The Rights of the Colonists

At the time Adams wrote this essay, leaders among the colonists were not yet committed to full independence from Britain. Instead, wanted to improve the status of the colonies within the British Empire. Still, central ideals of the Enlightenment shaped the colonists’ perspective and goals as tensions between the colonies and Great Britain intensified throughout the 1760s and 1770s. These ideals would eventually lead many colonists to advocate independence.

The Enlightenment was a broad intellectual movement. Many of the best-known philosophers of the period were concerned with questions of rights, liberties, and government. Enlightenment thinkers distilled what they considered the most essential rules of nature and society. John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher who most directly influenced the thinking of the British colonists, asserted that mankind has natural rights that no government should infringe upon without legitimate reason. These include life, liberty, and property. The opening lines of Adams’s essay reiterate these three categories as the most sacred and essential realms of a person’s life. Adams does not defend or offer an argument to support this statement. He presents it as fact, which indicates his underlying adoption of Enlightenment thinking and the assumption that his