Episode Details

In 1765 the British laid a modest tax on the colonies, and the colonists answered as though chains were being fastened on their wrists — crying slavery, conspiracy, a deliberate design against their freedom. To London it looked like hysteria. It was not. This episode takes down the third and most combustible of the founding’s intellectual inheritances: the commonwealth tradition, the fierce “real Whig” vision that taught the colonists to see all politics as a war of liberty against power and corruption.

Here are its prophets — Algernon Sidney, executed for a book, whose defiant motto became the seal of Massachusetts; James Harrington and his empire of laws, not of men; John Milton, poet of both political and spiritual liberty; and above all Cato’s Letters, the most-reprinted political writing in colonial America, the daily catechism of liberty and the free press. From this stream came the standing-army dread, the free press of the First Amendment, and the burning certainty that Britain meant to enslave America — the lens that turned a tax on paper into the opening move of a plot. And buried inside it, the problem that would define the founding: if power always corrupts and virtue always decays, how can any republic last?