Some Americans couched their resistance in constitutional terms. Many were lawyers or well-educated merchants and planters. Composing pamphlets of remarkable political sophistication, they gave the resistance movement its rationale, its political agenda, and its leaders.
Patriot writers drew on three intellectual traditions. The first was English common law, the centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the lives and property of the monarch’s subjects. In the famous Writs of Assistance case of 1761, Boston lawyer James Otis invoked English legal precedents to challenge open-ended search warrants. In demanding a jury trial for John Hancock in the late 1760s, John Adams appealed to the Magna Carta (1215), the ancient document that, said Adams, “has for many Centuries been esteemed by Englishmen, as one of the … firmest Bulwarks of their Liberties.” Other lawyers protested that new strictures violated specific “liberties and privileges” granted in colonial charters or embodied in Britain’s “ancient constitution.”
Enlightenment rationalism provided Patriots with a second important intellectual resource. Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson and other Patriots drew on the writings of John Locke, who had argued that all individuals possessed certain “natural rights” — life, liberty, and property — that governments must protect (see Chapter 4). And they turned to the works of French philosopher Montesquieu, who had maintained that a “separation of powers” among government departments prevented arbitrary rule.
The republican and Whig strands of the English political tradition provided a third ideological source for American Patriots. Puritan New England had long venerated the Commonwealth era (1649–1660), when England had been a republic (see Chapter 2). After the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, many colonists praised the English Whigs for creating a constitutional monarchy that prevented the king from imposing taxes and other measures. Joseph Warren, a physician and a Radical Whig Patriot, suggested that the Stamp Act was part of a ministerial plot “to force the colonies into rebellion” and justify the use of “military power to reduce them to servitude.” John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768) urged colonists to “remember your ancestors and your posterity” and oppose parliamentary taxes. The letters circulated widely and served as an early call to resistance. If Parliament could tax the colonies without their consent, he wrote, “our boasted liberty is but A sound and nothing else.”
Such arguments, widely publicized in newspapers and pamphlets, gave intellectual substance to the Patriot movement and turned a series of impromptu riots, tax protests, and boycotts of British manufactures into a formidable political force.