Home / Essays / Identify the influence of the Enlightenment, Great Awakening, Common Law, and Republican Ideology in the following excerpt

Identify the influence of the Enlightenment, Great Awakening, Common Law, and Republican Ideology in the following excerpt

Essay: Write a well-organized 2 page essay. Identify the influence of the Enlightenment, Great Awakening, Common Law, and Republican Ideology in the following excerpt.

Author: Massachusetts Assembly
Type of document: Resolutions on the Stamp Act
Date: 1765

II. Resolved, –That the inhabitants of this province are unalienable entitled to those essential rights in common with all men: and that no law of society can, consistent with the law of God and nature, divest them of those rights.

III. Resolved, –That no man can justly take the property of another without his consent; and that upon this original principle the right of representation in the same body, which exercises the power of making laws for levying taxes, which is one of the main pillars of the British constitution, is evidently founded.

IV. Resolved, –That this inherent right, together with all other essential rights, liberties, privileges, and immunities of the people of Great Britain, have been fully confirmed to them by Magna Charta, and by former and later acts of parliament.

XII. Resolved, as a just conclusion from some of the foregoing resolves,
That all acts made by any power whatever other than the general assembly of this province, imposing taxes on the inhabitants, are infringements of our inherent and unalienable rights, as men and British subjects, and render void the most valuable declarations of our charter.

XIII. Resolved, –That the extension of the powers of the court of admiralty [Vice Admiralty court] within this province, is a most violent infraction of the right of trials by juries—a right which this house, upon the principles of their British ancestors, hold most dear and sacred; it being the only security of the lives, liberties, and properties of his majesty’s subjects here.

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