American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775 [Hardcover]

American States of Naturetransforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. Surveying thousands of texts produced between 1761 and 1775, including hundreds of archival discoveries, this book shows that the state of nature was among the most crucial revolutionary concepts. The founding generation drew not only on English sources, such as Hobbes and Locke, but also on Grotius, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Vattel, and others, to develop an original and distinct American view of the state of nature as a natural community where colonists could pool their rights to self-defense and self-government.American States of Naturetransforms our understanding of the American Revolution and the early makings of the Constitution. The journey to an independent United States generated important arguments about the existing condition of Americans, in which rival interpretations of the term state of nature played a crucial role. State of nature typically implied a pre-political condition and was often invoked in support of individual rights to property and self-defense and the right to exit or to form a political state. It could connote either a paradise, a baseline condition of virtue and health, or a hell on earth. This mutable phrase was well-known in Europe and its empires. In the British colonies, state of nature appeared thousands of times in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other texts from 1630 to 1810. But by the 1760s, a distinctively American state-of-nature discourse started to emerge. It combined existing meanings and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, such as the Stamp Act crisis of 1765-66 and the First Continental Congress of 1774. In laws, resolutions, petitions, sermons, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and diaries, the American states of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did. Il£w