Enlightenment

New thinking and writings that came out of the Enlightenment period much influenced the ideology of the American colonists. Perhaps most important was John Locke and his essays on the Treatise of Government and Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argued that people had natural rights and liberties that allowed man to do whatever he wanted to do without the arbitrary or absolute power of another man. In this state of natural right, people were allotted the basic rights of life, liberty, and property. Locke believe that contracts were binding, and if people entered into a “social contract” with government, and the government ends up infringing on these natural rights, the people then have the right to resist their government. Prior to the revolution, the British Parliament was certainly an arbitrary and absolute power over the colonies.
The oppositionists were political writers who feared that the Parliament, the freely elected representatives of the people who establi...