The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

John Trenchard (1662-1723), an English political essayist, and Thomas Gordon (d. 1750), a Scottish political writer, were Commonwealthmen and Radical Whigs in Great Britain. Trenchard and Gordon co-authored Cato’s Letters (1720-1723), which became “the most authoritative statement of the nature of political liberty” (36) along with the treatises of John Locke as well as a powerful exposition of the potential threats to liberty for the American colonists. According to Bailyn, Trenchard and Gordon were publicists of a distinctive opposition tradition that had originated during the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period (1649-1660). Bailyn argues that colonial Americans created a coherent political ideology from the writings of these Commonwealthmen that predisposed them to view British policy after 1763 not as ill-informed missteps but as evidence of a conspiracy to deprive the colonists of their liberty and rights.

Widely reprinted in the American colonies, the essay collection Cato’s Letters was named after an ancient Roman who had virtuously opposed Julius Caesar’s rule. Trenchard and Gordon warned against the corrupting influence of power and recommended a balanced government to safeguard liberty. To prevent tyranny, these writers favored strict adherence to the rule of law, opposed standing armies, and supported excluding “placemen” (officeholders dependent on ministerial appointment) from Parliamentary membership. Many of these reforms were advocated in response to the efforts of Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, to extend his influence over Parliament by using patronage and awarding preferments, which Trenchard and Gordon viewed as unconstitutional intrusions on legislative independence. They urged people to be vigilant against any signs of corruption and believed that a virtuous citizenry was key to the maintenance of liberty against encroaching power. Their ideas were associated with the “Country” Party tradition that opposed the concentration of power of a corrupt “Court” Party in London that tried to keep legislative representatives subservient to the royal court. Bailyn argues that the pessimism Trenchard and Gordon expressed about the corrupt conditions in England and their suggestions for reform had more influence on the American colonists than on English politicians because the colonial circumstances more closely matched their ideas.

John Locke (1632-1704) was an English philosopher whose Second Treatise of Government (1689) theorizing natural rights, consent of the governed, and social compacts greatly influenced the American Revolutionaries. Bailyn points out that numerous Revolutionary-era pamphlets cite Locke. In Locke’s argument against the divine right of kings to rule, he began with a hypothetical original state of nature when no government existed. All humans lived in a state of general equality because their rights derived from nature. However, when some disturbed the rights of others, individuals came together in a social compact and agreed to invent a government to protect their natural rights. Government, therefore, existed only by the consent of the governed. If government violated the contract to serve the people, the people had the right to alter or abolish it.

Bailyn traces the changing view of representation developing in Revolutionary America, which implied that “direct consent of the people in government was not restricted, as Locke would have had it, to those climactic moments when government was overthrown by the people in a last final effort to defend their rights” (173). Instead, the consent of the people was to be “a continuous, everyday process […] no longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government” (173).

John Wilkes (1725-1797) was an English radical journalist and politician whose career, according to Bailyn, was crucial to the American colonists’ understanding of the British government’s assault on their liberty. Lord Bute, the English prime minister from 1762 to 1763 and a favorite of King George III, was satirized by Wilkes in his newspaper The North Briton. In The North Briton issue number 45, Wilkes criticized a speech by King George III that praised the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Wilkes was charged with seditious libel, and the king issued a general warrant for Wilkes’ arrest. Wilkes challenged the constitutionality of the general warrant and eventually won his case. Wilkes became a symbol of freedom of speech and resistance to power. In the American colonies, Wilkes was viewed as a national leader of opposition to the power-hungry government that had passed the Stamp Act. When he returned from exile in France in 1768, he was elected to Parliament, and Americans had great hope that he would do good for all.

Bailyn contends that the news that Wilkes was denied his Parliament seat “by the maneuvers of the court party” (112) profoundly shocked the American colonists. When Wilkes was re-elected to Parliament a second, a third, and a fourth time only to have Parliament void each result, his difficulties convinced many colonial Americans that the British constitution was being subverted by a corrupt government.

John Dickinson (1732-1808) was a lawyer, statesman, and author in Pennsylvania. According to Bailyn, Dickinson wrote “the most influential pamphlet published in America before 1776,” in which he cautioned against submitting to the Stamp Act since the precedent of Parliament levying any amount of tax on the colonies would then be established. Dickinson wrote 12 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767-1768) and asserted that those who are taxed without their consent as expressed by themselves or their representatives are slaves.

In the First Continental Congress, Dickinson worked on the 1774 Petition to the King. As a member of the Second Continental Congress, Dickinson wrote the 1775 Olive Branch Petition. Although Dickinson had favored negotiation with King George III, he wrote the final draft of the 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms when conciliation efforts failed. He refused to sign the Declaration of Independence but served in the Pennsylvania militia during the Revolutionary War. In 1787, Dickinson served as a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention. Dickinson, a wealthy slaveholder with Quaker influences, freed all his slaves before his death.

James Otis, Jr. (1725-1783) was a lawyer and political writer in Massachusetts. Otis argued in a legal challenge to writs of assistance (general warrants that allowed British officials to search colonists’ premises) that any act of Parliament “against the constitution is void” (176). Otis’s boldness in suggesting constitutional limitations on legislative power helped start the Revolutionary theorists’ process of emphasizing principles above institutions. According to Bailyn, Otis’s troubled career dramatizes the “confusions and difficulties inherent in this process” (176). In Otis’ pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), he expressed his theory that taxes can be levied only by a representative government, arguing that rights are derived from God and nature. Otis followed the idea of natural rights to its logical conclusion, assuming that it applied to Black people as well as white people, and condemned the institution of chattel slavery.

However, Otis’s later assertion that the nature of sovereignty in Parliament means that it is the colonists’ duty to submit to Parliament’s acts “appeared to leading patriots to constitute an astonishing reversal” (206). Bailyn suggests that Otis’s self-contradictions stem mainly from his anachronistic application of early 17th-century assumptions to 18th-century problems. 

John Adams (1735-1826) was a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress, the first vice president of the United States (1789-1797), and the second president of the United States (1797-1801). Bailyn cites Thoughts on Government (1776) as the major pamphlet authored by Adams during the Revolutionary period. After the widespread popularity of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) in the American colonies, Adams feared the effect of Paine’s proposed governmental structure of a unicameral assembly, which he believed would produce confusion without any restraint or counterbalance. In response, Adams wrote his own influential Thoughts on Government (1776), which proposed inner balances, including two contending assemblies and would contribute to the development of the U.S. Constitution.

Bailyn additionally describes Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765), in which Adams expressed his fear of the conjunction of British civil and ecclesiastical tyrannies. Bailyn also notes that although lawyer John Adams successfully defended British soldiers in court, Adams believed the Boston Massacre in 1770 was the strongest evidence of the danger of standing armies.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the first U.S. secretary of state (1790-1793), the second vice president of the United States (1797-1801), and the third president of the United States (1801-1809). Bailyn describes Jefferson’s sole effort as a Revolutionary pamphleteer as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). Jefferson deplored the practice of slavery in this Revolutionary pamphlet, but he remained a slave-owner for economic reasons.

In Jefferson’s draft constitution for his state, he agreed with Adams that a second branch of the legislature was necessary for balance in government. Jefferson is also mentioned as a leader in disestablishing religion in Virginia, writing the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which passed in 1786.