Recommended reading in America in 1756, almost exactly 20 years before the Declaration of Independence.
John Locke, Algernon Sydney, The Bible, Smollet's A Complete History of England, Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights, the 1701 Act of Settlement. As it says in the article extract below, "every Briton has the happiness to be born free". That's almost a straight lift from Rutherford's Lex Rex of 1644 – "every man is born free".
Thomas Jefferson & co didn't invent liberty in 1776. They reclaimed it and recharged it. As Professor Gordon S. Wood says, 1776 was a revolution on behalf of the liberties of the British constitution against the rogue government of the Tory Party who came to power in 1770 (previous post & podcast clip of Professor Wood is here).
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