Existing comment:
"We the People"
While the Revolutionary War was being waged on battlefields, Virginia's political leaders worked to conceive a government better than the one they had rejected.
George Mason, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson looked to philosophers like the Englishman John Locke for ideas about how nations should govern. They concluded that people -- meaning white men -- have inherent human rights to life and liberty, that governments serve the people by protecting those rights, and that governmental power should be divided and separate from the church. |