Bernard Bailyn
American historian, author, and professor specializing in U S Colonial and Revolutionary-era History.
Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.
Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.