Smithsonian "One Day in History", published 2006

This book published by the Smithsonian Institution has a preface by Gordon S. Wood (Wikipedia here), the author of the landmark The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (online here).

"THE AMERICAN Revolution has been called a conservative revolution, which seems to be a contradiction in terms. However, there is a large body of literature that supports the fact that the colonists seceded from Britain not because they wanted to overturn the existing social and political order, but because they were being denied the rights guaranteed to English citizens.

The rationale for the secession was in great part based on the theories of English philosopher John Locke, who believed in the natural rights that were given to all humans by their Creator.

It is significant that the government created by the states when the Constitution was written in 1787 was based in large part on the English system of government that had been instituted after the Glorious Revolution (1688) and the recognition of the English Bill of Rights. The most notable difference in the American and English political systems, of course, was the absence of the monarchy in America."

From the same publication:

"... These ideas were not original to Thomas Jefferson. These truths, which had not always been quite so “self-evident,” are usually credited to John Locke, a British writer and philosopher of the Enlightenment. Locke was a revolutionary and a political activist who had supported Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Locke rejected the theory of divine monarchy, which held that kings had been appointed to their positions by God. 

Divine monarchs ruled— or so they told themselves — at the will of God and were thus responsible to no one but Him for their actions. Locke opposed the very idea of divine monarchs and also rejected the belief, deeply held by the Stuarts, as well as by many other European rulers, that monarchs should have absolute authority over their subjects and did not need the permission of others before putting their will into action.

Locke instead posited a different basis for government, one that was postulated on the existence of what he termed “natural rights.” According to the theory of natural rights, all people possessed rights that had been given to them by God simply because they were human. These “rights” were those that allowed people to ensure their survival: life, liberty, and the property needed to maintain life. Because these rights were given to people by God, not by a monarch, they could not be taken from them. They were thus “unalienable.”

Although Jefferson, in his Declaration, proved to be a faithful copyist of Locke, there is one significant way in which Jefferson’s conception of “unalienable rights” differed. While Locke asserts that one’s natural rights consist of life, liberty, and property, Jefferson omits any reference to property and instead proclaims that people have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This change, many scholars believe, was made to indicate that in a nation built on the concept of freedom, the protection of slave property would not be considered a fundamental right and would not be among the foremost concerns of the new nation."