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Rights and Constitutions

This chapter examines Otis’s speech in Paxton’s Case to understand why John Adams regarded it as the start of the American Revolution, and describes Otis’s speech as the inflection point when European state of nature theories began to turn into a revolutionary American discourse. In Otis’s system, the state of nature was a source of substantive rights (including life, liberty, and property) that endured in the polity and remained inalienable for both white colonists and enslaved African Americans. Newly discovered archival evidence about this key speech is presented. The chapter follows further strands of state of nature interpretation before the Stamp Act, including Williams’s 1762 election sermon and polemical publications by Otis, which introduced the meaning of the state of nature as interstate relations into the revolutionary discourse. It concludes with Thomas Pownall’s view of citizens of the British Empire sharing the sociability, interdependence, and common rights that characterize the state of nature.