Lesson
Unit 1 Civics Connection: The Colonial Origins of American Republicanism
Founding Principles
Representative / Republican Government, Natural/Inalienable Rights
Virtues
Objectives:
- Recognize the reflection of Enlightenment thought in the governing documents and discourse of North American English colonies by analyzing excerpts from colonial charters, John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and revolutionary writings to identify constitutional principles.
- Evaluate the significance of constitutional principles in facilitating self-government for ordered liberty.
Materials
Lesson Components
Primary Sources and an introductory essay to help students dive deep into the ideas that create the American governmental system.
A guide for conducting a modified Socratic seminar.
Lesson plan
More Information
Before the lesson, instruct students to bring colored pens, pencils, or highlighters, and decide which color you want students to use in their annotation of each of the three influences on the development of republicanism.
Standards
Advanced Placement
- Topic 2.7 · Colonial Society and Culture
- Theme · American and Regional Culture
- Learning Objective · Unit 2H
- Historical Development · 2.2.I.A
- Historical Development · 2.2.I.B
- Reasoning Skill · Developments and Processes
- Reasoning Skill · Sourcing and Situation
- Reasoning Skill · Claims and Evidence in Sources
- Reasoning Skill · Contextualization
- Reasoning Skill · Making Connections
- Reasoning Skill · Argumentation
- Reasoning Process · Comparison
- Reasoning Process · Continuity and Change
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Related materials
In this week's Scholar Talk, BRI Senior Teaching Fellow Tony Williams sits down with Jonathan Den Hartog. In vivid detail, Den Hartog describes the republican ideals that influenced the American Revolution and Founding. He'll explain how the concept of republicanism helped shape American thinking about constitutional principles and civic virtues in framing the nation. What were the political and economic problems that arose after the Revolution, and how did the Federalists and Anti-Federalists strive to address them?
The United States Founders believed that certain civic virtues were required of citizens in order for the Constitution to work. Numerous primary sources—notably the Federalist Papers and the Autobiography of Ben Franklin—point us to the “Founders’ Virtues.” You will explore some of the following civic virtues as an integral part of Documents of Freedom.
The Founders were students of history. From ancient to recent times, history was full of examples of experiments in free republics which ended in dictatorship. Establishing safeguards against this natural and on-going threat would be vital to the new American republic. They combined their knowledge of the past with the tested ideas of philosophers and their own inventions in political science new political theories to create a new system of republican government.
The ink was barely dry on the Constitution when the first challenges to its protections arose. These early challenges to the new constitutional republic often involved the meaning of the Constitution itself. What did its words actually mean, and who would get to decide?
While many people today use the terms “republic” and “democracy” interchangeably, America’s Founders saw important differences between the two forms of government. Distrustful of democracies, they were skeptical about the protection of individual rights in a system that functioned simply by majority rule. The Framers of the United States Constitution instead crafted a constitutional republic based on majority rule but included structures to curb its excesses and protect essential liberty interests.
