The Inheritance Behind the Revolution
The men who fired on British regulars at Lexington and Concord did not see themselves as revolutionaries inventing a new political order. They saw themselves as Englishmen defending an old one. The American founders did not emerge from a vacuum. They came out of a British tradition that was Christian, Reformed, and deeply legalistic about the relationship between rulers and the ruled. They quoted John Knox, who told Queen Mary to her face that the people had a right to resist a sovereign who stepped outside her bounds. They quoted Calvin and Cromwell. They studied the German pastors and princes who had resisted the emperor during the Reformation. They were searching history for examples of lawful resistance to tyranny, and they were trying very hard to identify the correct way to do it.
The principle they inherited was simple: disobedience to tyranny is obedience to God. But the corollary mattered just as much. Resist tyranny the right way, and you tend to get less tyranny. Resist it the wrong way, and you get more. Knox’s confrontation with the Queen, Cromwell’s England, and the Reformation precedents all gave the colonists a working framework for what lawful resistance looked like and what it did not.
This inheritance shaped the colonists’ self-understanding by 1775. When Paul Revere rode through the Massachusetts countryside, he was not warning that “the British are coming.” Every man in those towns considered himself British — an Englishman with rights under the Magna Carta, under the common law, and under the colonial charters their grandfathers had signed directly with the Crown. The warning was that the regulars were on the move.
Charters, Compacts, and the Limits of Parliament
The colonies of New England were not new in 1775. Many of the towns through which Revere rode were 100 to 150 years old. They had a long track record of governing themselves, defending themselves, electing their own officers, and conducting their own affairs. Their legal relationship with England ran through specific paperwork — charters and compacts signed directly with the king — that predated much of Parliament’s modern claim to authority.
That distinction was the heart of the constitutional argument. Parliament had no legal relationship with the colonies. When Parliament began passing laws and levying taxes on Americans, the colonists’ objection was not primarily emotional or even economic. It was jurisdictional. Parliament was acting outside its lawful authority. Taxation without representation was wrong not because taxes are intrinsically intolerable, but because the body imposing them had no standing to do so under the actual legal documents governing the colonies.
The Coercive Acts — what Americans called the Intolerable Acts — made the problem stark. Parliament dissolved the Massachusetts council, authorized royal officers to quarter troops among the citizenry, dispatched General Gage with four regiments, and seized the port of Boston. Town meetings were restricted to four a year and required the military governor’s permission. The legal structures that the colonists had built and operated for over a century were being unilaterally swept aside by a body with no jurisdiction to do so.
Even at this point, the colonists’ response was not to repudiate their system. It was to defend it. They petitioned the king. They sent ambassadors. They argued in courts. They wrote pamphlets and remonstrated. The progression toward armed resistance was slow, deliberate, and grounded in the position that British liberties were not the grants of princes or parliaments but inherent rights, agreed on as maxims and established as preliminaries even before Parliament existed.
The Bright Line at Lexington and Concord
When General Gage sent 700 men to Concord on the night of April 18, 1775, he was looking for the leaders of the rebellion — Sam Adams and John Hancock — and for the militia stores at Concord. Gage and his officers appear to have believed that if they could arrest a few rabble-rousers and confiscate some powder, the unrest would subside and the populace would return to obedience.
This was a profound misreading. The colonists were not stirred up by a handful of mutineers. They were a people with deeply held legal and moral convictions, organized through decades of community life, and militarily prepared. The town militias were not insurgent groups. They were legally mandated civil defense institutions. Every able-bodied man in the town was required by law to be a member. The militia stores Gage was sent to seize were the lawful supplies of a lawful institution.
This is why the disarmament line, more than any tax or quartering act, was the line that could not be crossed. It was not the last straw of accumulated frustration. It was a direct attack on the legal defensive structure of the towns themselves. The modern equivalent would not be an ATF no-knock raid on an individual. It would be federal agents arriving without lawful paperwork to disarm a state’s National Guard and a county sheriff’s department. There is also the pragmatic point: a people who do not resist the seizure of their arms have lost the ability to resist anything else thereafter.
When Gage’s 700 regulars reached Concord, they were met by 4,000 militiamen. By the end of April 19, roughly 20,000 men from across the countryside had turned out. This was not the response of a population recently inflamed by political speeches. It was the response of communities with a century and a half of self-government, decades of conversation about their rights, sermons on the legitimacy of resistance to unlawful authority, and 16 prior wars’ worth of organized military experience fighting alongside the British.
The Colonists Acting as Lesser Magistrates
What happened at Lexington and Concord, and through the war that followed, is not cleanly described as one nation fighting another. The colonies did not declare independence until July 1776 — fifteen months after the first shots. What occurred in April 1775 was the action of lesser magistrates resisting a greater magistrate who had moved outside his lawful authority.
The militia officers, the elected town leaders, the colonial assemblies — these were duly constituted civil authorities. When they resisted Gage, they did so in their official capacities, defending the legal structures of their towns and colonies. Even after royal governors fled, the colonies did not collapse into anarchy. The duly elected officials of Virginia remained the duly elected officials of Virginia. Patrick Henry became governor. The continuity of legitimate civil authority was preserved.
This is the crucial difference between the American war for independence and most of the violent revolutions that followed it. The colonists were not abolishing their existing system to replace it with something invented from scratch. They were conserving what they already had — common law, charters, town governments, militias, the rights of Englishmen — and adding limitations against the abuses they had suffered. When the Bill of Rights was eventually drafted, its provisions read as restrictions on government, not as grants of new powers. The Second Amendment’s text explicitly presupposes a pre-existing right; the colonists’ legal argument throughout had been that the right to keep and bear arms was an ancient English right, recognized for centuries, that could not be denied them.
The pattern of doing the right thing at the right time and in the right way runs through the whole conflict. At the Boston Massacre, the colonists infuriated by the Crown’s misconduct nonetheless tried the British soldiers as individuals and acquitted them on the grounds of self-defense, with John Adams arguing the case and Paul Revere providing testimony for the defense. The principle of individual rights and individual responsibility — rather than collective guilt — held even under provocation. At Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, the militias took fire before they returned it, because the systemic understanding among the colonists was that they could not be the side that fired first.
George Washington’s voluntary relinquishment of power after two terms was the same principle in a later setting. King George III reportedly said that if Washington stepped down, he would be a greater man than the king had thought. Washington stepped down. A head of state voluntarily surrendering power was, and remains, an extraordinary statement — one possible only because the entire revolution had been conducted as the defense of principle rather than the seizure of power.
The English constitutional inheritance, properly understood and properly applied, is what made American independence possible without producing the kind of regime it had overthrown. The colonists won not because they invented something new, but because they were rigorously faithful to something old.