Words and their meanings change over time. To our age, the word 'Revolution' means a kind of "burn it all down and start afresh" often with the implied use of force and arms. That's not what was understood in 1700s America and Britain.
When the Founding Fathers wrote of 'revolution' they expressly regarded it as a return, a recovery of the rights as expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, and a selection of other earlier documents such as the Magna Carta – rights which successive Parliaments and Monarchs had taken from the people.
“The Revolution (of 1688 in England) was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty ... The very idea of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution [1688] and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.
All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity ... In the Petition of Right submitted to Charles I, the Parliament says to the King ‘Your subjects have inherited this freedom,’ claiming their franchises not on abstract principles such as ‘the rights of man,’ but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers ... They preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title ... to that vague speculative idea of ‘natural right.’”
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797) in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
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