In his exhaustive study of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard describes the American revolution as the first “successful war of national liberation” and “a people’s war, waged by the majority of Americans having the courage and the zeal to rise up against constituted ‘legitimate’ government, [and throw] off their ‘sovereign.’” How was this liberation to be achieved? Through an act of secession and through establishing new polities that were free of legal and political control from another, larger polity. This was certainly radical—and essentially unheard of—at the time, as historian David Armitage shows:
The notion that “one People” might find it “necessary” to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede from an empire or a composite state—was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution. … [B]y and large, existing empires and states fiercely resisted movements toward secession and did all they could to suppress them…
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