In January 1776, nine months after the fighting at Lexington and Concord, the Continental Congress was still officially seeking reconciliation with George III, and most colonists still blamed his ministers rather than the king himself. By July, Congress had declared the colonies independent and called the king a tyrant. Battles alone do not explain that turn. Colonists had to come to believe that a king was unnecessary, that a republic could work, and that rights came from nature and God rather than from royal charters. Those beliefs had roots in the Enlightenment and in colonial religion, and they were made popular by two documents written within six months of each other.
Enlightenment ideas: rights, consent, and talent over birth
The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement that applied reason to nature, society and government. Educated colonists read its writers in pamphlets, newspapers and college libraries, and four strands shaped their politics.
Natural rights and consent. John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) argued that people are born with rights to life, liberty and property, that they create governments by consent to protect those rights, and that when a government systematically violates them, the people may resist and replace it. Locke wrote to justify England's Glorious Revolution of 1688; colonists used him to justify their own.
Fear of power. British opposition writers known as radical Whigs, such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in Cato's Letters (1720-1723), warned that power always seeks to expand at liberty's expense, that standing armies and corrupt officials are its tools, and that citizens must watch for the first signs of tyranny. This explains why colonists read a small tax as a deadly threat: to a radical Whig, accepting the first unlawful tax meant accepting all the ones that would follow.
Republicanism. A republic is a government without a king, in which power comes from the people and is exercised by their representatives. Colonists drew the idea from ancient Rome and from the French writer Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which also argued for separating legislative, executive and judicial power. Republican thinkers held that a republic survives only if its citizens have virtue: willingness to put the public good above private interest.
Talent over hereditary privilege. Enlightenment writers questioned why birth should decide anyone's place. In the colonies the question had special force, since there was no titled nobility, land was widely owned among free white men, and men like Benjamin Franklin, a candle maker's son who became one of the most famous scientists in the world, showed how far ability could carry someone. Many American thinkers came to argue that leaders should rise by merit and virtue, not inherit their positions. After independence, Virginia abolished entail and primogeniture, the inheritance laws that kept great estates intact in one family line (Topic 3.6 covers such changes).
Religion and a people blessed with liberty
The Revolution was not only an Enlightenment project. Most colonists were Protestant Christians, and religion gave them their own reasons to defend liberty.
The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, led by preachers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, taught that each person must experience God's grace directly, and it encouraged ordinary people to reject ministers they judged unconverted. That habit of questioning authority carried into politics. Many colonists, especially New England Congregationalists, also saw themselves as heirs of the Puritans, a people in covenant with God whose liberty was a divine gift that it would be a sin to surrender.
Ministers made the link explicit. In 1750 the Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew preached that Christians had no duty to obey a ruler who became a tyrant, and that resisting one was a religious obligation. In the 1760s, rumors that the Church of England would send a bishop to America alarmed dissenting Protestants, who connected church authority with political tyranny. During the war, Congress proclaimed days of fasting and prayer, and so many ministers preached resistance that Loyalists called them the "black regiment," after the color of their robes.
Religious language reached people the pamphlets missed. The enslaved Boston poet Phillis Wheatley, whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773, wrote an elegy for Whitefield that celebrated his gospel as open to everyone, including Africans. In a 1774 letter she argued that God had planted a love of freedom in every human being, a direct challenge to colonists who demanded liberty while holding slaves.
Deists like Jefferson and Franklin, who believed in a creator but doubted much of Christian doctrine, and evangelicals who believed deeply in it, reached the same conclusion from different directions: liberty was a gift of God or of nature, and no king could rightfully take it away. That is why the Declaration appeals both to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and to "divine Providence."
Common Sense: the case against kings
Before 1776, most colonists argued that the king's ministers and Parliament were corrupt, not the king. Thomas Paine demolished that position. Paine was an English corset maker and former tax collector who had arrived in Philadelphia only in late 1774. His pamphlet Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, made three arguments:
- Monarchy is absurd. Kings began as conquerors, and hereditary succession was worse still, since no one could bind their descendants to obey a family forever. Paine called George III a "royal brute."
- Independence is natural and practical. Paine wrote that "there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Britain dragged America into European wars, and American trade would do better free of British restrictions.
- America has a mission. An independent republic would be "an asylum for mankind," a refuge for liberty that had been driven from the rest of the world.
What made Common Sense work was its style. Earlier pamphlets were written by lawyers for educated readers, full of Latin and constitutional precedent. Paine wrote plain sentences, used examples from the Bible that any churchgoer knew, and attacked the king by name. The pamphlet was read aloud in taverns and army camps and sold tens of thousands of copies in 1776; estimates range from about 75,000 to over 150,000, and historians such as Trish Loughran have argued that the larger figures are exaggerated. Either way, it reached a huge share of a population of about 2.5 million.
The Declaration of Independence
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." Congress appointed a committee of five (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston) to draft a declaration, and Jefferson wrote the first draft. Congress voted for independence on July 2 and approved the edited Declaration on July 4, after cutting about a quarter of Jefferson's text, including a passage blaming the king for the Atlantic slave trade, which delegates from South Carolina and Georgia opposed.
The document has three parts. The preamble states a theory of government: all men are created equal, they have unalienable rights including "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," governments exist to secure those rights and derive their power from "the consent of the governed," and when a government becomes destructive of those ends, the people may alter or abolish it. The long middle section is a list of grievances, aimed at the king rather than Parliament. That choice was deliberate: colonists now denied that Parliament had ever had authority over them, so the king was the only link left to cut. The conclusion declares the colonies "Free and Independent States."
The Declaration's purposes match its audiences. It aimed to unite colonists behind a decision many still doubted, to justify the break to "the opinions of mankind," and to show European powers, especially France, that the United States was a nation that could make alliances rather than a rebellion inside the British Empire.
Historians argue about its sources. Carl Becker's The Declaration of Independence (1922) traced its philosophy chiefly to Locke. Garry Wills's Inventing America (1978) stressed Scottish Enlightenment writers. Pauline Maier's American Scripture (1997) showed that more than ninety towns, counties and colonies issued their own declarations for independence in the spring of 1776, so Jefferson was expressing ideas already widely shared.
Why these ideas lasted
The phrase "all men are created equal" was written by a man who enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, and the Declaration's authors did not mean it to free the enslaved, enfranchise women or include Native nations. But its words could be turned against those exclusions, and they were, almost immediately. In 1777 enslaved people in Massachusetts petitioned the legislature for freedom, arguing that they had the same natural rights the Declaration claimed. Over the next two centuries the same move kept recurring:
- The Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls (1848) rewrote the preamble as "all men and women are created equal."
- Frederick Douglass, in his 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", measured the nation against its founding ideals and found it guilty.
- Abraham Lincoln opened the Gettysburg Address (1863) by dating the nation from 1776 and its commitment to equality.
The Declaration also traveled: Venezuela's declaration of independence (1811) and many later ones borrowed its form. At home, each generation used the document to argue over who its ideals covered, which is how a statement of 1776 became the standard Americans measured their nation against.
Worked examples
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 1776
Explain how Paine's point of view and purpose shape this passage.
Show solution
Point of view. Paine was a recent English immigrant from a modest background, a craftsman and former minor tax official, not a colonial lawyer or planter. He had no stake in defending British institutions, and he had lived in England as a man of low birth in a society ranked by it. Both help explain why he attacks hereditary privilege itself rather than only the abuses of a particular king.
Purpose. In January 1776 many colonists still hoped for reconciliation and blamed ministers, not the king. Paine's goal was to destroy their remaining loyalty to monarchy, so he argues that hereditary rule is wrong in principle ("all men being originally equals") and ridiculous in practice. The image of "an ass for a lion" is meant to make readers laugh at kingship, which a respectful constitutional argument could never do.
Audience link. He wrote for ordinary readers, so he uses a vivid animal image and a simple chain of reasoning rather than legal precedents.
Why this earns the point. "Explain" means connecting a feature of the author's situation to a feature of the text. Saying "Paine's purpose was to persuade people" earns nothing; saying what he wanted them to believe, why, and how the passage's language serves that goal does.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
a. Briefly describe ONE intellectual influence on the ideas in the excerpt.
b. Briefly explain ONE way the ideas in the excerpt differed from colonial arguments against Britain in the 1760s.
c. Briefly explain ONE way a group in the period 1776 to 1865 used the ideas in the excerpt.
Show solution
a. The excerpt draws on John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), which held that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property and that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed and exists to protect those rights.
b. In the 1760s, colonists such as the Stamp Act Congress argued from their rights as British subjects under the British constitution and still pledged subordination to Parliament. The Declaration grounds rights in nature and in God ("endowed by their Creator"), so they belong to all people and do not depend on British law, which justified leaving the empire altogether.
c. Women's rights activists at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 rewrote the excerpt in their Declaration of Sentiments as "all men and women are created equal," using the founding document's own logic to demand rights, including the vote, that it had not granted women.
Why these earn the points. Part (a) names the influence and the specific idea it shares with the excerpt. Part (b) shows change over time by pinpointing what shifted (British rights to natural rights) and why it mattered. Part (c) names a specific group, date and use, within the prompt's dates.
Evaluate the relative importance of Enlightenment ideas and religious beliefs in changing colonial attitudes about government in the period from 1740 to 1776.
Write a thesis and outline the evidence.
Show solution
Thesis: Enlightenment ideas were more important than religious beliefs in shaping the specific arguments for independence, since natural rights, consent and the case against hereditary rule supplied the reasoning of Common Sense and the Declaration; however, religion was essential in spreading resistance to ordinary colonists, who came to see their liberty as God-given and resistance to tyranny as a Christian duty.
Enlightenment evidence. Locke's theory of natural rights and consent appears almost directly in the Declaration's preamble. Radical Whig warnings about standing armies and corruption explain why colonists read the troops in Boston (1768) and the Coercive Acts (1774) as a plot against liberty. Paine's attack on hereditary succession reflects the Enlightenment preference for merit over birth.
Religious evidence. The Great Awakening taught colonists to judge authority for themselves. Jonathan Mayhew's 1750 sermon justified resisting tyrants on Christian grounds, and the "black regiment" of Patriot ministers preached resistance during the war. Paine himself used biblical examples against kingship because his readers knew the Bible better than Locke.
Why it scores. The thesis compares the two factors and explains the difference in their roles (arguments versus popular reach), which is the kind of reasoning "relative importance" asks for. Each piece of evidence is tied to a change in attitudes, not just listed.
Where students lose points
On the exam
This topic's skill is explaining a source's point of view, purpose, historical situation and audience. Common Sense and the Declaration are the two documents this topic's required content names, so be ready to read an excerpt of either and say what shaped it or what it caused. Sermons and Wheatley's poems appear here as examples of the religious strand; no question requires you to have studied them, but you should be able to source an unfamiliar document like them on sight. On the DBQ, sourcing earns credit only when you explain how the feature matters to your argument, as in the first example. In essays across the course, the Declaration's ideals are evidence for continuity: later reform movements from abolition to women's suffrage appealed to them.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which change in colonial thinking does Common Sense best illustrate?
- A
From blaming the king's ministers to rejecting monarchy itself
- B
From supporting nonimportation to demanding representation in Parliament
- C
From accepting the Proclamation of 1763 to demanding western land
- D
From supporting the Articles of Confederation to calling for a stronger central government
Show answer
A
Before 1776 most colonists blamed corrupt ministers and Parliament; Paine attacked monarchy and hereditary succession themselves, which made independence thinkable. Choice B reverses colonial thinking, which moved away from seeking seats in Parliament, and D describes the 1780s, after Common Sense.
- A
Question 2
Why are the Declaration of Independence's grievances addressed to the king rather than to Parliament?
Show answer
By 1776 colonists argued that Parliament had never had legitimate authority over them, since they elected no members of it; their only constitutional tie to Britain was their allegiance to the Crown. Breaking with the king therefore meant breaking with Britain, so the grievances had to show that he had become a tyrant.
This reflects the change in colonial arguments from 1765, when they accepted Parliament's general authority and denied only its power to tax, to 1774-1776, when they denied its authority entirely.
Question 3
A historian argues that religion helped persuade ordinary colonists to support resistance to Britain. Which evidence best supports this?
- A
Montesquieu's argument for separating legislative, executive and judicial power
- B
Ministers preaching that resisting tyranny was a Christian duty, earning them the Loyalist nickname "black regiment"
- C
The Albany Plan of Union's proposal for a grand council
- D
Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity
Show answer
B
Patriot ministers reached congregations across the colonies with a religious case for resistance. Montesquieu (A) and Franklin's science (D) are Enlightenment influences, not religious ones, and the Albany Plan (C) was a 1754 defense proposal.
- A
Question 4
Explain how the Declaration's statement that "all men are created equal" could be used against slavery even though many of its signers enslaved people.
Show answer
The Declaration grounded rights in nature and God rather than in law or status, so anyone who was a human being could claim them. Enslaved petitioners in Massachusetts in 1777, and later abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, argued that slavery contradicted the nation's own founding principle.
A universal claim cannot easily be limited to one group. That gap between the ideal and practice is what later reform movements used.