The Founders on the Source of Rights and an Essential Reading List
Rights Are Not Gifts from Government.
They don’t come from a constitution, a bill of rights, or any document at all.
Natural rights come from your creator and are inherent to your humanity. Even civil rights are built upon this foundation.
The founders and old revolutionaries widely embraced these principles. Starting with the Declaration of Independence, we’ll explore their views on natural rights, their origins, and the thinkers they said we should be reading for a deeper understanding.
Let’s start with something we’re all familiar with:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
-Declaration of Independence
Less than a month earlier, George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights had very similar language in Section 1:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Thomas Paine succinctly echoed this sentiment:
“It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights.”
It bears repeating. Rights are not gifts from government.
In 1766, John Dickinson, the “Penman of the Revolution,” emphasized “KINGS or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness”
He continued, pointing to the source of our rights:
“We claim them from a higher source – from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives.”
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out decades later, the “object of the Declaration of Independence” was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before”
Instead, the Declaration “was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion”
Jefferson offered several recommendations for essential reading (a full list is at the end):
“all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc.”
He especially praised Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government, calling it “the best elementary book of the principles of government, as founded in natural right, which has ever been published in any language”
Hard to find a better 5-star review for a book than that!
Battling with an opponent of natural rights in 1775, a young Alexander Hamilton gave us another recommended reading list to understand these principles:
“If you will follow my advice, there still may be hopes of your reformation. Apply yourself, without delay, to the study of the law of nature. I would recommend to your perusal, Grotius. Puffendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlemaqui.”
ALIENABLE AND UNALIENABLE
One of the earliest, if not the first, differentiations between alienable and unalienable rights came from Francis Hutcheson, known as one of the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, and was highly influential in 18th century colonial America. His book, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, which introduced his association of “unalienable rights” with a right to resist oppressive government, was used as early as the 1730s as a textbook at Harvard College.
In the search of Nature there is the like Beauty in the Knowledge of some great Principles, or universal Forces, from which innumerable Effects do flow. Such is Gravitation, in Sir Isaac Newton’s Scheme; such also is the Knowledge of the Original of Rights, perfect and imperfect, and external; alienable and unalienable
Hutcheson continued, with an introduction to “perfect” rights:
“The Rights call’d perfect, are of such necessity to the publick Good, that the universal Violation of them would make human Life intolerable; and it actually makes those miserable, whose Rights are thus violated.”
As Hamilton clearly explained, “This is what is called the law of nature.”
He continued, citing Blackstone:
“which, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately, or immediately, from this original.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single modern politician espousing a view that all human laws are invalid when they are contrary to the law of nature.
Hamilton then took it further, not only explaining the source of these rights, but also pointing out that they’re based in both “personal liberty, and personal safety.”
“Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.”
NATURAL RIGHTS
In 1791, Thomas Paine gave a clear definition of natural rights.
“Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.”
Four years before the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Adams used language echoed by Jefferson and co:
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
In short, you don’t have intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, or property rights, or anything else – like a right to life – unless you also have the right to defend them from being taken from you.
Luther Martin affirmed these principles in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 – and he helped us add to our reading list too.
“The first principle of government is founded on the natural right of individuals, and in perfect equality. Locke, Vattel, Lord Somers, and Dr. Priestley, all confirm this principle.”
CIVIL RIGHTS
Writing to Thomas Jefferson, Paine also defined “civil rights.”
“Civil rights or rights of Compact, and are distinguishable from Natural rights, because in the one we act wholly in our own person, in the other we agree not to do so, but act under the guarantee of society.”
In his 1789 speech proposing amendments to the Constitution, James Madison also referenced this understanding:
“Trial by jury cannot be considered as a natural right, but a right resulting from the social compact which regulates the action of the community, but is as essential to secure the liberty of the people as any one of the pre-existent rights of nature.”
NOT GIFTS
Connecting the dots, Paine reminded us that rights are not gifts from anyone.
“An enquiry into the origin of rights will demonstrate to us that rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another.”
Paine continued, forcefully arguing that rights don’t come from documents or declarations either – those are just reaffirming pre-existing rights.
“A declaration of rights is not a creation of them, nor a donation of them. It is a manifest of the principle by which they exist, followed by a detail of what the rights are”
Paine them summed it up, tying natural and civil rights together under the same foundation,
“For every civil right has a natural right for its foundation, and it includes the principle of a reciprocal guarantee of those rights from man to man. As therefore it is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man”
Thomas Jefferson may have put it best.
“A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
It’s no wonder why government-run schools rarely teach these foundational principles about NATURAL rights – they’re a huge part of the system that has given us the biggest government in history.
But TAC has you covered – and nothing helps us reach and teach more and more people about natural rights – and how we’re supposed to defend them – more than the financial faith and support of our members. JOIN US TODAY!
THE FOUNDERS’ NATURAL RIGHTS READING LIST
-John Locke – Two Treatises of Civil Government
-John Locke – Essay Concerning Human Understanding
-Algernon Sidney – Discourses Concerning Government
-Aristotle – Politeia/The Republic
-Cicero – On the Laws
-Cicero – On Duties
-Cicero – On the State
-Hugo Grotius – Law of Nature and Nations
-Samuel von Pufendorf – On the Law of Nature and of Nations
-Samuel von Pufendorf – On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law
-Montesquieu – The Spirit of Laws
-Jean Jacque Burlamaqui – Principles of Natural Law,
-Emer de Vattel – The Law of Nations
-Lord Somers – The judgment of whole kingdoms and nations, concerning the rights, power, and prerogative of kings, and the rights, priviledges, and properties of the people
-Dr. Joseph Priestley – Essay on the First Principles of Government
-Francis Hutcheson – An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
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