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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.

Bernard Bailyn

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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Facts Law Liberty
What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues.
BERNARD BAILYN

Multiplicity Reform Simplicity Weakness Weaknesses
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
BERNARD BAILYN

Literature Revolution World
Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the “left” opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts.
BERNARD BAILYN

Army Country Mind
Not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes.
BERNARD BAILYN

Country Enlightened Hope Principle Renewal Spokesmen
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.
BERNARD BAILYN

Obvious Revolution Social
Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.
BERNARD BAILYN

Growing Heat Sparks
The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.
BERNARD BAILYN

England Limits might
Everyone knew that democracy – direct rule by all the people – required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.
BERNARD BAILYN

Democracy People Race
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred.
BERNARD BAILYN

Four Struggle Years
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
BERNARD BAILYN

Corruption Facts Liberty
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Effort Kind Principles
Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.
BERNARD BAILYN

Leader May Revolution
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.
BERNARD BAILYN

Constitution Finals Political
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.
BERNARD BAILYN

Country Ignorant Men
Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.
BERNARD BAILYN

Crown Sovereign Together

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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