Of Rights and Laws

[mountaineer]

Of Rights and Laws
It wasn’t just that the colonists believed they had a right to defend their property, their speech, and every other inherent right: they believed they had an obligation to defend them.
By Ned Ryun
July 1, 2021

We find ourselves in a situation not unlike the one confronted by our founders in the days leading up to the Battle of Bunker Hill and the beginning of the American Revolution.

While the tension between the colonists and England had been building for years, events accelerated rapidly towards violence in 1774 as the colonists began actively resisting the Intolerable Acts that Parliament had passed as retribution for the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Among other things, the draconian laws shut down the port of Boston and suspended self-government in the colony of Massachusetts. The colonists then began forming their own provincial Congress and organizing for armed resistance to defend their rights and property from the arbitrary authoritarianism of the ruling elites in London.

Some historians have argued that the colonists fought England for economic reasons. While it was a contributing factor, that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason for the division boiled down to a question of “Who governs?” and the idea of transcendent rights and the rule of law.  ...

And those rights, which of course no human document could ever fully spell out, included the rights to property and speech, assembly and free elections, and the right to defense—because, as James Madison would write in his treatise on property in 1792, “There is a right to property and a property in rights.” So property concerns not just physical things, but even such things as one’s conscience counts as one’s property.

These ideas of transcendent rights became the real breaking point with England and her colonies: the ruling class in England—those in Parliament and among King George III’s ministers—viewed such talk as more of a series of suggestions that could be discarded when inconvenient. ...

Please read entire article at American Greatness