The dominant storyline of our American Revolution is about patriotic defiance — refusing to pay taxes, dumping tea into the Boston Harbor and shooting redcoats once we saw the whites of their eyes. It’s about virtuous lawbreaking in the name of freedom.
There is plenty of evidence to support this narrative. Yet like all triumphant tales, this one tends to crowd out other important truths about our past and ourselves. For the revolutionaries not only rejected royal and imperial authority but also embraced what we now call the “rule of law,” first as a national privilege and then as an egalitarian ideal.
The roots of that ideal stretched from Boston to India and converged in 1776 into a powerful call for a new moral and legal order for America and the world.
Colonial protests began in the mid-1760s because the British Parliament’s new taxes violated the ” principles and spirit of the British constitution,” according to colonial delegates, meaning the established or “constituted” laws made Americans members of the British Empire rather than subjects of British firepower. Those laws enshrined English liberties such as the right to free assembly and jury trials.
The dread of losing those national freedoms increased in early 1774, when British authorities closed the port of Boston and threatened to bring the military-style rule of new imperial outposts such as Quebec and Nova Scotia to the older 13 Colonies. These “cruel, unjust, and sanguinary” measures, one group of Maryland patriots declared, could only portend rule “by military Force and ships of war” — government by violence rather than law.