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We Americans misconstrue a lot in presuming that we know what 18th-century men thought about when they invented a nation that was joined to the transcendent value of human liberty. The founders’ vocabulary was different from ours. They invoked a word we don’t use much anymore – magnanimity – when they spoke of the generous concern meant to underlie the relationship between individuals, or between the government and its citizens. The new republic was to advance social harmony, which unequal governments (monarchy, aristocracy) did not.
It is noteworthy that in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson emphasized this point in his criticism of the British: “We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations.” He justified separation from Britain as much on the basis of its moral abandonment of the colonies as of an unjustifiable use of power. When a people were treated thoughtlessly and callously, when their rulers failed to show genuine concern for their happiness, subjecting them to “injuries and usurpations,” they, as an abused people, had every right to protest loudly and even rebel, so as to obtain “new guards for their future security.”
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