The founders knew how often republics had failed. Their task was to create governments that could protect liberty and survive the pressures that had destroyed earlier experiments.
The American Revolution began as a defense of local self-government and became an attempt to build a republic on universal rights.
Paul A. Rahe, a historian at Hillsdale College, explains that their task was to create governments that could protect liberty and survive the pressures that had destroyed earlier experiments.
Ancient republics offered both encouragement and warnings. Greek communities practiced forms of self-government, though they excluded women, enslaved people, and foreigners, and some restricted power to an oligarchy. Athens built a maritime empire but pushed its ambitions too far. Sparta also struggled with expansion. Their experience raised a difficult question: Could a republic grow more powerful without undermining the institutions that sustained it?
Rome survived for centuries before expansion strained its military system. Citizen militias gave way to armies whose soldiers spent long periods away from home. Those soldiers became increasingly dependent on their generals, who used their armies to fight for political control. Civil wars eventually ended in imperial rule under Augustus.
Later republics had their own problems. Venice combined longevity with narrow oligarchic government, while Florence suffered repeated political turmoil.
Much of the political thought the founders read grew out of these failures. Thucydides examined Athens’ disastrous war. Plato wrote about Socrates, whom the Athenians executed. Machiavelli produced his major works after the fall of the Florentine Republic he had served. Hobbes and Locke also experienced exile.
Political theory often began with people trying to understand what had gone wrong in their own countries. The founders approached earlier republics with that same mixture of admiration and caution.
Before the Revolution, this reading was largely an intellectual pursuit. Colonial leaders studied ancient history and European political thought, including Montesquieu’s work. Conflict with Britain forced them to put those ideas to use. Starting in 1776, they had to create state governments; by 1787, they were working on a national constitution. Americans tested arrangements and revised constitutions that proved unsatisfactory. Building a republic required practical experience as well as books.
The colonies already had considerable experience governing themselves. Their assemblies made laws and raised taxes. Although Britain appointed many governors, those officials often depended on the assemblies for their pay. Local representatives could use that dependence to influence governors who possessed substantial authority on paper. Connecticut and Rhode Island elected their own governors. The colonies also differed culturally and had little enthusiasm for surrendering their separate authority.
British taxation threatened these arrangements. Opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 rested on the belief that colonial assemblies should tax their own people. Control over revenue also affected control over government. Officials paid independently of the assemblies would have less reason to answer to them. London’s efforts to assert authority threatened powers the colonists had long exercised and considered their own.
Britain’s response to Massachusetts made that threat harder to dismiss. The Massachusetts Government Act of 1774 revoked important charter provisions and strengthened royal control. Other colonies could imagine the same happening to them. Their first appeals relied on British legal traditions and charter rights. They believed established practices entitled them to particular liberties, and they sought to preserve those liberties within the empire.
These charter rights had roots in medieval corporate law and older Roman practices. Charters recognized a community’s authority to manage its affairs and placed limits on outside rulers. That history helps explain the distinction between “liberties,” meaning particular rights protected by established arrangements, and liberty understood as a right belonging to everyone. The colonists began by defending liberties they believed Britain had already recognized.
Independence required another argument. Once Americans rejected British rule, British custom could no longer supply the foundation for their governments. They turned to natural rights, drawing on Locke. Rights belonging to human beings could justify their decision to establish a new political order, regardless of what a monarch or Parliament had granted.
The Declaration of Independence made protecting rights the purpose of government and grounded legitimate power in the consent of the governed. Its promise of the pursuit of happiness allowed for material independence and freedom of conscience. Jefferson’s work on the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom expressed the view that religious freedom was a natural right.
The founders hoped a successful republic would encourage others to claim self-government. They expected other peoples to learn from the American example. Jefferson still expressed this hope in his 1826 letter to Roger C. Weightman, anticipating that the Declaration would encourage people beyond America to seek their freedom.
Slavery exposed the contradiction within that argument. If liberty belonged to every human being, how could Americans justify denying it to enslaved people? Independence left slavery intact, but the principles used to reject British rule also challenged it. Americans had established governments on the promise of natural rights while continuing to deny those rights to people they held in bondage. Ending British rule left that conflict for Americans themselves to confront.
