Continunity and Revolution: The Basis of the American Revolution in the Common Law and the Ancient Constitution, as Explicated by John Dickinson

by Feeney, Joseph Leland

How revolutionary was the American Revolutionary War? My thesis is that, for a broad cross section of Americans, the political scientific rationale of the American Revolutionary era was based on the Common Law and the Ancient Constitution. In this paper I have investigated the life and writings of John Dickinson so as to provide a standpoint from which the continuity of the Ancient Constitutional and Common Law ethos can be seen as a subtext of the American "Revolutionary" War.