What were the main arguments for independence?

The main arguments for American independence centered on taxation without representation, unfair imperial laws, the Crown's repeated rejection of colonial petitions, and a deeper claim of natural rights to self government. The most familiar slogan was no taxation without representation. Colonists argued that since they had no elected members in the British House of Commons, Parliament had no constitutional authority to tax them. The Stamp Act Congress of October 1765, the Declaration of Rights and Grievances of 1774, and the Declaration of Independence of 1776 all rested on this argument.

Closely connected was the broader objection to a long string of restrictive laws. The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Duties of 1767, the Tea Act of 1773, and the Coercive or Intolerable Acts of 1774 each provoked specific protests. Colonists also resented the Quebec Act of 1774, which extended the boundaries of Quebec into the Ohio Valley and recognized French civil law and Catholicism in territory that British colonists considered theirs by right of charter and conquest. They objected to the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774 that required them to house British troops, the Currency Act of 1764 that prohibited paper money, and the use of writs of assistance and admiralty courts to enforce trade regulations without juries. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbidding settlement west of the Appalachians frustrated land-hungry colonists who had fought in the French and Indian War expecting to claim western lands.

A second class of arguments concerned the failure of petitioning. The Olive Branch Petition of July 8, 1775 asked King George III directly for redress, and the king rejected it unread, declaring the colonies in rebellion on August 23, 1775. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously on January 10, 1776, sold roughly 120,000 copies in three months and made the case that monarchy itself was illegitimate and that the colonies could not be safely reconciled with Britain. Paine's plain language reached a popular audience the formal congressional documents could not.

A third class of arguments relied on natural rights philosophy. Drawing on John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government from 1689, Patrick Henry, James Otis, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others argued that government existed to protect natural rights to life, liberty, and property, that government required the consent of the governed, and that when government became destructive of those ends the people had a right to alter or abolish it. The Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 wove these strands together: a list of 27 specific grievances followed by a statement of natural rights and the right to revolution.