We Must Return to the Founder's Values to Save America the Beautiful

July 4, 2011: Why America’s Founders Originally Rebelled & Their Thoughts Today

Kelly O'Connell
Sunday, July 3, 2011
many links on this post

Somewhere between confusion and ignorance lies the teaching many Americans receive today on the motives of the Founders of the USA. The American Revolution was really a battle over ideas between the Old and New Worlds. And the chief idea being fought over in the 1770s was that of Liberty.

Colonists considered themselves heirs of the rights of freeborn Englishmen. This powerful conviction was torn-asunder by the decisions of mad King George and an arrogant Parliament. The English realized too late that principled Americans would be willing to fight and die for such beliefs as the right to representative government and the sanctity of private property.

Amazingly, we again today must reassert our rights to such concepts as Life, Liberty and Property, against a tyrannical government or allow our children to eke out an existence as slaves of an all-powerful state.

I. Primary Goal of American Revolution: Preservation of Liberty

The singular concern of American colonists—their overarching goal—was to maintain their liberty, according to Bernard Bailyn, Professor Emeritus of Early American History at Harvard. Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes, and is considered the single most important work on this topic in the last half century. Bailyn claims the Founders exhibited “a cluster of convictions focused on the effort to free the individual from the oppressive misuse of power, from the tyranny of the state.â€