Magna Carta and America

In the summer of 1776 delegates from Britain's 13 North American colonies met in Philadelphia to consider the direction their burgeoning rebellion would take.  Would they be satisfied with remaining British subjects, providing that their rights and liberties as they saw them were respected.  Or, did they want full and complete independence.  Full and complete independence was decided upon and a committee of three men, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, were designated to draw up a declaration setting forth the colonies' official reasons for declaring independence, including a list of abuses of British officials, including taxation without representation, billeting troops and the like.  Though a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" read-potential allies among European nations, compelled them to draw up a formal declaration, Jefferson and the others were drawing on centuries of British precedent.

Reel back to 1215, to a meadow along the Thames River not far from Windsor Castle.  King John had bumbled from one disaster to another during his reign.  He'd lost most of the Plantagenet possessions in France and was intent on pursuing with his war with age-old enemy and person arch-rival Phillip II.  His barons, or leading nobles, were in open revolt.  In January, 1215, John had called a counsel at Windsor to demand more money and men and most of them refused to show up, levying their armies for battle against their sovereign.  The only thing that might force some of these men, who were oftentimes as powerful, as wealthy and in command of as many men as the King himself to come to reason was the threat from the Pope to excommunicate everybody if they didn't work out an agreement.  Enter Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.  He met with the barons, who were at Runnymede not to parley with the King, but to start a war if he didn't give in.  By June 15, 1215, Langton had formalized a list of the barons' worst grievance and mutual demands.  John consented to meet them at Runnymede and accept the charter. 

Over the centuries, Magna Carta has been blown up to be a first blast of the trumpet in forming England into a primitive parliamentary democracy.  No.  Nor was it a means of protecting ancient Saxon liberties, or the rights of the common man.  The barons were addressing their own concerns and it was specifically in regard to grievances they'd experienced under Henry II, Richard I, and John, who had encroached on baronial authority with courts of law, regular parliamentary meetings to demand taxes, and other feudal dues for wars and crusades.  The barons wanted their power back.  Among the demands were a reduction in feudal dues and fees, preservation of justice throughout the realm, trial of barons by barons (trial of your peers), reduction in royal domain land claimed by the king, no new taxes for war without consent of a counsel of the barons, no new royal decrees without consent of a counsel of the barons and preservation of Church authority.

John promised to ratify the agreement in 40 days, which he didn't.  Despite this, the barons considered the document binding.  Several copies were made, of which four survive.  John's son, Henry III, reissued the Magna Carta in 1216, and again in 1217.  The basic list of baronial demands turned baronial rights was reissued several times during successive Plantagenet reigns, give or take a few clauses.  The constant feuding between monarch and barons, later monarch and Parliament, not to mention monarch and members of the Royal Family, who were often barons in their own right, shows just how much attention the Kings of England paid to it.  It would take centuries and much more legal and constitutional reform before England became anything like the realm the Founding Fathers looked to for inspiration in 1776.

So what did the Magna Carta do?  It's important enough in our history that a replica is in the National Archives, stored in the same glass case that holds an original of the Declaration and the Constitution.  Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Liberties was a list of demands to form the basis for a peace treaty, not a declaration of anyone's independence, but it did set a precedent in English custom.  By enforcing their rights, the barons were enforcing, at least for themselves, the right of legal process as it stood in England at the time.  Henry II had already started the process of legal writs, by which legal cases were pursued and judgments given.  Magna Carta started the precedent of charters.  Nothing was legal, be it a royal decree or the judgment of court or parliament, unless it was written down and the duties and obligations of all those bound by it were enumerated.

The Founding Fathers would have been aware of this tradition.  It began in 1620, with the Mayflower Compact, which bound both the Pilgrims and those traveling with them as servants, sailors and one mercenary to formally draw up a charter of laws at a future date.  Each colony had a charter, many of them setting forth what by that time were considered basic common law rights such as suffrage, even if partial and gendered, rights to trial by jury and the like.  By 1776, the idea of drawing up a charter to both formulate demands and catalogue reasons for taking a legal and binding action was well-ingrained.  The barons at least gave us that much.