What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. Their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.
Bernard Bailyn
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.
politics
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
liberty conspiracy
effort rights principles
Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.
revolution
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
revolution literature
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
slavery
The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.
legal
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