A Beautiful Dream in Colonial America

A beautiful dream in Colonial America was to build a country where individuals could live in freedom was the beginning of the story. Our founding fathers risked everything to move to this new land where possibilities and opportunities were abundant for the brave and adventurous, that were willing to risk everything for a better life. Many Europeans chose to embark on this adventure of a lifetime and landed here beginning in 1492.

Europeans came to the Americas to increase their wealth and influence in the world. The Spanish were among the first to settle in what is now the United States of America. However, by 1650 the English had developed a strong presence on the East Coast of America. The first colony was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia.

Many of the settlers that arrived in the Americas came to escape religious persecution. The founders were deeply influenced by republicanism and by the optimism of the European Enlightenment. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all agreed that laws, rather than men, should be the final sanction and that government should be responsible to the governed.

The basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by the voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

The United States is both a democracy and a republic. A democracy because the people hold the ultimate power. A republic because it is ruled by the law and is not tyranny or monarchy.

• Republic: “A state in which the people and their elected representatives hold supreme power…”

• Democracy: “A government system by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is a well-known phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence. The phrase gives three examples of the unalienable rights which the Declaration says have been given to all humans by their creator and which governments are created to protect.

Republicanism is a political ideology centered on citizenship in a state-organized as a republic. Historically, it ranges from the rule of a representative minority or oligarchy to popular sovereignty. … Republicanism may also refer to the non-ideological scientific approach to politics and governance.

John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch.

Among these fundamental natural rights, Locke said, are “life, liberty, and property.” Locke believed that the most basic human law of nature is the preservation of humanity. To serve that purpose, he reasoned, individuals have both a right and a duty to preserve their own lives.

Our founding fathers as a political group, they were a phenomenon unprecedented in history: they were thinkers who were also men of action. They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man’s mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man’s metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man’s right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the “unaided” power of their intellect.