Edward Rutledge, First Continental Congress, 28 September 1774 – "I came with an idea of getting a Bill of Rights."

His father was from Ulster, some say County Tyrone. Rutledge was just 24 or 25 when, at the First Continental Congress on 28 September 1774, he said "I came with an idea of getting a Bill of Rights". On 14 October, Congress issued its Declaration and Resolves, written by John Dickinson (Wikipedia here).

The eventual Bill of Rights (the amendments to the new United States Constitution) would't be created until 15 years later in 1789. Rutledge had been reading Sir William Blackstone's recent volume Commentaries on the Laws of England written between 1765-69 (Wikipedia here). John Adams' personal copy is online here on Archive.org.

Livingston, Smith & Scott – it sounds like a law firm and it pretty much was. New York, 1765.

They were known as the "Presbyterian Whig Triumvirate" – Williiam Livingston, William Smith, and John Morin Scott. They founded the New York Society Library in 1754, and produced a publication, the Independent Reflector.

Scott was (perhaps) the first to entertain the possibility that one day "Great Britain and her colonies" might separate – "the connection between them ought to cease". A 1765 article, anonymously attributed to "Free Man", was thought to be the handiwork of Scott. George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, quotes extensively from the article, and concludes with this –

"... There never can be a disposition in the colonies to break off their connection with the mother country, so long as they are permitted to have the full enjoyment of those rights to which the English constitution entitles them. They desire no more ; nor can they be satisfied with less." 

Such were the words in which the sober judgment of New York embodied its convictions. They were caught up by the impatient colonies; were reprinted in nearly all their newspapers; were approved of by the most learned and judicious on this continent; and even formed part of the instructions of South Carolina to its agent in England.

Thus revolution proceeded. Virginia marshalled resistance; Massachusetts entreated union; New York pointed to independence.

• The Whigs of Colonial New York is online at JSTOR, here. 

"Gallant Resistance made by their Forefathers " – The Pennsylvania Gazette, 17 June 1756

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).