What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any.

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

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

In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government.

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

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

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