Richard Ryerson’s essay on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord ends extremely provocatively. Ryerson quotes “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “published,” he notes, “on the eve of the Civil War,” commenting on the poem’s “lesson, always timely in any free republic, has never been more urgently needed than in 2025.”

But what was this lesson? Given when he published, and the actual events of Lexington and Concord, the answer seems obvious. Longfellow’s goal was not to write a poem that would, until recently, be taught in American schools. Rather, Ryerson notes, “his goal was more immediate.” Longfellow sought to revive the spirit of the minutemen as the American republic approached another crisis in his own day.

That spirit was necessary because the rights of Americans were under attack. The British were coming, and the militia must rouse itself to fight them. And who was the militia? It was, in principle, every adult male in New England. John Adams described the militia this way in a 1781 letter to the Abbé de Mably that he included as an appendix to the first volume of his Defence of the Constitutions. (Charles Francis Adams moved it to a later part of the Defence in the Works of John Adams.) Recall that one of the fundamental lessons Adams wished to teach in that book was that there is a fundamental connection between the character of the laws and institutions in a given society and the political character (roughly what scholars today call “political culture”):

The militia comprehends the whole people. By virtue of the laws of the country, every male inhabitant between sixteen and sixty years of age, is enrolled in a company, and a regiment of militia completely organized with all its officers. He is enjoined to keep always in his house, and at his own expense, a firelock in good order, a powder horn, a pound of powder, twelve flints, four-and-twenty balls of lead, a cartridge box, and a knapsack; so that the whole country is ready to march for its own defence upon the first signal of alarm.

In that letter, Adams argued the militia, along with the towns, the schools, and the congregations had helped to produce the strong and virtuous political character of the New Englander. In the early to mid-1770s that meant that they were primed first to recognize and then to resist the encroachment of novel and arbitrary powers emanating from London.

For Americans from Adams to Longfellow, one reason why the militia was fundamental was a lesson that 1775 and 1861 had in common: there are times when men must take up arms and fight for our liberties. Adams was deeply skeptical of the claim that that was something that could ever be changed.

I rather doubt that that is the message Ryerson intended to convey. And yet it is the implication of the text. That raises a deeply troubling question, one that, I suspect, we would rather not have to ask. Is the Whiggish view of history true? Is it in fact the case that humanity can progress fundamentally in a way that creates a world in which it is never necessary to take up arms in defense of one’s homeland and one’s liberty? One certainly would like to think so. But perhaps that belief is merely a hope, akin to religious faith.

Is it possible to reduce the message of Lexington and Concord to one that says we ought to be roused and prepared only for fights of the nonphysical sort? Only if history is a ratchet, with progress from actual fighting to more peaceful forms of political contention (or even progress away from political conflict in general) locked in.

Taking such progress for granted is perhaps one of the factors that make it harder to sustain. Given the historical tendency of the Whig view, we cease to think about better and worse in government, and instead think of “forward” or “backward” in history, a change which may, if we are not careful, lead us to embrace changes that undermine liberty but are presented as “forward” in history, or “necessary” in light of other changes. Changes that transform our structure of government, our understanding of the rights of men, or even our notion of the nature of human life and social order are presented as no less binding than previous generations’ view of right, so long as they are branded as “better.” But calling something “forward” can easily be a way of stealing a base.

If this is the case, we might ask, for example, what powers may the unelected parts of our government assume without becoming an aristocracy? In the 1760s, Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts argued that “the establishment of a certain, sufficient, and independent Civil List, is not only expedient, but necessary to the welfare of the American Colonies.” The colonists generally feared that the gentlemen appointed to such a civil list (duly credentialed gentlemen paid independently of the elected government would govern on their own behalf, threatening their liberties.) Is our administrative state too much like that? It has been presented as progress, rather than as a movement away from the principles and practices upon which our republic rests. But is it? How one answers that question turns, to a great degree, upon the question of how deep the continuities of history are.

That brings up the questions Ryerson explicitly addresses. To pick one central one: “how did many thousands of British North Americans come to believe that they had a right to stage an armed rebellion against a government that they had regarded as legitimate since their youth.” Ryerson notes that they were, in fact, defending the provincial and local governments they had long known, and they were defending longstanding laws as they understood them. As Ryerson, a student of Jack Greene, knows well, one key problem was that there was no consensus about the nature of the imperial constitution.

What was the relationship between the colonies and the King in Parliament was very much debated and disputed. That’s why in his Administration of the Colonies, Thomas Pownall, a member of Parliament from 1767 to 1780 who had been lieutenant governor of New Jersey and then of Massachusetts, noted that the legal relationship between the colonies and Britain was the same one Scotland and England had between 1603 and 1707. When Edmund Burke read the 1768 edition, he was shocked to find Pownall suggesting that the relationship between the colonies was based on feudal law, akin to the relationship of the Channel Isles of Guernsey and Jersey to Britain (they had been part of the Duchy of Normandy, and had remained in the King’s personal holdings, and never had been incorporated into Great Britain). That shocked Burke (see his marginalia in the 1767 edition), but it was much closer to the common colonial view, which gave Parliament no right to legislate for the colonies or tax them. By contrast, William Pitt the Elder, first minister when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, thought Parliament had the right to do the former but not the latter—a reality that reminds us that even the British debated the exact nature of the imperial constitution.

What that reminds us is that one problem with Whiggish history is that it is too universal. The claim that the relationship between the colonies and Britain was feudal would look like what scholars often call (mistakenly universalizing) the “seventeenth century constitution,” rather than the “eighteenth century constitution” with Parliament at its center. The trouble was that there is no such universal history. What was consensus constitutional doctrine in Massachusetts in 1765 was very different from what was consensus constitutional doctrine in London in 1765. The colonists at Lexington and Concord did not believe they were attacking “a government that they had regarded as legitimate since their youth.” They believed they were defending the constitutional order under which they had long lived. In other words, judged from the outside, there was no one arc of constitutional history in the entire British empire. That is part of the reason why the empire broke into two once what Burke called “a wise and salutary neglect” across the ocean could no longer be maintained.

And that brings us to the reasons why the colonists believed that they had the legal right to judge an action of Parliament to be unconstitutional and resist, via arms, an effort to impose such acts of “pretended legislation” as the Declaration terms them. Ryerson stresses the connection between Locke and the general right to revolution. That’s good as far as it goes, but it misses a much larger story. John Philip Reid, among others, demonstrated at length that the right to resist illegal action was a common right of British colonists, even if it was the government that was acting illegally.

John Adams thought that his work in the case of Rex v Corbett in 1769 was essential in this regard. A colonial sailor had the right to resist an illegal impressment, even to the point of killing a British naval officer who was trying to kidnap him (what is an illegal impressment but a kidnapping, Adams recognized). As the progressive legal scholar Sanford Levinson notes in his work on the Second Amendment, the American tradition is not the Weberian one in which the government is trusted with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in defense of the law. In Adams’ day, it was the common law, not Lockean theory, that ensured that right. In other words, up to the time of declaring independence, the colonists were using common law rights of resistance to resist violations of the rights of Britons. They were defending the British constitution as they had lived it for quite some time.

Ryerson asserts that “most literate (and many illiterate) British North Americans, and most Britons, knew that their government was a constitutional monarchy, a unique fusion of a reigning king or queen and a Parliament whose authority, from its center in Great Britain, extended outward to over two dozen settler colonies of various sizes, ages, economies, and demographies, and dozens of smaller outposts, spread across several continents.” That is much too simplistic. It makes the view of Parliament the norm. Yet that is an arbitrary turn, although it is one that members of Parliament and the King found congenial. As noted, the constitutional nature of the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain was unsettled. As Adams noted in his Novanglus essays, the term “British Empire” had no established legal meaning. It was not a legal term at all, he said.

Why does this matter? As Reid notes, the center of the Declaration is an indictment of the king at common law. The tyranny to which Ryerson refers was, as far as the colonists were concerned, the effort to attack longstanding liberties, and to do so in the name of an updated and rationalized imperial constitution that most members of Parliament refused to recognize as an innovation at all.

Why did the men of Lexington Green muster? They mustered because the militia was a fundamental part of colonial life. They mustered because they believed that the King’s effort to impose Parliament’s will (“pretended acts of legislation” in the words of the declaration) was an attack on the government they participated in and knew best. Why did they not disperse when the King’s troops demanded they do so? Because in that world, the King’s government did not have a monopoly on the use of force in defense of the law. The law governed, not the interpretation put upon it by any court or officer. Recall that in the colonies and in the early republic, our juries often ruled on both law and fact. The law ruled, and the people were regarded as intelligent enough to read it thoughtfully, much as New England’s dissenting Protestants were expected to read and ponder scripture themselves. The law was over King, Parliament, colonial government, and individual colonists.

Why did they fight? They fought in defense of their laws and liberties. They fought for the “Rights of Englishmen” as they were enjoyed by British subjects in the colonies. But when resistance turned to revolution, the rights of Englishmen became, of necessity, the rights of men, and America became not merely a different country than Britain, but a different sort of country than Britain. We would have to understand our rights as universal. That is part of the reason why slavery would have to go if the new republic were to succeed..

Those differences are grounded in what Lincoln called “a truth applicable to all men at all times.” If we lose our appreciation for that fixed star, for the robust conception of human nature upon which the Declaration rests, even if we do so in the name of “progress,” we are likely to lose our liberties. Can we sustain those liberties over the long term only by peaceful means? I certainly hope so. But that is a religious hope; it is not something that history is capable of demonstrating.