American Political Thought. Ken Kersch

its assumptions concerning the fixed territoriality of states, petitions, treaties, and citizenship), property ownership, race, ethnicity, (minority and liberal individual) rights, and the Christian faith.

      As might be expected, some of the most prominent voices of Native American political thought in British North America – and, in turn, the early republic and antebellum United States – were evangelical Christian ministermissionaries like Samson Occom and William Apess, fired, in some cases by the First Great Awakening, to bring the gospel to the land’s indigenous heathens, while simultaneously arguing for their just and humane treatment. Others, like the Seneca orator Red Jacket (Sagoyewatha) or the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, either advocated on behalf of their tribes’ traditional religions, or simply continued to practice their native cosmologies and faiths.

      While Africans in America were relative newcomers when considered in relation to the continent’s indigenous peoples, they arrived on its shores at about the same time as North America’s white European explorers and settlers. Although there were sixteenth-century antecedents in short-lived Spanish settlements dotting the littoral southeast, the forced labor of Africans brought against their will to North America began in earnest in Virginia in 1619 – the year before the Puritan settlers landed at Plymouth. At the time, forced labor was not a unique burden of coercively imported Africans: indentured servitude of whites, to say nothing of women (who in many respects were conceived of as living in service to their husbands), was a pillar of the settler-colonial economic, social, and political order. In time, however, this form of servitude faded, and slavery in the Americas, in contradistinction to bondage in the ancient world, was racialized.

Opposition to the enslavement of human beings, albeit fledgling, traces back nearly as long. From as early as the 1680s, Quakers, concentrated in the Pennsylvania colony, distinguished themselves as outspoken opponents of slavery. As Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, democracy, and human progress began to take hold in the mid-eighteenth century,³ and then set the framework for the colonial grievances with the mother country (and, eventually, for the American Revolution), whites and free blacks alike noted the contradiction between the colonists’ ever more loudly professed moral and political ideas and both chattel slavery and racial inequality. In what has come to be called abolitionism’s “First Wave,” interracial coalitions sustained and inspired by Christian and secular humanitarian ideals alike began the process that resulted in gradual, state-by-state emancipation in the North. This ongoing process collided with the country’s founding, raising serious political problems that would bedevil the Constitutional Convention that framed the nation’s core political institutions.

The American Revolution and the Founding

      In the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain’s North American colonies were increasingly implicated in that era’s global imperial wars, struggles, and crises. The metropole’s initial oversight was light, and its authority weak: while not forgotten, those colonies were an afterthought. To be sure, they were enmeshed in a web of (it was said, mutually beneficial) imperial regulations concerning imports and exports. But the colonies were taxed only lightly, and left largely to govern themselves. Each colony had an elected representative legislature that directed its own internal affairs. Their economies thrived, and the population grew.

      Things began to change, however, with the French and Indian War (1756–1763), the North American front of the globe-spanning Seven Years War, which ultimately pitted a coalition led by Great Britain against a rival coalition led by France. Britain won the war, leading France to surrender nearly all of the territory it had previously claimed in North America east of the Mississippi River, including in what is today Canada. This drew Britain into an increased focus on its North American colonies and on the extensive – and expensive – responsibilities it now bore for defending them. Britain argued that it had shielded the free Protestant colonies – at the urging, for that matter, of New Englanders – from the threat of tyrannical popery (French Canada), marauding (French-allied) Indians, and foreign attacks and bids for conquest. The British believed that, under these new circumstances, it was only proper for the colonies to bear some of the massive costs of Great Britain’s titanic war debts, and their own self-defense.

A succession of revenue acts followed across the 1760s and 1770s, sparking increasingly spirited colonial resistance. A cascade of pamphlets – the most popular form of political writing at the time – flowed, most prominently in resistance to the direct tax on printed material authorized by the Stamp Act (1765). The debate turned on the power of Parliament to tax the people of the North American colonies, when the colonists did not have power to vote for and elect members of Parliament. The colonists argued that they were being taxed without representation, and hence their property was being taken without their consent. If Parliament could strip them of their natural, pre-political rights to property (Locke), it was said, Parliament, by implication, had free rein to strip them of any and all of their God-given natural rights – to say nothing of their rights as British subjects.

      The argument expanded over a series of thrusts and parries concerning subsequent revenue acts (and partial retreats, but with a British refusal to cede the authority to tax). These included not only boycotts and other incendiary protests (some led in Boston by Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty), but also outsized explosions of rage and violence against what many were now complaining was a system of unjust and, finally, intolerable rule by a distant and tyrannical government. English “country” party and republican political thought (James Harrington, Algernon Sydney, and others) had descried the corruption of the distant urban elite governing class under the sway of and resident at the King’s “Court.” In seeking to understand their growing list of grievances and predicament, the American colonists drew from this thought, in the process forging penetrating new reflections on sovereignty, government by consent, representation, and rights, with frenzied outrage over ostensible depredations of rights that, in a less fraught context, might have seemed like lesser slights. (An inflamed “rights consciousness,” many have observed, has continued to characterize the American temperament.) In time, as the British increasingly took extraordinary steps to suppress resistance – including closing Boston harbor; altering and then suspending Massachusetts’s colonial charter to reinforce their control; landing waves of troops, some of whom were coercively quartered in colonial residences; disarming colonial militias; and expatriating rebellious colonists for trial in England – a critical mass of the most vocal colonists moved from complaining of transgressions of their traditional, common law and natural rights as Englishmen under the British Constitution to contemplating a permanent political break.

The First and Second Continental Congresses were convened (1774, 1775) to coordinate support for the resistance in Massachusetts, and, before long, a military battle broke out between British troops and the colonists at Lexington and Concord which is generally taken as the start of the American Revolution. At this point, however, debates were still ongoing in the colonies about whether to seek reconciliation (as initially advocated by John Dickinson, James Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson, among others, and a clear majority of the delegates to the Second Continental Congress) or separation (advocated by radicals like Samuel Adams and John Adams). Samuel Adams had already authored “The Rights of the Colonists” (1772), in which, in Lockean high dudgeon, he denounced the British for trenching on the rights of the American colonists to life, liberty, and property (with the rights to representation, toleration, and conscience thrown in for good measure, although Adams was careful to acknowledge a duty to pay taxes in support of a legitimate government). Where fundamental rights had been violated, Adams insisted, there was a clear right of revolution. By contrast, even two years later, while denouncing “parliamentary tyranny,” in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774), Thomas Jefferson appealed to King George III to intervene to settle the ongoing grievances. In his appeal, Jefferson underlined the individualist roots of the colonial settlement, where the colonists had labored unceasingly and sacrificed much to build their own societies. But Jefferson too noted the right to revolution, cheekily citing England’s own Glorious Revolution (1689) as a case in point.

      The game-changer, however, was the anonymously published incendiary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), which turned public opinion sharply in favor