‘A Total Contradiction to Every Principle Laid Down at the Time of the Revolution’

This chapter draws attention to the largely forgotten role that memories of the Glorious Revolution played in the American Revolution. Britons in the 1760s and 1770s argued that their right to tax Americans rested on ancient royal prerogative that was instantiated via parliamentary supremacy after 1688. Yet American orators and writers such as James Otis, Joseph Warren, Richard Bland and Thomas Jefferson countered that American rights rested on a Lockean settler-colonial theory that original migrants had left English jurisdiction and mixed their labour with American soil, obviating British (and Native American) claims to property and governance there. Colonists also formed their own governments and then consented to join an English (then British) Empire that was in effect a federation of states. American revolutionaries in 1776 believed that their forebears had rightfully revolted in the face of violations of their settler rights by James II and his imperial minions as part of a wider Glorious Revolution that restored their rights to property and self-government. For them, therefore, parliamentary taxation and other measures from 1764 represented ‘a total contradiction to every principle laid down at the time of the Revolution’, and thus they acted to restore those rights once more in 1776.