At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.

Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.

Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.

The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.