jurists, quoted the maxim that in contriving a government "every man ought to be supposed a knave" — David Hume's maxim, from his essay "Of the Independency of Parliament," though Hamilton's text names only "a celebrated author."⁷⁴

The Scots reached America through schoolrooms as well as books. Previously we followed Francis Hutcheson's student Francis Alison to his school at New London, Pennsylvania, whose pupils included three later signers of the Declaration. John Witherspoon came from Scotland to preside over the College of New Jersey in 1768, and from 1769 lectured on moral philosophy in a course that follows the order of Hutcheson's system, though how far it depends on him is disputed; James Madison graduated under him in 1771, and Witherspoon signed the Declaration.⁷⁵ James Wilson studied at St Andrews and at Glasgow and Edinburgh before emigrating.⁷⁶

What Moved Through the Language

The third kind of evidence is the hardest to establish and, for the questions of this series, the most important. It is a proposition that appears in the Declaration, that one of the earlier traditions articulated, and that no participant attributes to it. Here the evidence is inferential, and each inference has to show its chain.

The Thomist line is the clearest example. Neither Aquinas nor Richard Hooker appears among the authorities named in the colonial writings quoted here. Aquinas had defined law as an ordinance of reason directed to the common good. Hooker, like Aquinas, rested natural law on the eternal law of God, and the Elizabethan churchman wrote within the scholastic tradition Article 4 traced to Aquinas.⁷⁷ Locke built the opening of the Second Treatise on Hooker. The equality of men by nature, he wrote, "the judicious Hooker looks upon as so evident in itself, and beyond all question," that he makes it the foundation of the duties men owe one another.⁷⁸ From there Locke recast political power as a trust, held for the people's good and forfeited when abused, the language Otis used in 1764. Carl Becker put the chain more bluntly: "Jefferson copied Locke and Locke quoted Hooker."⁷⁹ Becker's sentence is an interpretation, not a document. What the documents support is a sequence — law ordered to the common good, natural law rooted in God's reason, political power held in trust — carried from the scholastics through Hooker into Locke, whose book Otis, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson all cited or owned. Article 4 called the line a braid rather than a single strand, and this is what a braid looks like in the documents.

The Levellers are a harder case. None of the colonial writings quoted here cites Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, or the Agreement of the People, and a legal historian who looked for the line of influence in 1991 found that it had not been traced.⁸⁰ What survived was the proposition Rainsborough put at Putney — that a man ought first by his own consent to put himself under a government — in the forms it took in the writers the colonists did read. Wilson's sentence of 1774 states that proposition. Article 9 called the Levellers "early travelers on a road that others would map." The documents of 1776 support the description and no more.

The Scots present the reverse problem: much reading and no named debt. Garry Wills argued in 1978 that the Declaration's moral vocabulary came from Hutcheson and the Scottish moral-sense school. Ronald Hamowy answered in 1979 that Hutcheson is not once quoted, cited, or recommended in any of Jefferson's writings, and that the evidence of Jefferson's familiarity with Locke had been set aside.⁸¹ The evidence sorts by person. Jefferson recommended Kames, Hume, and Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and studied under a Scot. Adams read Hutcheson. Hutcheson's moral philosophy reached Pennsylvania through Alison's school, and Witherspoon taught his own version of it to Madison's cohort at Princeton. Wilson was educated in Scotland. That is an intellectual environment, not a chain to any clause of the Declaration, and what it supplied is more aptly described as a vocabulary than a source. The moral-sense writers spoke of moral truths apprehended immediately by a faculty every person has. That adjacent vocabulary helps explain why a claim of self-evident rights was intelligible to Jefferson's readers, without establishing where Jefferson's word came from; Locke's usage is the nearer one. Hume and Smith had also examined how order in law, commerce, and manners can grow out of human interaction without being designed by any one authority, though neither thought government unnecessary. That line of thought bore less on the Declaration than on the problems of organizing a government that followed it.

Voltaire was on the shelf too — "Voltaire's works" on Jefferson's list of 1771, and the Traité sur la tolérance, which Franklin quoted in a letter of 1764 — and Article 15 found that his case against persecution met a debate already under way in America.⁸² The Wealth of Nations was published in London on March 9, 1776; Article 13 found the shared year a coincidence of date rather than a connection.

The classics were everywhere and almost always in the background. Adams wrote in 1765 that the first settlers of New England had been familiar with "the historians, orators, poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome."⁸³ Bernard Bailyn, surveying the pamphlets of the Revolution, found the classical citations abundant and mostly illustrative, and the Enlightenment citations often offhand; what he found organizing the colonists' thought was the English opposition tradition of the early eighteenth century, the radical Whig writers who carried the commonwealth arguments of the previous century forward into the age of Walpole.⁸⁴ Donald Lutz's count of citations in American political writing, which Article 14 used for Montesquieu, found no single European writer or tradition dominant.⁸⁵

The Synthesis

The phrase in Jefferson's letter of 1825 — the harmonising sentiments of the day — fits the documents better than either the single-source or the no-source account. The immediate documentary world of the second paragraph is visible: Jefferson's own Virginia preamble, Mason's draft in print in Philadelphia, the congressional declarations of 1774 and 1776, and an exceptionally close parallel to Locke. Behind that stood an overlapping canon. Jefferson named Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney in 1825; Adams had named all four before independence. The books and educations of the revolutionary generation widen the circle to the natural-law jurists, the commonwealth writers, Coke and the common law, the Scots, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Behind some of those stand older traditions still: the scholastic natural law that Hooker carried, and the Levellers' claim of consent, present in the propositions and absent from the citations. None of these writers is thereby the source of a sentence. Together they mark the world of thought in which the sentences could be written.

Nor was the Declaration a compilation. Jefferson did not sit down with these books open, and he said so. The documents show a generation of educated political men formed by an overlapping canon, who had reasoned from it in newspapers, town meetings, and assemblies for twelve years, and who by the summer of 1776 no longer needed to cite it. The sentences had become their own.

The Honest Reckoning

The Struck Passage

Among the passages Congress removed from Jefferson's draft was a charge against the king:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.⁸⁶

The passage went on to accuse the king of vetoing colonial attempts to restrain "this execrable commerce," and then turned to a second charge: that he was now "exciting those very people to rise in arms among us." This referred to the proclamation of November 7, 1775, in which Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, declared free the enslaved people of rebel owners who were able and willing to bear arms for the king.⁸⁷ The same paragraph that called the slave trade war against human nature condemned the king for offering freedom to its victims.

Jefferson recorded why it was struck. The clause, he wrote, "was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it." He added that "our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures," since their people, though they held few slaves, had been considerable carriers of them to others.⁸⁸ Adams wrote in 1822 that he had admired the passage, knowing "his Southern Bretheren would never suffer to pass in Congress."⁸⁹

The man who wrote it held people in slavery when he wrote it, and for the rest of his life. Article 17 quoted Burke's observation that among the slaveholding gentry of Virginia freedom was a kind of rank and privilege. The struck passage and the self-evident truth were written by the same hand in the same month, and the hand did not reconcile them.

The Yelps

The contradiction was visible at the time, and opponents of the colonies said so. Samuel Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny of 1775 asked: "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"⁹⁰ Johnson was writing in the ministry's defense, and the question was a fair one anyway.

The people with the greatest standing to ask it did ask it, in the colonists' own language. In January 1777 eight Black men in Massachusetts, among them Prince Hall, petitioned the legislature on behalf of "a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country." They had, they wrote, "in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the great Parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind."⁹¹ They were reading the Declaration as written. It was the colonists who had not yet learned to.

The Others Outside

The reckoning does not stop with slavery. The Declaration's list of grievances charges the king with endeavoring to bring on the inhabitants of the frontiers "the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."⁹² The Declaration and Resolves of 1774 condemned the Quebec Act for "establishing the Roman Catholic religion" in Canada and "erecting a tyranny there."⁹³ And the crowds that pulled down Hutchinson's house in 1765 were the forerunners of the crowds and committees that, in the war that followed, tarred and drove out neighbors who stayed loyal, and of the state laws that confiscated their property; some sixty thousand loyalists left the United States.⁹⁴ The rights the Declaration called self-evident were claimed in a movement that denied them, in different ways, to many of the people it touched.

None of this cancels the principle. Each of these exclusions was challenged, sooner or later, in the Declaration's own words, and the challenges drew their force from the fact that the words would not stay inside the limits their authors set. We previously said of the Levellers that "they minted language whose logic ran past the limits its coiners set." It is truer of 1776.

The Skeptic's Case

That the Principles Followed the Interest

The strongest objection is that the progression traced here is an illusion of hindsight. The colonists resisted taxes, and they reached for whatever plea would defeat the tax in front of them. When charters served, they cited charters; when the charters were rewritten, they cited nature. The sequence of pleas tracks the sequence of Parliament's measures, which is what one would expect if the pleas were instruments.

Much of this is true. The pleas did follow the measures, and interest was present in every room. But nature was not a late discovery; Otis had invoked it in 1764 while pledging obedience. What changed was its ordinal rank, and on that the objection has its limits. A movement looking only for instruments would have kept the strongest legal ones foremost, and the charters and the English constitution were the strongest legal footing the colonists had. They subordinated them to an appeal to nature that no court would enforce, that bound them to principles their own societies violated, and that their enslaved neighbors would immediately use against them. That is a costly choice. The likelier explanation is that by 1776 the men who had reached for nature believed what they had spent twelve years saying.

That the Loyalists Had the Better Constitutional Case

On the law as Westminster understood it, Parliament was right. Our previous article on the English revolution, Article 11, established that the settlement of 1689 made Parliament supreme in England. Blackstone, in 1765, described its authority as "sovereign and uncontrollable," and the Declaratory Act applied that doctrine to the colonies.⁹⁵ Otis conceded in 1764 that the colonies must obey. And the loyalist warning that independence would divide the colonists came true: tens of thousands of loyalists left the country, many of them stripped of their property by state laws passed in the name of liberty.

The reply has two parts. The first is that the imperial constitution was unwritten, and where sovereignty lay within the empire, and whether it could be divided, was the question in dispute. Parliament's doctrine controlled the institutions at Westminster, which did not settle the question for the people it was applied to. The second is that the objection explains the colonists' movement rather than refuting it. Once they understood that the English constitution, as Westminster interpreted it, gave them no protection against Parliament, they had two choices: accept that Parliament could bind them in all cases whatsoever, or locate their rights somewhere Parliament could not reach. The rise of the laws of nature above the rights of Englishmen is the record of that choice. The loyalists held the metropolitan doctrine and lost the country, because the patriots had moved the question to ground that doctrine did not reach.

That the Bookshelf Proves Too Much

The third objection is aimed at the method. Educated loyalists had been schooled in the same colleges and the same books as the patriots. If the same shelf produced both the Declaration and the case against it, the shelf explains nothing; showing that a book was owned shows only that it was owned.

The objection is right that a book on a shelf is not a cause, which is why a named source counts for more than an owned one, and a close textual parallel for more than either. But the objection mistakes what the shelf is evidence for. It does not show why one reader chose independence and another loyalty. It shows what both of them could think with, and what a sentence like all men are created equal meant to the people who heard it read. A shared vocabulary is the condition of a debate, not the conclusion of one. The men who disagreed about independence in 1776 understood each other well, because they had read so many of the same books.

Self-Evident

On July 8, 1776, the Declaration was read to a crowd in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House. "Three cheers rended the Welkin," Adams wrote the next day, and the bells rang all day and almost all night.⁹⁶ On July 9 it was read to the brigades of the Continental Army in New York, and that night a crowd pulled down the statue of George III that stood on the Bowling Green. Washington's orders the next day credited the men's zeal and disapproved the manner.⁹⁷

The document they cheered rested on one word written over three. In 1764 James Otis had invoked the law of God and nature and told the colonists, in the same pamphlet, that they must obey. In 1774 Congress placed nature first among three grounds and still consented to Parliament's regulation of trade. In 1776 nature became the ground that justified separation itself, and its truths were called self-evident — needing no grant, no statute, and no Saxon past. The ideas had been in the colonies all along. What changed was the ordering. The books that taught them to reason that way had come from Rome and from the medieval schools, from Coke's courtroom and Sidney's scaffold and Locke's exile, from Glasgow lecture halls and French books. By July 1776 they had become an American creed.

The Declaration settled why the colonies were free. It did not settle how a free people would govern itself across a continent, and Lee's resolution of June 7 had already named the question: a plan of confederation was still to be prepared. Articles 15 and 16 of this series left the Americans needing consent that could be organized across a great distance and limits that would hold when the consenting majority wanted them not to. The Declaration supplied neither. It supplied the reason to look for them.

This is the road to 1776.

Self-Reflection Prompts

In 1764 James Otis argued that an act of Parliament against natural equity was void, and also that the colonies must obey Parliament until it repealed its own acts. Can a person hold both positions honestly — and if a law is void, what does obeying it mean?
The colonists' claims became more universal as Parliament rewrote their charters. Is a right more secure when it rests on a written grant that can be revoked, or on an assertion about human nature that no court enforces?
The Declaration's second paragraph has a close parallel in Mason's draft, a closer one in Locke, and a shelf of books behind both. When ideas have become so common that their authors no longer cite them, are they more alive than when they were cited, or less?
Congress struck Jefferson's passage on the slave trade in deference to South Carolina and Georgia, and kept the sentence that all men are created equal. Was a declaration that left the contradiction standing better than no common declaration at all?
The Liberty Test. The colonists claimed that no government could take their property without their consent, because no individual could. Apply the test to the colonists themselves in 1776 — to the enslaved, to the loyalists whose property was confiscated, to the nations west of the Proclamation line. Did the Revolution leave Americans more free or more governed, and does the answer depend on which Americans are counted?

Endnotes

Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 67, consulted in the Internet Archive scan. The text printed by the Avalon Project from Tansill, Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union (1927), differs in the first resolve, reading "liberty and property: and" and "any foreign power whatever"; the Journals read "sovereign power," and the epigraph follows the Journals. "N. C. D." is nemine contra dicente, no one dissenting.
Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), editorial note, "The Declaration of Independence," Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0176-0001; Jefferson, "Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress," ibid., 01-01-02-0160. Jefferson's later account of showing the draft to Franklin and Adams is in his letter to James Madison, August 30, 1823, Founders Online, 03-20-02-0123. Adams's accounts differ: in his Autobiography and in a letter to Timothy Pickering of August 6, 1822, he describes a subcommittee of Jefferson and himself, which Jefferson denied.
"Jefferson's 'original Rough draught' of the Declaration of Independence," in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:243–47, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0176-0004; the page range is that given by the Library of Congress, "Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents," which reproduces Boyd's text. Quoted in the original spelling and with Jefferson's ampersands.
Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:243–47, note 2 to the rough draft: the phrase "was changed to 'self-evident' before Adams made his copy. This change has been attributed to Franklin, but the opinion rests on no conclusive evidence, and there seems to be even stronger evidence that the change was made by TJ or at least that it is in his handwriting," citing Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 22–23, which has not been inspected here. The attribution to Franklin continues to be repeated, including by a Library of Congress curator in press coverage of a 2026 exhibition.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4, ch. 7, "Of Maxims," §§1–2, as transcribed by the Chinese University of Hong Kong: "Maxims or axioms are self-evident propositions," and knowledge is self-evident where agreement or disagreement "is perceived immediately by itself, without the intervention or help of any other." Ronald Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 36, no. 4 (October 1979): 503 ff., argues for the Lockean sense against a derivation from the Scottish common-sense school, and points also to William Duncan's Elements of Logick; no particular textbook is asserted here as Jefferson's source. An earlier draft said the usage came from the logic textbooks the colonial colleges taught; that connection is conjectural and was withdrawn.
The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, as printed by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.
The American Revenue Act of 1764, preamble, as printed by Teaching American History, which gives no print edition; the act received the royal assent on April 5, 1764.
The Molasses Act of 1733 had laid a duty of six pence a gallon on foreign molasses; on the reduction to three pence and the provisions for enforcement, see the Independence Hall Association, "The Sugar Act," ushistory.org. The statute citation of the 1764 act is not asserted here.
"Instructions of the Town of Boston to Its Representatives in the General Court. May, 1764," in Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. 1, 5, consulted in the Internet Archive scan. Cushing's note names the drafting committee as Richard Dana, Samuel Adams, John Ruddock, Nathaniel Bethune, and Joseph Green, reporting on May 24, 1764; the traditional attribution of the text to Samuel Adams alone is not adopted here.
James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), 5, 8, and 22, as transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership from Evans 9773, University of Michigan Digital Library, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N07655.0001.001. The page numbers are the Text Creation Partnership's page markers.
Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 9 ("originally and ultimately in the people"; "in trust, and on a condition") and 34–35 ("Our rights as men and free born British subjects"; "by the law of God, and nature, by the common law, and by act of parliament"), Text Creation Partnership text. Otis's introduction also grounds government in "the unchangeable will of GOD, the author of nature" (8). An earlier draft presented the appeal to nature as arriving after 1764; Otis's pamphlet shows it present from the start, and the body now describes a change in the rank of natural rights rather than their appearance.
Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 37, Text Creation Partnership text.
Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 39, Text Creation Partnership text. On the following page Otis writes that "let the parliament lay what burthens they please on us, we must, it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve us."
Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 41, Text Creation Partnership text.
"Adams' Minutes of the Argument: Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, 24 February 1761," in Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 2, Founders Online, 05-02-02-0006-0002-0002. The editors' note 21 identifies the authority as Bonham's Case, 8 Co. Rep. 113b, 118, cited by Otis from the extract in Viner's Abridgment. Adams's longer "Abstract" of the argument, dated about April 1761, survives only in a text printed in the Massachusetts Spy in 1773 and is described by the editors as a reworked and partly propagandistic version; it is not quoted here.
Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. 2, editorial note, "Petition of Lechmere (Writs of Assistance)," Founders Online, 05-02-02-0006-0002-0001. The characterization in the body paraphrases the editors, who write that Otis's notion that the courts had a constitutional function in controlling Parliament "was surely one source of the modern concept of their power," while falling short of later judicial review.
William Tudor, The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823), 76–77, consulted in the Internet Archive scan, where the sentence reads that Otis argued "against the tyranny of taxation without representation," and that "taxation without representation is tyranny" became "a common maxim in the mouth of every one." The scan's text is damaged at the page break, and the wording between the two clauses has been read from the page image only in part. Tudor repeats the formula at 90 and 118, in each case in his own voice. No text of 1761 or 1764 attributes the sentence to Otis.
J. L. Bell, "'No Taxation without Representation' (Part 1)" and "(Part 2)," Journal of the American Revolution, May 21–22, 2013. Bell locates the headline over Lord Camden's speech against the Declaratory Act in the London Magazine for February 1768; the February issue's table of contents lists the speech, but the headline page itself has not been seen here, and some secondary accounts give August 1768. Bell notes that the phrase does not appear in Camden's speech as first printed in 1767.
The Stamp Act, March 22, 1765, as printed by the Avalon Project from Danby Pickering, The Statutes at Large; the act took effect "from and after the first day of November, one thousand seven hundred and sixty five." On its place in the revenue program, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953). No pinpoint is asserted.
On the uncertain record, see the editorial note to Thomas Wharton to Benjamin Franklin, July 16, 1765, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 12, Founders Online, 01-12-02-0109, which reports that the Journal of the House of Burgesses contains four resolves, that the Newport Mercury of June 24, 1765, printed six and the Maryland Gazette of July 4, 1765, seven, and that the Virginia Gazette never printed any version; and Colonial Williamsburg, "Patrick Henry's Resolutions," which states that a fifth resolve was adopted and expunged the following day. Sources differ on how many resolves passed before the expunging. Henry had been elected to the house earlier in May 1765.
Resolve 3, as printed by Colonial Williamsburg, "Patrick Henry's Resolutions," from the text adopted by the House.
"Journal of a French Traveller in the Colonies, 1765, I," American Historical Review 26 (July 1921): 745–46, entry for May 30, 1765, consulted in the Internet Archive scan of the JSTOR text; quoted in the traveler's spelling. The traveler is not identified by name.
John Burk, The History of Virginia, vol. 3 (Petersburg: Dickson and Pescud, 1805), 309, which reads in part "Sir, if this be treason, continued he, make the most of it"; William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817), 65, which gives the familiar wording. Both consulted in Internet Archive scans; the Internet Archive record for Burk's third volume dates it 1804, while its title page reads 1805. Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry (1887), traces the anecdote to the recollection of Judge John Tyler.
Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, August 30, 1765, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, vol. 1, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 84, ch. 17, "The Second Stamp Act Riots, 26 August 1765," consulted at colonialsociety.org. To Lord Halifax the same day he wrote that he had "but just sufficient notice to escape with my children." On the events of August 14, Hutchinson to William Bollan, September 1, 1765, in the same volume.
"Resolutions of the Continental Congress, October 19, 1765," as printed by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, resolves III and IV.
[Thomas Whately], The Regulations Lately Made concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered (London: J. Wilkie, 1765), as printed by Teaching American History, which gives no page numbers. The pamphlet appeared anonymously; the attribution to Whately is the usual one, and the edition of 1775 was published under George Grenville's name.
Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament (Annapolis: Jonas Green, 1765), as transcribed for a course reader at Oberlin College; no page is asserted.
An Act Repealing the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act, both dated March 18, 1766, as printed by the Avalon Project from Pickering, Statutes at Large.
John Adams, "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law," No. 1, Boston Gazette, [August 12, 1765], and No. 4, [October 21, 1765], in Papers of John Adams, vol. 1, Founders Online, 06-01-02-0052-0004 and -0007. The second phrase in the body is from No. 4: "Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution."
John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, Letter II, as printed by Teaching American History from Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of John Dickinson, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895), 312–22. The Townshend Revenue Act (7 Geo. III c. 46) passed on June 29, 1767, and its duties took effect on November 20, 1767, the date under which the Avalon Project prints it; on the date of passage, see the American Battlefield Trust, "Townshend Revenue Act."
Declaration and Resolves, resolve 4, as printed by the Avalon Project from Tansill, in the original spelling "bonfide." The resolve continues by "excluding every idea of taxation internal or external, for raising a revenue on the subjects, in America, without their consent." An earlier draft said the colonial writers stopped drawing a line inside Parliament's power after 1768; Congress still drew one in 1774, and the body was corrected.
Robert Treat Paine's draft of the reply of the town of Taunton to the Boston committee, in The Papers of Robert Treat Paine, vol. 2, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://masshist.org/publications/rtpp/index.php/view/RTP2d530, for the dates of the meeting; Massachusetts Historical Society, "Committees of Correspondence," for the twenty-one members and Samuel Adams's proposal.
"The Rights of the Colonists," in The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1772), as printed in Cushing, Writings of Samuel Adams, 2:350–59, and by Teaching American History. The passage on Locke concerns religious toleration.
The traditional division is reported in, among others, the editorial apparatus of the Joseph Warren papers project (drjosephwarren.com). The standard study of the committee is Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), which has not been consulted here. An earlier draft attributed to Brown a judgment on the authorship of each section; because that judgment could not be checked against the book, it was withdrawn.
Ray Raphael, "The Signal of Sam Adams," Journal of the American Revolution, January 23, 2014, drawing on contemporary accounts in the Boston Evening Post and Boston Gazette of December 20, 1773, and tracing the signal story to William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (Boston, 1865); Barry Popik, "It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority," barrypopik.com, which finds the line in no writing of Adams and traces it to a magazine article by Diane Ackerman reprinted in the Deseret News, September 6, 1987.
Virginia Resolves establishing a Committee of Correspondence, March 12, 1773, as printed by the Avalon Project from the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia.
The Boston Port Act and the Massachusetts Government Act, as printed by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, under the dates March 31, 1774, and May 20, 1774.
Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (Williamsburg, 1774), as printed by the Avalon Project; the text should be checked against Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:121–37, which has not been consulted here.
The composition in 1768 and publication in 1774 are stated in the editorial notes at constitution.org ("Originally written in 1768") and in the Contextus edition, which places composition during the crisis over the Townshend Acts. Wilson's own prefatory advertisement has not been inspected here.
James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, 1774), in Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, eds., Collected Works of James Wilson, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), as excerpted by the Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism project; the conclusion is quoted from the 1774 text at constitution.org. No pinpoint is asserted.
As quoted in George W. Carey, "James Wilson: Political Thought and the Constitutional Convention," The Imaginative Conservative, October 2022, citing Wilson's works at 2:721; the edition Carey cites is not named on the page and the passage has not been seen in a primary printing here. The body's statement that Wilson found no such line rests on the pamphlet's conclusion, quoted from the 1774 text at constitution.org, that the colonies cannot be bound by the legislative authority of Parliament; the words in which Wilson reports finding none have not been verified.
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1:67.
Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, [February 23,] 1775, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0057.
John Adams, "Novanglus," No. I, Boston Gazette, January 23, 1775, in Papers of John Adams, vol. 2, Founders Online, 06-02-02-0072-0002. Adams is identifying the principles his opponent, "Massachusettensis," had called revolutionary; the spellings "Sydney" and "Lock" are his.
The advertisement in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, January 9, 1776, as transcribed by the Adverts 250 Project (adverts250project.org) and the Declaration Resources Project at Harvard University; the Pennsylvania Gazette and Pennsylvania Journal announced publication on January 10, which is the date usually given. Paine's introduction to the enlarged edition, dated February 14, 1776, states that who the author was "is wholly unnecessary to the Public."
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, quoted from the enlarged edition (Philadelphia: W. and T. Bradford, February 14, 1776) as transcribed by Project Gutenberg. The wording has not been compared with Robert Bell's first edition.
Paine, Common Sense. The absence of Locke rests on a search of the full Project Gutenberg text of the enlarged edition.
Ray Raphael, "Thomas Paine's Inflated Numbers," Journal of the American Revolution, March 20, 2013, which reports Paine's claim of 120,000 in his "Forester" letter of April 8, 1776, and of 150,000 in a letter to Henry Laurens of January 14, 1779, and Moncure Conway's estimate of half a million in 1892; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), whose estimate of an upper limit of about 75,000 is given here as Raphael reports it. Paine's letters and Loughran's text have not been consulted directly, and no page is asserted.
George Washington to Joseph Reed, January 31, 1776, in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 3, Founders Online, 03-03-02-0163, in the original spelling.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 19, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, Founders Online, 04-01-02-0235.
[Charles Inglis], The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, in Certain Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense. By an American (Philadelphia: James Humphreys, Jr., 1776), Evans 14809, as transcribed by the Text Creation Partnership. The pamphlet was published anonymously; the attribution to Inglis is the standard one.
The Halifax Resolves, April 12, 1776, as reprinted by NCpedia from the North Carolina Manual; the resolution of the Virginia Convention, May 15, 1776, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0152. North Carolina empowered its delegates to concur; Virginia instructed its delegates to propose.
Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997), ch. 2, "The 'Other' Declarations of Independence," and appendix A: "There are, in fact, at least ninety documents in that category, and perhaps still more waiting to be found." The wording has been confirmed by full-text search of the Knopf edition; the pages, 48–49, are as cited from a 1998 printing by a secondary source and have not been seen here.
The resolution of May 10 and the preamble of May 15, 1776, as quoted in the Papers of John Jay, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0144, n., and in John Adams to James Warren, May 15, 1776, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, Founders Online, 06-04-02-0079; the printed text is in Journals of the Continental Congress, 4:357–58, which has not been consulted directly. Duane's phrase is reported in Adams's Autobiography, Founders Online, 01-03-02-0016-0029, written decades later; Adams's contemporary notes of the debate record an unnamed member protesting "this Piece of Mechanism, this Preamble," Founders Online, 01-02-02-0006-0007.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 1, Founders Online, 04-01-02-0266.
Lee's Resolution, June 7, 1776, as printed by the Avalon Project from Tansill, Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union.
Jefferson, "Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress," Founders Online, 01-01-02-0160. Boyd judges that the notes were probably put in their present form in the late summer or autumn of 1776 and certainly before June 1, 1783; they are a reconstruction, not a verbatim record.
Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, editorial note to Jefferson's drafts of a constitution for Virginia, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0161-0001. Jefferson's own account of how the preamble came to be adopted in Virginia is in his letter to Augustus B. Woodward, April 3, 1825, Founders Online, 98-01-02-5105.
The committee draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, article 1, as printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, June 6, 1776, and reproduced by the Papers of Thomas Jefferson project, Princeton University, "Virginia Declaration of Rights." On the printings, see the editorial note in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 1, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0054-0000. Mason's own first draft reads "born equally free and independant" and "pursueing and obtaining Happiness and Safety"; see Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), as reproduced by ConSource. The adopted text of June 12, 1776, reads "by nature equally free and independent."
Editorial note in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 3, Founders Online, 01-03-02-0016-0142, which reports that the speech survives as a partial rough draft extended by notes, edited by J. H. Powell in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 65 (October 1941): 458–81.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, the second of two letters of that date, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, Founders Online, 04-02-02-0016. Early printings of the letter were misdated and altered. The account of the votes of July 1 and 2 follows Jefferson's "Notes of Proceedings."
Boyd, editorial note, "The Declaration of Independence," Founders Online, 01-01-02-0176-0001: "Congress excised about a fourth of the text." Adams, writing to Pickering in 1822, said that Congress "cut off about a quarter part of it." On the passages concerning the people of England, Jefferson, "Notes of Proceedings."
John Adams to Timothy Pickering, August 6, 1822, Founders Online, 99-02-02-7674, an unannotated early-access text from the Pickering Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The pamphlet Adams describes, "voted and printed by the Town of Boston before the first Congress met," is the Boston committee's report of 1772, which he attributed to Otis "as I suppose" and Samuel Adams.
Jefferson to Madison, August 30, 1823, Founders Online, 03-20-02-0123.
Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, Founders Online, 98-01-02-5212, an unannotated early-access text, which reads "harmonising" and "Sidney Etc."; the edition of Paul Leicester Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899), 343, quoted in Article 10, reads "harmonizing" and "Sidney, &c."
Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0057, in the original spelling and punctuation.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, §225, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Mentor, 1965), as printed in Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders' Constitution, vol. 1, ch. 3, doc. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
The Declaration of Independence, as transcribed by the National Archives.
Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, with a list of books for a private library, August 3, 1771, in Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:76–81, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0056.
Perkins, Buchanan & Brown to Jefferson, October 2, 1769, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0022; Jefferson to John Page, February 21, 1770, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0023, in which the manuscript is damaged. Whether any of the books invoiced in 1769 survived the fire is not established.
On the Legal Commonplace Book, begun when Jefferson was a law student in the 1760s and added to for decades, see David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, eds., Jefferson's Legal Commonplace Book, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), as described by the publisher; for the authors excerpted, see the concordance of Jefferson's early reading maintained by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's library at Monticello, which describes itself as incomplete. The dating of individual entries before or after 1776 is not asserted, and Jefferson's copy of Beccaria appears to have been an edition of 1774.
Jefferson, "Notes on Early Career (the so-called 'Autobiography')," [January 6–July 29, 1821], Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, Founders Online, 03-17-02-0324-0002. On Small's birth in Scotland and his education at Marischal College, see the Lunar Society, "William Small"; the year of his degree is not asserted.
John Adams, Diary, January 16, 1756, Diary and Autobiography, vol. 1, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0002-0001, whose editors note that Hutcheson volumes survive among Adams's books at the Boston Public Library; Diary, November 26, 1760, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0005-0007-0014; Adams to William Hooper, [before March 27, 1776], Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, Founders Online, 06-04-02-0026-0002. The printed Thoughts on Government of April 1776 carries the same list of names.
Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0057; David Hume, "Of the Independency of Parliament," in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, as printed by davidhume.org. Hamilton's footnote to "a celebrated author" has not been seen in the text consulted, and the body does not assert that he named Hume.
Princeton University Library, Mudd Manuscript Library, finding aid for the John Witherspoon Collection (C0274), on his presidency from 1768 and his signature; Princeton University Library, student notebooks of Witherspoon's lectures on moral philosophy dated 1771–1772, 1772–1773, and 1774; Dafydd Mills Daniel, Journal of Scottish Thought 14, no. 1 (2025), doi:10.57132/jst.414, on delivery from 1769, on the charge that the lectures follow Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy, and on his own contrary view; and Gideon Mailer, John Witherspoon's American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2017), which disputes the Hutchesonian reading. The lectures were first printed in 1800, after Witherspoon's death. On Madison's graduation in 1771, see Library of Congress, "James Madison: Timeline." On Alison's school, see Article 12.
University of St Andrews, Biographical Register, entry for James Wilson: student at United College, 1757–1761, "Also at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities," "Went to America 1765." No Scottish degree is recorded.
On Aquinas's definition of law as an ordinance of reason for the common good, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 90, a. 4; see Article 4. On Hooker, Robert Faulkner, "Richard Hooker (1554–1600) and Natural Law," Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (Witherspoon Institute, 2015), which states that Hooker's law of reason, like Aquinas's law of nature, is derived from the eternal law, and that Locke justified his argument with sixteen quotations from "the judicious Hooker." An earlier draft said that a single Thomist premise reached Philadelphia; the body now describes a sequence of related ideas.
Locke, Second Treatise, §5, as printed in the Project Gutenberg text from the edition of C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Locke cites Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, book 1, again at §§15, 60, and 61.
Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 79, in the sentence "The lineage is direct: Jefferson copied Locke and Locke quoted Hooker." The page is given on the external auditor's reading of the Online Library of Liberty scan; the scan consulted here placed the sentence near p. 79 but its page numbering could not be confirmed.
Michael Kent Curtis, "In Pursuit of Liberty: The Levellers and the American Bill of Rights," Constitutional Commentary 8 (1991): 359 ff., at 391, which states that the course of Leveller influence "has not been traced" and that one historian's claim that revolutionary pamphlets cited Leveller writings is unsupported by a footnote. Rainsborough's words at Putney are quoted in Article 9.
Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978); Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment," which states that Hutcheson "is not once quoted, cited, referred to, or recommended, in any connection, in any of Jefferson's writings," and that Jefferson owned three of Hutcheson's works by 1815.
Jefferson to Skipwith, August 3, 1771; Benjamin Franklin to Henry Bouquet, September 30, 1764, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 11, Founders Online, 01-11-02-0105, quoting "a Piece of Voltaire's on the Subject of Relegious Toleration."
Adams, "Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law," No. 1, Founders Online, 06-01-02-0052-0004.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), ch. 2, "Sources and Traditions." The body paraphrases Bailyn's argument; his wording has not been checked against the book here, and no pinpoint is asserted. See also Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
Donald S. Lutz, "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (March 1984): 189–97.
Jefferson's rough draft, Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:243–47, Founders Online, 01-01-02-0176-0004, in the original spelling.
Proclamation of John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, November 7, 1775, issued on board the ship William off Norfolk, as printed by Encyclopedia Virginia from the Library of Virginia.
Jefferson, "Notes of Proceedings," Founders Online, 01-01-02-0160. Jefferson later incorporated these notes into his Autobiography of 1821.
Adams to Pickering, August 6, 1822.
Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny; An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London: T. Cadell, 1775), as printed at samueljohnson.com from The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 14 (Troy, N.Y.: Pafraets, 1913).
Petition of Prince Hall and others to the Massachusetts legislature, January 13, 1777, Massachusetts Archives, vol. 212, as transcribed in James G. Basker, ed., Black Writers of the Founding Era (Library of America), and printed in the Library of America's "Story of the Week." Another manuscript of the petition, printed in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th ser., 3 (1877): 436–37, reads "a great number of blacks."
The Declaration of Independence, as transcribed by the National Archives.
The Declaration and Resolves, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1:67 ff., as printed by the Avalon Project; the Quebec Act, as printed by the Avalon Project, provided for "the free Exercise of the Religion of the Church of Rome" in the province.
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011), whose estimate is that some sixty thousand loyalists left the United States. No pinpoint is asserted.
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, book 1, ch. 2, "Of the Parliament," as printed by the Avalon Project, which reads "fovereign and uncontrollable" in the long-s rendering of the original. An earlier draft said without qualification that Parliament was right on the law; the location and divisibility of sovereignty within the unwritten imperial constitution was the matter in dispute, and the body now distinguishes the metropolitan doctrine from a settled law.
John Adams to Samuel Chase, July 9, 1776, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4, Founders Online, 06-04-02-0155. Adams does not name the reader.
General Orders, July 9 and July 10, 1776, Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 5, Founders Online, 03-05-02-0176 and 03-05-02-0185, with the editors' note quoting Samuel Blachley Webb on the statue "on the bowling green at the south end of Broadway."

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

Adams, John. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. Founders Online, National Archives.
Adams, John. "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law." Boston Gazette, August–October 1765. In Papers of John Adams, vol. 1. Founders Online.
Adams, John. "Novanglus," No. I. Boston Gazette, January 23, 1775. In Papers of John Adams, vol. 2. Founders Online.
Adams, John. Letters to Abigail Adams, March 19, May 17, and July 3, 1776; to Samuel Chase, July 9, 1776; to Timothy Pickering, August 6, 1822. Founders Online.
Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Book 1. Oxford, 1765.
Burk, John. The History of Virginia. Vol. 3. Petersburg: Dickson and Pescud, 1805.
The Declaration of Independence. July 4, 1776. National Archives.
Dickinson, John. Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania. 1767–68.
Dulany, Daniel. Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies. Annapolis: Jonas Green, 1765.
Hamilton, Alexander. The Farmer Refuted. New York, 1775. In The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1. Founders Online.
[Inglis, Charles]. The True Interest of America Impartially Stated. Philadelphia: James Humphreys, Jr., 1776.
Jefferson, Thomas. "Original Rough Draught" of the Declaration of Independence. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, edited by Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.
Jefferson, Thomas. A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Williamsburg, 1774.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letters to Robert Skipwith, August 3, 1771; to James Madison, August 30, 1823; to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825. Founders Online.
Johnson, Samuel. Taxation No Tyranny. London: T. Cadell, 1775.
Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789. Vol. 1. Washington, D.C., 1904.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London, 1690.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. New York: Mentor, 1965.
Otis, James. The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764.
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Philadelphia, 1776.
Tudor, William. The Life of James Otis, of Massachusetts. Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823.
[Whately, Thomas]. The Regulations Lately Made concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered. London: J. Wilkie, 1765.
Wilson, James. Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. Philadelphia, 1774.
Wirt, William. Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry. Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817.

Secondary Works

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Becker, Carl L. The Declaration of Independence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
Bell, J. L. "'No Taxation without Representation.'" Parts 1 and 2. Journal of the American Revolution, May 21–22, 2013.
Boyd, Julian P. The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945.
Brown, Richard D. Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Curtis, Michael Kent. "In Pursuit of Liberty: The Levellers and the American Bill of Rights." Constitutional Commentary 8 (1991).
Faulkner, Robert. "Richard Hooker (1554–1600) and Natural Law." Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism. Witherspoon Institute, 2015.
Hamowy, Ronald. "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 36, no. 4 (1979).
Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011.
Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Lutz, Donald S. "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought." American Political Science Review 78, no. 1 (1984): 189–97.
Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.
Mailer, Gideon. John Witherspoon's American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
Raphael, Ray. "The Signal of Sam Adams." Journal of the American Revolution, January 23, 2014.
Raphael, Ray. "Thomas Paine's Inflated Numbers." Journal of the American Revolution, March 20, 2013.
Robbins, Caroline. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

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