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

The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.

The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.

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

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.

What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.

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.