The Rights Proclaimed
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gument being that Americans were entitled to the same rights as Englishmen. These rights, the Americans argued, were basically inherited rights,
derived from the English Constitution and the great charters of liberty,
the English common law, and colonial charters. Nature was another
source of rights—‘‘the right to life, liberty, and property’’—but to suggest that Americans were motivated principally by a natural right theory is to overstate the importance of John Locke and natural rights doctrines. The controversy with Great Britain centered mainly on legally
established constitutional rights, not abstract philosophical rights. As an
authoritative source of rights, nature was mentioned either as an alternative source or as a rhetorical device.
The first official list of claimed rights appeared in Patrick Henry’s famous Resolves, which the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted in 1765.
They were passed in response to the Stamp Act and were repeated again
and again in other State assemblies and in the Continental Congress down
to the outbreak of the Revolution. Henry argued that the English had
violated three rights. The first was the right of equality between the
American and European subjects of George III. The colonists, said the
Virginia Resolves, were entitled to ‘‘all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and
possessed by the people of Great Britain.’’ The second English right asserted was the right to be taxed only by representatives of one’s choosing. And the third, closely related to the second, was government by
consent: ‘‘the inestimable right of being governed by such laws, respecting their internal polity and taxation, as are derived from their own consent.’’
The most comprehensive statement of colonial privileges made during the revolutionary period appeared in the Declaration of Rights of
1774. Whereas Henry’s resolves were concerned with the single issue of
internal taxation, the Declaration of 1774 listed nearly all of the rights
Americans had been claiming since the passage of the Stamp Act. Nine
rights were identified: (1) the right to ‘‘life, liberty and property,’’ which
the colonists never ‘‘ceded to any sovereign power whatever’’; (2) the
right to equal rights; (3) the right of representation; (4) common law
rights; (5) trial by jury; (6) rights under English statutes that were in force
at the time of colonization; (7) the right to petition, the House of Com-