The dominant storyline of our American Revolution is about patriotic defiance — refusing to pay taxes, dumping tea into the Boston Harbor and shooting redcoats once we saw the whites of their eyes. It’s about virtuous lawbreaking in the name of freedom.
There is plenty of evidence to support this narrative. Yet like all triumphant tales, this one tends to crowd out other important truths about our past and ourselves. For the revolutionaries not only rejected royal and imperial authority but also embraced what we now call the “rule of law,” first as a national privilege and then as an egalitarian ideal.
The roots of that ideal stretched from Boston to India and converged in 1776 into a powerful call for a new moral and legal order for America and the world.
Colonial protests began in the mid-1760s because the British Parliament’s new taxes violated the “ principles and spirit of the British constitution,” according to colonial delegates, meaning the established or “constituted” laws made Americans members of the British Empire rather than subjects of British firepower. Those laws enshrined English liberties such as the right to free assembly and jury trials.
The dread of losing those national freedoms increased in early 1774, when British authorities closed the port of Boston and threatened to bring the military-style rule of new imperial outposts such as Quebec and Nova Scotia to the older 13 Colonies. These “cruel, unjust, and sanguinary” measures, one group of Maryland patriots declared, could only portend rule “by military Force and ships of war” — government by violence rather than law.
Desperate to protect Americans’ status within the empire, Founding Father Ben Franklin called in 1775 for “impartial justice,” or the kind of law that applied to the rulers and the ruled, both mother country and American Colonies.
As King George III made clear that he saw the colonists as second-class subjects, however, the patriots realized that they would first have to break the law to secure its blessings. They hesitated on the brink until an English expatriate urged them to reject the British Constitution, not appeal to it.
Tom Paine spent his first 37 years in an England where vast inequalities of wealth and privilege made a mockery of law and justice. One of his radicalizing moments came in 1773, when Parliament exonerated Lord Robert Clive, who had helped install British rule over India through force and corruption.
Arriving in Philadelphia with little more than a letter of recommendation from Franklin, Paine published a bitterly sarcastic eulogy to Lord Clive, who had died by suicide, as a fitting servant for a lawless, rampaging empire. Then, in January 1776, Paine released his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense” to convince his adopted countrymen to embrace the enlightened belief that people were “originally equals in the order of creation.”
The British Constitution was “sickly,” Paine argued, because its privileged ranks made the laws they liked and ignored the ones they didn’t. The king and nobility ( “no-ability,” Paine later called them) were nearly as dismissive of North Americans as they were of South Asians. This left the colonists with only one choice: “Whether we shall make our own laws, or, whether the king … shall tell us, ‘there shall be no laws but such as l like.’”
Note that Paine never imagined a future without law, or even with less law. Rather, he called on Americans to make laws that would apply to everyone, lifting the people into an equal and dignified status while holding their leaders to specific duties.
“For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king.” Paine even imagined a ceremony in which the people placed a crown on the sacred figure of the law.
Six months later, another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, began the Declaration of Independence by asserting the self-evident equality of all men, then launched his grievances against George III with the statement that the king had “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
Jefferson concluded by declaring the United States capable of making laws for its own people and of forming treaties with other countries.
In short, the revolutionaries saw the rule of law not only as a necessary bulwark against cruel and corrupt rulers but also as the glorious foundation of a new republican age of equal rights. They even imagined the rule of law as a framework for an international order where the strong no longer bullied the weak.
The rule of law has played a major role in global humanitarian and national liberation movements ever since, including Ukraine’s efforts since 1991 to break free of Russia, which Congress is increasingly unwilling to support.
In today’s America, the shocking inequalities between the morbidly rich and everyone else have made us cynical about any unitary standard. Some of our loudest citizens openly invite us to act like crowned ruffians, while others insist that 18th century ideals can only perpetuate that era’s racial castes. The rule of law thus sounds like a fool’s hope whose time has come and gone.
Before we give up on the ideal, however, we should remember how much it meant to those who defied a king and an empire in its name and to consider what alternatives we have in a world where the worst among us always try to force their rules on everyone else.
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