By 1775, talk of liberty pervaded the colonies. The past few years had witnessed an endless parade of pamphlets with titles like A Chariot of Liberty and Oration on the Beauties of Liberty (the latter, a sermon delivered in Boston by Joseph Allen in 1772, became the most popular public address of the years before independence). Sober men spoke longingly of the “sweets of liberty.” While sleeping, Americans dreamed of liberty. One anonymous essayist reported a “night vision” of the word written in the sun’s rays. Commented a British emigrant who arrived in Maryland early in 1775: “They are all liberty mad.”
The right to resist oppressive authority and the identification of liberty with the cause of God, so deeply ingrained by the imperial struggles of the eighteenth century, were now invoked against Britain itself, by colonists of all backgrounds. The first mass meeting in the history of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, whose population was overwhelmingly of German ancestry, gathered in 1774. By the following year, a majority of the county’s adult population had joined militia associations. Many German settlers, whose close-knit communities had earlier viewed with some suspicion “the famous English liberty” as a byword for selfish individualism, now claimed all the “rights and privileges of natural-born subjects of his majesty.”
As the crisis deepened, Americans increasingly based their claims not simply on the historical rights of Englishmen but on the more abstract language of natural rights and universal freedom. The First Continental Congress defended its actions by appealing to the “principles of the English constitution,” the “liberties of free and natural-born subjects within the realm of England,” and the “immutable law of nature.” John Locke’s theory of natural rights that existed prior to the establishment of government offered a powerful justification for colonial resistance. Americans, declared Thomas Jefferson in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (written in 1774 to instruct Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress), were “a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.” Americans, Jefferson insisted, still revered the king. But he demanded that empire henceforth be seen as a collection of equal parts held together by loyalty to a constitutional monarch, not a system in which one part ruled over the others.