John Adams once wrote that the true American Revolution was in the “minds of the American people,” and Thomas Jefferson once described the Declaration of Independence as an “expression of the American mind.” This talk examines the moral history of the American Revolution and its relationship to the Declaration of Independence. In particular, Thompson examines how America’s leading revolutionaries discovered and developed the Declaration’s four self-evident truths during the years of the imperial crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies. The talk will emphasize how and why independence became a moral necessity for American Patriots.

C. Bradley Thompson is a Professor of Political Science at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has also been a visiting fellow at Harvard University and at the University of London, and he was a James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 2004-05. Professor Thompson has published several books, including the prize-winning John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (1998), and Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860 (2003). He is the author most recently of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It (2019). Professor Thompson received his Ph.D. at Brown University. He and his wife homeschooled their three children for 18 years, and he supports Arsenal Football Club.