A History of the Constitution - The Common-Law Mind of the Founders (14/30)
Coke, Hale, Blackstone, Natural Law, and the Radical Whig Tradition
The Common-Law Mind of the Founders — Coke, Hale, Blackstone, Natural Law, and the Radical Whig Tradition
“The law is the perfection of reason.” — Sir Edward Coke
“Whenever the legislators endeavor to destroy the property of the people… they put themselves into a state of war with the people.” — John Locke
“Power is of an encroaching nature.” — Cato’s Letters
If you want to understand why the Declaration of Independence reads the way it does — furious, moral, principled, legally precise — you must understand the intellectual world inside the Founders’ heads. That world was not born in 1776. It was formed by centuries of English constitutional struggle, the natural-law tradition of Europe, and, perhaps most explosively, the Radical Whig movement, which convinced Americans that liberty dies quietly unless citizens stay permanently pissed-off and vigilant.
This entry traces that lineage: from the courtrooms of Edward Coke, through the natural-law philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, to the anti-corruption pamphleteers whose writings were more widespread in early America than the Bible in some towns. These were the thinkers who taught the Founders how to argue, how to justify resistance, and — above all — how to understand power.
Coke, Hale, and Blackstone — The Common-Law Mind
The Founders were lawyers before they were revolutionaries, and their law libraries all shared the same three names: Sir Edward Coke, Sir Matthew Hale, and Sir William Blackstone. These men were the architects of the legal worldview that shaped colonial America.
Coke — The Judge Who Taught Americans How to Resist
Sir Edward Coke is the godfather of Anglo-American constitutionalism. As Chief Justice during the reign of James I, Coke did something almost unheard of in Europe at the time: he told a king to his face that the law was superior to the crown. In decision after decision — over taxation, imprisonment, prerogative courts — Coke insisted that even the monarch must bow to the common law.
It’s hard to overstate how radical that was. To the Founders, Coke proved that reason, precedent, and public judgment could bind arbitrary power. His ruling in Bonham’s Case even suggested that courts could void acts of Parliament if they violated “common right and reason,” a conceptual ancestor of American judicial review.
Coke became the Founders’ model of the courageous jurist, the man who stands between the citizen and the state with nothing but the law in his hand and a spine of iron.
Hale — Law as Inheritance and Continuity
Matthew Hale’s influence was quieter but just as deep. In The History of the Common Law, Hale traced English legal institutions back through centuries, showing how law emerged not from kings, but from the collective wisdom of experience. For Hale, law represented a long and steady accumulation of judgment — something to be preserved, not refashioned on a monarch’s whim.
This historical consciousness shaped the Founders’ preference for a constitutional order rooted in inherited rights, long-tested customs, and cautious reform. Hale taught them to distrust sudden, sweeping changes in favor of organic evolution grounded in tradition.
Blackstone — The Founders’ Legal Bible
If Coke taught resistance and Hale taught continuity, then Blackstone taught structure. Published between 1765 and 1769, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England became the single most influential legal textbook in the colonies. It distilled the entire common-law system into a coherent, readable framework that every American lawyer absorbed.
Blackstone defined rights as “absolute, vested in individuals by the immutable laws of nature.” He explained due process, property, courts, and political power with clarity and authority. For the Founders, Blackstone was less a scholar than a roadmap — the clearest guide to the legal universe they inhabited.
Together, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone gave the Founders a worldview in which law is ancient, rational, moral, and superior to government. When Jefferson, Adams, and their peers complained that George III had violated their rights, they weren’t making things up — they were citing a millennium of English legal tradition.
The Natural Law Tradition — The Moral Architecture of the Declaration
The Declaration’s opening line — “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” — wasn’t decorative. It was a legal and philosophical claim drawn from a long chain of thinkers stretching from the late 1500s to the mid-1700s.
From Hooker to Hobbes: Reason, Order, and the Social Contract
Richard Hooker argued that natural law was moral reason applied to human affairs, a universal standard higher than kings or parliaments. John Selden deepened this tradition, treating liberty as an inherited cultural right, not a royal gift.
Then came Hobbes, whose dark view of human nature the Founders mostly rejected — but whose social contract theory they embraced. The idea that government is a human creation, not a divine right, was essential to American political thought.
Locke — The Philosopher of 1776
Locke was the hinge of this new form of government and political philosophy. He blended moral natural rights (life, liberty, property) with a practical theory of government as a trust. When rulers violate that trust, he argued, the people may alter or abolish the government. Jefferson drew heavily from Locke’s Second Treatise — often paraphrasing him almost word for word.
Burlamaqui and Vattel — Natural Law Made Actionable
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui made natural law accessible, moral, and practical. Emer de Vattel then applied natural law to international relations in The Law of Nations — a book so influential that the Continental Congress bought copies for every delegate.
Natural law gave the Founders a moral universe in which rights were real, pre-political, and universal. When they declared independence, they did so with the confidence that they were appealing to something older and higher than Parliament.
The Radical Whig (Country) Tradition — Liberty’s Early-Warning System
If Coke and Blackstone trained the Founders’ legal minds, and Locke trained their philosophical minds, the Radical Whigs trained their instincts — particularly their instinct to distrust power.
The “Country-Party” writers, emerging in the late 1600s and early 1700s, argued that political liberty survives only when citizens assume rulers are always trying to centralize authority. Their worldview was shaped by the corruption and court politics of the post-Stuart era, when English ministers used bribery, patronage, and executive intrigue to dominate Parliament.
Cato’s Letters — The Founders’ Secular Scripture
John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote Cato’s Letters between 1720 and 1723. These essays were reprinted in American newspapers more than any other secular text. If you read colonial political pamphlets between 1760 and 1776, you find Cato everywhere: quoted, paraphrased, invoked.
Cato hammered home a few essential lessons:
Power always grows unless checked.
Liberty dies through gradual encroachment, not sudden tyranny.
Standing armies are dangerous.
Executive power must be watched relentlessly.
Corruption is the enemy of republican government.
Citizens must remain armed, informed, and vigilant.
This wasn’t conspiracy theory — it was history. The Stuarts had attempted everything Cato warned about. The Hanoverians weren’t much better. So when George III began behaving like his predecessors, Americans recognized the pattern immediately.
Bolingbroke and the Politics of Virtue
Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, offered a more philosophical angle. He emphasized civic virtue, rotation in office, and the constant danger of “court influence” — political corruption through executive manipulation.
Bolingbroke’s suspicion of entrenched elites resonated deeply with colonial Americans. His work shaped the Founders’ fear of faction and their obsession with virtuous leadership.
The Country Mindset
By the 1760s, the Radical Whig worldview had fused with American political culture. Colonists believed — sincerely — that liberty depended on citizens who were ready to call bullshit on government at the slightest provocation. That mindset made resistance in the 1760s and 1770s inevitable.
Reflection — The Intellectual Operating System of the Revolution
When the Founders sat down to declare independence, they did so with a mental toolkit built from:
Coke’s defiance of arbitrary power
Hale’s sense of constitutional continuity
Blackstone’s structure of rights and legal reasoning
Hooker’s moral order
Selden’s vision of inherited liberties
Hobbes’s social contract (minus the absolutist conclusions)
Locke’s natural rights and right of revolution
Burlamaqui’s moral clarity
Vattel’s law of nations
Cato’s suspicion of power
Bolingbroke’s warnings about corruption
This was not a revolution improvised in anger. It was the logical, disciplined, deeply learned conclusion of a centuries-long intellectual tradition.
The Founders believed — honestly — that they were not overthrowing the English constitution. They were restoring it. It was a natural law of the universe that Englishmen, and by extension all men, possessed these unalienable rights.
Everything that happens next — from the Declaration to the Articles to the Constitution itself — grows directly out of this worldview.
External Links for Further Reading
Sir Edward Coke — Institutes of the Laws of England (Select Volumes)
Matthew Hale — The History of the Common Law of England (1713 Edition)
William Blackstone — Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui — The Principles of Natural and Politic Law
Country-Party / Radical Whig Historical Overview (British Library)
Next Entry: Declaration of Independence (1776)