When the English Parliament and Crown enclosed their views with undue fiscal and theoretical restrictions upon the citizens of the North American colonies, the men who would become known as America's Founding Fathers rejoined with a quick, powerful, rhetorical and later military response. These politicians cum philosophers approached the legal authorities with the disdain of an unjust ruler, purporting instead a policy of individual rights protected by a government that allows for the common good. To the leaders at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the liberties of all men were clear; "They are entitled to life, liberty, and property."1 In their actualization of these beliefs, they created a system that mixed the importance of individual liberties with the great need to protect the common good in a careful balance that is the basis of the American political paradigm.

             The great thinkers of pre-Revolution America adopted a synthesized political ideology that made use of newly en vogue democratic approaches and common sense in the creation of a new republic. Both before and after July 1776, American republicanism melded the call for the protection of liberties that ought to be guaranteed the individual with the need to govern a large amount of people and protect their common good. In defining this balance, the ideas upon which they called included both their own colonial experiences and also were the derivation of particularly Scottish and English theories. The political, social, and economic systems for which they provided were based on the familiar aspects of popular sovereignty, liberty, equality, property, the common good, and representation.2.

             The Founding Fathers' obsession with republican formulas is bound in the documents and lives of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and others. Each make use of texts external to the colonies, like Common Sense by Thomas Paine.