"The reasoning of the colonists was wanting in some of the essentials of revolutionary thinking — that is to say, wanting in an attitude of rebellion toward established institutions, lacking an attitude of mind which would welcome an overturning and would sweep away the past and build new structures on its ruins. Colonial reasoning was both abstract and concrete. It was concrete and historical because it referred definitely to actual working institutions; it was in a measure abstract because it laid stress upon natural rights that were postulates of argument.
But, it must always be remembered, those rights, as the colonists viewed them, were embodied in British citizenship; they had been given a degree of actuality in British constitutional doctrine; they had been announced time and again by revered British thinkers and political leaders, and, in part at least, were woven into the history of the “glorious revolution” of 1688, which was as near to the colonists as the days of Lincoln are to the men and women of the fourth decade of the twentieth century.
It would be folly, of course, to deny that there was nothing in the spirit and history of English constitutionalism on which the colonists could base their demands."
- From the Pulitzer Prize winning A Constitutional History Of The United States by Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin (1935).
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