Conceived in liberty
by Myron Magnet

On revolution and counterrevolution in America.
January 2026

Editors’ note: “Reflections on the revolution: a symposium” examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of the American Revolution as well as the enduring pertinence of the United States’ founding ideals. Other participants include Roger Kimball, Dominic Green, Victor Davis Hanson, Wilfred M. McClay, Andrew Roberts & James Piereson.

They were warned. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke prophesied to his fellow members of Parliament in March 1775 that their harsh efforts to control Britain’s North American colonists would surely blow up in their faces.

The reason, he explained, was the colonists’ culture. At its core, he said, was a supercharged version of the British love of liberty. In the Englishmen who settled the New World in the seventeenth century, that passion had been stoked to white-hot intensity by that era’s revolutionary republican politics as well as by the Puritan religion that had led so many to emigrate. Their nonconformist religion, and that of the Huguenots and German Protestants whom similar persecution soon drove to follow them to the Northern colonies, embodied “the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion,” Burke observed. It was fiercely “adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.” In the Southern colonies, by a shabby quirk of human nature, the prevalence of slavery made freemen especially “proud and jealous of their freedom” as a mark of “rank and privilege.” Such people will tolerate only so much pushing.

Less than a month later, the shots at Lexington and Concord vindicated Burke’s prophecy. One can imagine Patriots shaking their heads ruefully over their colonial newspapers as they read excerpts from his eloquent speech in the months before they signed the Declaration of Independence two hundred fifty years ago. If only. Continue reading →