As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation's independence in 1776, there is a temptation to focus on the military engagement of that year, but its most important events occurred off the battlefield. Rather than being a simple struggle by a colonial people to gain independence from imperial rule, American patriots saw the events of 1776 as a revolutionary struggle to establish a new type of government: government by law, not by men, or, in the terms of that time, by constitutions, not by kings.
“The cause of America is largely the cause of all mankind,” wrote Thomas Paine in the introduction to “Common Sense,” the best-selling pamphlet published in January 1776 that transformed an armed rebellion for colonial rights into a global revolution for representative government. “The birthday of a new world is near.”
New nations frequently separate from old ones and have done so since the dawn of history. Paine and other patriots did not see the American Revolution in such narrow terms. For them, it promised something new under the sun or, as the Secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thompson, soon inscribed in Latin on the Great Seal of the United States in 1776, “Novus ordo seclorum” or “A new order of the ages.”
This “new order” was not simply an independent nation but a different type of state: a constitutional republic based on popular sovereignty and the rule of law in a world dominated by monarchies, theocracies, dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes. “Because just as in absolute governments the King is the law, so in free countries the law ought to be King,” Paine explained.
“It has been the will of heaven that we should be launched into existence…when an unexampled coincidence of circumstances has afforded thirteen colonies at once the opportunity of beginning a new government,” John Adams wrote in a widely circulated letter from March 1776 that served as a guide to state constitution-making. These new state constitutions became the first written in history and, along with the Declaration of Independence, represented the greatest legacy of 1776.
“The happiness of the people, the great end of man, is the end of government,” wrote Adams in a phrase that belied the pretensions of monarchs and the practices of tyrants. “Therefore, that form of government which produces the greatest amount of happiness is the best.” The republics do it because they represent the people, he stated.
For Adams, the foundation of a secure republic rested on a representative legislature. “Equal interests among the people should have equal interests in them,” he wrote in a warning against the maldistribution of electoral districts then common in England. “Great care must be taken to achieve this and avoid unfair, biased and corrupt elections.”
To ensure “strict justice” in all cases, Adams proposed a system of checks on power. An independent, elected, term-serving executive would administer the laws passed by the legislature. Judges appointed by the executive and confirmed by legislators would possess judicial authority “distinct from both the legislative and the executive, and independent of both, so it can be a check on both and both should be a check on that.”
Highlighting the revolutionary nature of the new state constitutions, Adams asserted that commissions and judicial orders should be issued under the name of the state and not of a ruler. Republics are governments “of laws, not of men,” Adams stressed.
Adams closed his published letter with a flourish. “When!” he asked, “had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can devise?” For him and other patriots, 1776 was less about defeating Britain and achieving independence than about founding representative governments and ensuring individual liberty. “Actually he “That is the whole object of the present controversy,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in June 1776 of the new constitution then being drafted for Virginia, “for if in the future a bad government should be instituted upon us, it would have been better to have accepted at first the bad one offered to us from beyond the water without the risk and expense of a dispute.”
In a year widely remembered for military actions and the Declaration of Independence, most states set about drafting new constitutions that ended royal government by instituting republican governments along the lines outlined by Adams and endorsed by Jefferson. “All political power resides in and is derived solely from the people,” North Carolina's 1776 constitution began with a resounding statement rejecting the divine right of kings and proclaiming a new era of popular sovereignty. The document included a bill of rights enshrining due process and the rule of law, along with a list of grievances against George III. As a consequence of his actions aimed at reducing the American colonies “to a state of abject slavery,” according to the constitution, “all government under the command of the said King within the said Colonies has ceased.” Neither the first nor the last of the state constitutions of 1776; In these respects, North Carolina was representative.
Drafted by Jefferson and unanimously adopted by all state delegations in July, the Declaration of Independence complemented these new state constitutions. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” it states. “That to guarantee these rights, governments are instituted among men, which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Individual freedom and popular sovereignty are at the center of this declaration, which justified independence on the basis of the “repeated insults and usurpations of the king, all having as their direct objective the establishment of absolute tyranny over these States.”
On the military front during 1776, the Americans drove the British out of Boston and kept them out of Charleston, South Carolina, but lost New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. Overall, despite a small but inspiring year-end victory at Trenton, the Americans ended 1776 in a weaker military position than they began it.
What changed in 1776 was Americans' embrace of democracy over monarchy, republican rule of law over arbitrary rule by men, and written constitutions over hereditary regimes. Anticipating these revolutionary changes that would sweep the colonies in 1776 and then much of the world, Paine was able to justly write at the beginning of the year: “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson is the author, most recently, of “Declare independence: why it is important 1776.”
