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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
ture.’’ John Rutledge, on the other hand—joined by Joseph Galloway
and James Duane of New York—argued that ‘‘Our Claims I think are
well founded on the British Constitution, and not on the Law of Nature.’’
Adams discloses that he ‘‘was very strenuous for retaining and insisting
on it [the Law of Nature], as a resource to which We might be driven by
Parliament,’’ and this is the view that ultimately prevailed.
The rhetoric of the Declaration indicates that the members of the First
Continental Congress earnestly believed that they were seeking merely a
‘‘restoration’’ of their established legal rights, and were not laying claim
to new rights of a radical sort based on natural rights philosophy. Their
assertion of rights based on the ‘‘law of nature,’’ in other words, was written in anticipation of Parliament’s rejection of their constitutional doctrines, more out of desperation than of solid conviction. Notwithstanding
their reference to ‘‘the immutable laws of nature,’’ the focal points of their
brief against Parliament were their established rights under the English
Constitution, the common law, and their colonial charters.
There were other fundamental issues, equally important in connection with American political and constitutional development, dividing
the delegates. Adams recalled that a second point of major disagreement in the committee ‘‘was what authority we should concede to Parliament: Whether we should deny the Authority of Parliament in all
Cases: Whether we should allow any Authority to it, in our internal Affairs: or whether we should allow it to regulate the trade of the Empire,
with or without any restrictions.’’ Rejecting the principle of legislative
supremacy, they declared that the legislative authority of Parliament was
limited by the higher law of the Constitution. The Intolerable Acts, the
law establishing the board of commissioners, and the exercise of legislative power in the colonies by appointed councils, in violation of the principle ‘‘that the constituent branches of the legislature be independent of
each other,’’ were, said the delegates, ‘‘dangerous’’ and ‘‘unconstitutional.’’
Proclaiming the ‘‘right of the people to participate in their legislative councils,’’ the delegates finally agreed that Parliament could regulate the external commerce of the colonies but could not levy a tax on them.
The Declaration also reveals an early commitment not only to representative government and a broadly based system of civil liberties, but
also to bicameralism and, most significantly, to the overarching principle
of the American Constitution—namely, that a constitution is a higher