The Nature of a State in a State of Nature: The Earliest Imaginings of American Sovereignty, 1765-1776

Abstract

This thesis examines colonial perspectives of sovereignty on the eve of the American Revolution. It argues that between 1765 and 1776, the colonists of British America formulated a distinct impression of sovereignty made sensible by the particularities of existence on a vast continent remote from the metropole. Where historians tend to discount the colonists’ discursive contributions in this era, arguing that they ultimately concurred with the logic of established legal and political doctrines, this thesis shows that their impressions also diverged from tradition, entailing notions of place, prosperity, identity, and faith, as well as law and politics. It was during this period, marked by the devolution of relations with the mother country, that lawyers, landholders, merchants, clergymen, and politicians assembled in Congress to consider the nature of a state in a state of nature and imagine sovereignty at its most fundamental level. Where does sovereignty operate? What are its sources and principles? Who decides on its character? What is its purpose? And by what means does it function? By analysing the pamphlets, political treatises, and official records, against the informal discourse that took place within the correspondence and private reveries of individuals, this thesis discovers how the colonists posed and answered these questions. As I will show, they claimed meanings both abstract and material for sovereignty, as it became a general and unassailable mandate for a revolutionary course. What was most arresting about their conceptions, and what constitutes the central contention of this thesis was that against the backdrop of the American enlightenment, the idea of sovereignty they devised was unequivocally divine. The laws of nature and nature’s God shaped its legal form, the God-given right to property and a life of liberty shaped its narrated structures, orders of providence and a concern for the good of mankind shaped its practice and perceptibility, and attentions to virtue and a prevailing belief in the supreme sovereignty of God shaped the bond of its power. This thesis explores the ways in which the sacred quality of sovereignty became known and fashioned into the cohering imperative and foundational notion for the legitimation of a fully fleshed nation.