What did the founding fathers take from England while forming a new government?

Answer 1

Firstly it must be understood that by the time of America's Federal Constitution, the Founders were on their third polity. Polity is how societies organize into governing bodies. America's final polity was a bicameral system, or two houses of legislature voting on the passing of laws. Bicameral polity is the what; while Republic is the why. Republic is from the Latin; res publica meaning the public good or the public affairs.

However, this too can be misleading for a Republic is nothing without virtue. For example: While Rome's virtue was predicated on the expansion and domination of trade; backed by an elite military; Athens by comparison expressed their virtue or desire to do good, by pursuing the Arts and Sciences. However, all Republics began as a long suffering desire to remedy political evils. This is most conspicuous in Sparta, Rome, and America. Thomas Jefferson's teacher stated that "Commonwealth is the nearest English translation of the Latin res publica." Sorry too late to go digging in Mr. Jefferson's writings. Please trust its accuracy as I'm sure memory has not failed my as yet.

Therefore; The N. American British Colonies were first Royalist, then Confederate, then Constitutional. The now American people during the Constitutional Convention were understood to be... Republican. (not to be confused with today's Republican Party who were Federalists in the 1790's by virtue of a counter-revolution and establishing a central authority which is still with us today. Conversely, the motivation behind the Revolution, The Confederation, and the Federal Constitution: (as opposed to each State which has it's own Constitution), was to establish a central government.

Below are excerpts from my Book: The Never Realized Republic: Political Economy and Republican virtue. (formatted for this medium). While an intense work of scholarship, I rewrote it for students and general readership as The Republic: A Citizen's Guide to the meaning of Republic in America, (Oct. 2011). Each Chapter begins with a 2-3 paragraph explanation for the chapter that follows.

However, the short answer is: Common-Law or laws of authority whose principle or basic truth is Custom. Reference the Declaration of Independence: vis-à-vis "... He [the King] has refused his ascent to laws most wholesome and necessary for the public good..." Additionally, "...speaking of 'our ancestors' before emigration, possessed a right which nature has given to all men..., establish new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness. That their Saxon ancestors...had established there [in Britain] that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country."1

1[Thomas Jefferson], A Summary View of the Rights of British America, (Virginia, 1781), in Thomas Jefferson:Writings, (N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States), 105-106. Notes and text selected by Merrill D. Peterson. Hereinafter cited as Thomas Jefferson: Writings.

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Excerpts from

The Never Realized Republic: Political Economy and Republican Virtue

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Chapter II

The Authority of Custom, and Common Law Principles:

Colonial Heritage of Liberty and Education

"The colonists...carry out with them, too, the habit of subordination, some notion of the regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which support it, and of a regular administration of justice; and they naturally establish something of the same kind in the new settlement."

-Adam Smith, 17761

The concepts of law and liberty were carried by English citizens to the New World. In the colonists' lawful charters was an inherent principle: the custom of law, and to Englishmen, especially educated Englishmen, the idea of common law, was the common bond with England. "The travelers from England who founded America brought with them the common law of England. What else could they do? They knew no other law, and were bound to follow that which they knew."2

1Adam Smith, AnInquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Chicago: William Benton, 1776, 1952), Book IV, Of Systems of Political Economy, Chapter VII, Of Colonies, 243. Hereinafter cited as Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

2Lord Chief Justice (of England), Widgery, in Wright, Louis B. Wright, Magna Carta and the Tradition of Liberty, (Washington D.C: The United States Capitol Historical Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society, 1976), 11. Hereinafter cited as Wright, Magna Carta and the Tradition of Liberty,4. See also, "SINCE MAGNA CARTA THE COMMON LAW HAS BEEN THE CORNERSTONE OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES. EVEN AS AGAINST THE CROWN. SUMMARIZED LATER IN THE BILL OF RIGHTS ITS PRINCIPLES HAVE INSPIRED FREEDOM UNDER LAW. WHICH IS AT ONCE OUR DEAREST POSSESSION AND PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT." Presented by the Virginia State Bar May 17, 1959. This Plaque at Jamestown commemorates the introduction of common law on these shores, Wright, Magna Carta and the Tradition of Liberty.11.

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Colonial heritage was essentially born of a larger European civil, social, and scholarly history. Heritage is that which comes from the circumstances of birth, or the condition or state transmitted from ancestors." From heritage comes custom, and tradition, which is supported and perpetuated through education and religion. If we apply this to colonial America, we can see what Thomas Paine meant by "Europe not England, is the parent of America."3

The transition, of this heritage,-cultural, political, social, and religious,- that ultimately brought revolution and self-realization, was sprung from an intellectual and spiritually faithful civilization. European and classical history was America's history, in the sense that the historicity of social evolution and events from the Renaissance led the Revolutionary generation to make a break from the past.

3Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Thomas Wendel, ed. (New York: Barons Educational Series inc., 1975), 78. Hereinafter cited as Paine, Common Sense, Wendel, ed.

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A complex relation of cultural history, its impact and meaning upon seventeenth, and eighteenth-century thought, found fruition within the academic and civil institutions that were developing in the American Colonies, with institutions immersed in the very Renaissance tradition of political thought, and the literature of radical whiggism of England. "Throughout the eighteenth-century the Americans had published, republished, read, cited, and even plagiarized these radical writings, in their search for arguments to counter royal authority, to explain American deviations, or to justify peculiar American freedoms."1

These traditions and sources of political thought, and purpose, that found voice in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, were "most conspicuous in the writings of the Revolutionary period [and] was the heritage of classical antiquity."2 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in colonial America were a sort of prism, of intellectual and social development.

There was first and foremost the education of the classics, the white light of the prism. This was the foundation which was to broaden the illumination that the age of reason provided by showing only science had progressed, but there was potential for social progress as well, above and beyond Protestant reformation. "During the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, western political and social thought passed from its post-medieval to its early modern stage."3

Carl J. Richard, in The Founders and the Classics,shows that this classical foundation was a social conditioning of an educational system that had originated in the Middle Ages. "Americans derived their curriculum and pedagogical methods from the English educational system, which, like other European systems, had originated in the Middle Ages."4 There were other sources as well, culminating in the theories of social progress that led to an attempt to realize the ideal corporate society.5

1Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic:1776-1787, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 17. Hereinafter cited as Wood, The Creation of the American Republic.

2Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge: Mass, 1992), rev. ed., 23. Hereinafter cited as Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

3J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 401-402.. Hereinafter cited as Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment.

4Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), 20. Hereinafter cited as Richard, The Founders and the Classics.

5See, "there was even a desperate attempt, by many Americans to realize the traditional Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government." Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 54.

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