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  • The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis

  • Edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Jeffrey Paul, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, Fred D. Miller, Jr, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
  • Book:
    Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy
    Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    27 August 2012, pp 82-103

  • Summary

    In order to explore what early Americans meant when they claimed certain rights, this chapter examines the arguments they made against Crown and Parliament in the imperial crisis (1763-1776), a period often slighted in the scholarship on the American Founding in favor of the seminal events of the 1780s which culminated in the federal constitution. The pamphlets of Stephen Hopkins and Richard Bland, along with the resolves of the colonial assemblies and a specially constituted pan-colonial congress, contain strong evidence for the existence of a coherent and widely shared understanding of rights in British North America in the first phase of the imperial crisis. In a series of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania published in colonial newspapers, John Dickinson insisted that the Townshend duties were in fact taxes because they were enacted for the sole purpose of levying money, rather than to regulate trade within the empire.