On January 1, 1876, the U.S.S. Trenton was launched from the New York Navy Yard. She was an odd ship to be sure, given that she was propelled out of port by a steam-driven screw but also sported three full square-rig masts to assist it. Unfortunately, timing is everything, and even with this sterling set of qualifications, the U.S.S. Trenton was still only the runner-up in the 1876 “most rigging and screwing” championship.   

     First place went to the 1876 presidential election.

   Not to be outdone, the citizens of Massachusetts reacted by staging their own version of the Glorious Revolution in Boston just as the English Bill of Rights was being finalized.

  The English Bill of Rights is the first known example of such a document. Thomas Hobbes’ tour de force Leviathan (1651) is one of the first texts of what would become the Enlightenment of the 18th century—the movement upon which the great thinkers behind the American Revolution would draw. Incidentally, Hobbes is the first person to use the words “unalienable rights” in print, although he basically reduces it to the ineradicable right of biting people on the way to the gallows. 

  After James I made Virginia a royal colony, England got on with its usual business of war and imperialism. They aggressively colonized both the United States and Canada, as well as large parts of the West Indies. The Colonies made England wealthy and powerful, and they fought three wars with the Dutch, ultimately coming in a close second. It began when Oliver Cromwell, fresh off of deposing Charles I’s head from his shoulders, passed the first of the Navigation Acts in 1651. In short, anything traded from the Colonies had to either go through England first by way of an English ship, or be traded with another English colony. Naturally this caused some problems—see, First Anglo-Dutch War—but after a while the Colonists largely ignored the Navigation Acts as the fruits of the colonies were outstripping English demand to such a degree that surplus trade was a financial inevitability.

Chapter 4 - The Irony of Rights

Stay out of our government, stay out of our courtrooms, and let us deal with our own taxation—it was simple stuff, really. There was no point pretending to having laws and freedoms if the king could take them away any time he wanted. The Magna Carta was written as if in the first person of John I, albeit by a gang of barons with a sword at his throat, and by signing it he excoriated royal totalitarianism and subjugated himself to the law. However, just because John I was the king that broke the camel's back doesn't mean the perpetual and cyclical abuses of royalty hadn't been percolating in the minds of the English for centuries.

Chapter 3 - The Sins of the Father

The period between 1624 and 1688 was marked with regime change, war, British dominance of the New World, and the calcification of the American skeleton around which the revolutionary philosophy would take body and sinew. 

The Charter of Virginia, 1606, is the vestigial document that defined the corpus of what would become America, but it was the English legal and citizenship philosophies the colonists carried with them on the ship that breathed life into its soul.  The concepts of rights, freedoms, and social justice underpin what De Tocqueville would described after the revolution as the American character, in his third volume of Democracy in America:  

Chapter 1 - In the Beginning

If one understands the history of the Colony of Virginia, one understands the origin of the country we know today. Its founding and history through the revolution are microcosms of the “federal system”, a phrase hotly contested by the members of the Constitutional Congress who favored “national system”.