The solid grounding of the American republic

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 11, 2026 | In Reviews

Only a few pages into The Making of the American Mind, I paused in my reading and looked at the Index. The way Matthew Spalding introduced his subject (the book is subtitled “The Story of our Declaration of Independence”) gave me the sense that this would not be the standard boilerplate treatment, interpreting the Declaration as the thought of John Locke, filtered through the pen of Thomas Jefferson.

Oddly, when I looked under “Locke,” at first I saw no entry. It was there, of course; my eyes had somehow skipped over it. Spalding gives Locke plenty of attention. But my hunch was not entirely wrong. This book is, among other things, a largely successful effort to counteract the simplistic readings of our nation’s founding document.

Yes, Locke had a powerful influence on the American founding; the Declaration borrows phrases from his Second Treatise on Government. But his was not the only influence—not even the dominant influence—on the thought of the men who signed that document. The American Revolution might not have occurred without the prompting of Thomas Paine, the firebrand whose pamphlet Common Sense had far wider circulation in the colonies than any of Locke’s works. But Paine—who, after stirring the passions of the American colonists, joined with the more rabid revolutionaries in France—did not leave a permanent mark on the nation-building efforts of the American Founders.

In the years preceding the Revolution, the American colonies were awash in political pamphlets, many of which drew their inspiration from the historical examples of ancient Greece and Rome. It is no accident that the unidentified authors of these pamphlets often chose pseudonyms evoking figures of antiquity, like Brutus and Cincinnatus. The Federalist Papers, too, repeatedly illustrated arguments with examples from the Roman republic. In American schools of that era, the curriculum heavily emphasized Latin and Greek; educated men were familiar with Livy and Thucydides. John Adams was fond of Cicero. Patrick Henry quoted Sulla, the Roman dictator of the 1st century BC.

Certainly the men who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 were familiar with more recent theorists as well. But even Thomas Jefferson, whose debt to Locke is universally acknowledged, praised not the Two Treatises, but a work by the relatively obscure Algernon Sidney, as “probably the best elementary book of the principles of government, as founded in natural right, which has ever been published in any language.”

In short it is a flagrant error to suggest that the thinking of the men who signed the Declaration—easily the most impressive collection of political thinkers ever gathered in American history—could be characterized as flowing directly from Locke, or from any other single theorists. The Founders had read widely in political history and political theory; they drew from different sources within a broad and venerable tradition. As Matthew Spalding puts it:

In the end, it’s simply not correct to say the Americans were “Lockeans”—implying they adopted all of Locke’s opinions and viewed man through the lens of Locke’s philosophy. It is better to say, as we shall further see, that the American Founders widely adapted the Locke of the Two Treatises to their purposes and used his political arguments to great effect in their cause.

The colonists, Spalding reminds his readers, were keenly aware of the political tumult that had shaken England during the 17th century. The original colonies were chartered by the King of England, whose sovereignty was unchallenged at the time. After the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, Parliament became the primary power. But very few of the American colonists had been involved in the civil turmoil that brought about that change. Although the Americans still thought of themselves as British subjects, they were not at all unanimous in accepting the notion that they should be subject to Parliament: a body in which they were not represented.

By the time the tensions between England and American became acute, in the 1750s, the colonies had been established for several generations. They had established their own institutions, their own traditions, their own trade patterns, their own way of life, gradually becoming more distinct from their English cousins. Separated not only by an ocean but also by steadily growing cultural differences, they could begin to think of themselves as a distinct political society: “We the people.”

The immediate causes of the Revolution were ordinary political issues, of the sort that a unified society should be able to resolve: most notably, taxation. But now these societies had drifted apart, and beneath the squabbles about taxes, Americans saw deeper issues of justice and natural rights. No one, in any society, wants to pay higher taxes. But it takes more than a financial incentive to prompt farmers to take up arms and face trained soldiers, as the colonists did at Lexington and Concord.

The Declaration of Independence beautifully expresses what the colonists believed: that government should respect the natural rights that are endowed to many by his Creator. That line of argument traces its origins back far beyond Locke and Hobbes, through Suarez and Bellarmine, to Augustine and Cicero and Plato and the Bible. Yet at the same time the Founders believed that the authority for their beliefs could be found ready at hand. As Alexander Hamilton wrote:

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

Viewed from the perspective of religious faith, the authority cited in the Declaration, with its invocation of “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” is imperfectly expressed. But then, what purely human explanation of natural law is ever fully satisfactory? Politics is always the art of the possible, and in June of 1776 the Continental Congress had to find words that would be acceptable to the pious and the freethinkers, to John Adams and John Witherspoon and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. Their achievement is not perfect, but surely admirable.

One great virtue of The Making of the American Mind is the reverence with which Spalding treats his subject. He is not uncritical, but he is patriotic, and unabashed about his love for our country and his pride in its founding. His enthusiasm makes the book lively, his scholarship makes it informative, and his writing style makes it accessible: an ideal text for someone seeking to understand how the Declaration was drafted and approved and—what is much the same thing—how the independence of the United States was secured.