The English Background of American Isolationism in the Eighteenth Century

When the colonists began their opposition to the encroachments of the British government, the legal justification of their resistance was their conception of the rights of Englishmen. Before the War of Independence Americans had lived in the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of England; they were the proud heirs of the great English tradition of freedom, handed on in an unbroken succession from the days of Magna Carta; they had taken from English political experience the principle of “no taxation without representation”. When drafting their new Constitution, they intended merely to improve the old English version by divesting it of those features which had made possible the lapse of the British government into despotism.