by Joaquin Pedroso

Created on: July 26, 2007

The gradual emancipation of the thirteen American colonies brought with it a gradual change in the revolutionary mindset of the colonists. What began as a struggle to maintain certain Englishmen's rights, turned into a war to gain the colonist's natural rights never afforded to them. Among these natural rights, whose notion was willed into existence by the same philosophies which expounded the ideal of government by the consent of the governed, are life, liberty, and property. We see a strong reference to these ideals in not only the revolutionary documents but also in pamphlets and recorded histories of the revolutionary period. Despite the popular consensus on these ideals, only some were instituted in the workings of government, and thus evident in the Constitution. The Constitution was mostly a fulfillment, for some peoples, of the individual natural rights endorsed by Locke's political philosophy, but simultaneously was an insidious betrayal of a majority of colonist's political rights, and their social and economic revolutionary aspirations and expectations.

Obviously there were certain pragmatic reasons espoused for separation from England, as articulated in Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a continued connection to the mother country was seen as an absolutely disadvantageous situation,

the injuries and disadvantages we sustain by that connection are without numberbecause any submission to or dependence on Great Britain tends directly to involve this continent in European wars and quarrels and sets us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship and against whom we have neither anger nor complaint. As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any art of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European connections, which she never can do while, by her dependence on Britain, she is made the makeweight in the scale of British politics.#

Moreover, the authority of Great Britain over the colonies was called into question in Paine's Rights of Man, "Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which follow."# Essentially Britain had no authority over the thirteen colonies simply because the colonies were descended from it.
These ideas of practicality were also accompanied by strong ideals of freedom, independence, and justice. Freedom of worship was a key right colonists saw as essential to have. And many recognized its importance as a tool for social cohesion.

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