The Founding Debate Reading Group #2 - The Rights of Englishmen

The Rights of Englishmen: Whig Liberty and the Coming of Independence

In 2026, the United States turns 250. Across eight weeks we're reading the founders in their own words — the arguments they had with each other about liberty, power, and the system of government they were building.

Week One traced the philosophical foundations in Locke and Montesquieu. This week we cross the Atlantic and move from theory to the quarrel itself. The Rights of Englishmen follows the ideas that carried the colonies from loyal subjects to an independent people — the radical Whig inheritance of Cato's Letters, John Dickinson's careful constitutional case against taxation, Patrick Henry's call to arms, and the two founding declarations of 1776.

The colonists rarely thought of themselves as revolutionaries; they believed they were defending an inheritance. We'll try to understand how that conviction escalated, in a single decade, into a claim of independence.

This week's readings (all in the reader):

Cato's Letters, Nos. 33 & 62 — John Trenchard & Thomas Gordon

John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Letters II, VII, XII)

Patrick Henry, "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death"

The Virginia Declaration of Rights

The Declaration of Independence

The reader

I've compiled all of this week's (public-domain) readings into a nicely typeset, printable reader — with a short contextual introduction to each piece, a timeline of the founding era at the front, and optional comprehension questions. We'll go over the timeline together at the start of the session. Please come with an annotated copy. It's roughly 45 pages of reading.

Download it here: masonmelead.com/foundingwk2.pdf

See the larger schedule here