ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1776, after years of a constitutional crisis that dated to the close of the Seven Years War more than a decade earlier, thirteen of Britain’s colonies declared Independence from the British Crown and established republican governments. Indeed, some of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Revolution, the states that it produced, and the American ideal of liberty and republican government, have all featured deliberately classical elements. One of the reasons that the classical understandings of the crisis struggled to shape the movement for independence is that the classics either proved too much or too little. Until the moment of Independence, most American authors chose to set their claims against British action within the context of the British political tradition. There is a reasonable case that the American sensitivity to their classical reading did far more to shape the debates of 1787—89 than it had to the War of Independence.
