When we recall the American Revolution, we remember the hits: Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Valley Forge speech. Less remembered are the many pamphlets and sermons that shaped the worldview of the American colonists and brought them to the point of revolution in the first place.
In his 1967 book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn does the yeoman's work of reintroducing these less-famous texts into our historical memory. With heavy quotations, Bailyn shows how writers before and during the Revolution denounced the corrupting legacy of Robert Walpole (Britain's first prime minister), railed against executive usurpations of legislatures, and tried to identify when exactly tariffs became internal taxes. Bailyn's conclusion: The ideological origins of the American Revolution were both extremely libertarian and extremely paranoid.
