Bernard Bailyn quotes

The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution, there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do. (Bernard Bailyn)
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Everyone knew that democracy - direct rule by all the people - required such spartan, soul-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race. (Bernard Bailyn)
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages, the major themes of the "left" opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the "country" mind everywhere in the English-speaking world. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
In effect the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
What were once felt to be defects-isolation, institutional simplicity, primitiveness of manners, multiplicity of religions, weaknesses in the authority of the state-could now be seen as virtues, not only by Americans themselves but by enlightened spokesmen of reform, renewal and hope wherever they may be-in London coffeehouses, in Parisian salons, in the courts of German princes. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets. (Bernard Bailyn)
The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ... View quote
Bernard Bailyn
In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. View quote
Bernard Bailyn