Long before the Latin phrase "E pluribus unum" was chosen as the dictim that graces the Seal of the United States, American patriots were deeply influenced by Roman rhetoric. According to Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown University, celebrated Latin writers such as Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus and Plutarch influenced the political ideals of America's founding fathers. These thinkers were active after the greatest days of the Roman Republic "were fading or already passed; and thus they contrasted the growing stratification, corruption, and disorder they saw around them with an imagined earlier world of rustic simplicity and pastoral virtue." Discontented colonists identified with many of the critical attitudes on display in these ancient rhetorical works.
Enlightenment thinkers, including John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, profoundly influenced the course of American political thought preceding the Revolutionary War. These thinkers advocated substantial reforms to the existing political system and were amenable to the separation of Church and State. From the Enlightenment movement a philosophy of religion called deism was developed, which was accepted by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. "The deist believed that life, liberty, and property were all protected by natural law," and that "if any one of those were attacked it was an attack upon God, because God had instituted His natural law to protect life, liberty, and property," explains Earl G. Young in "American History for Everyone." Indeed, as the Declaration of Independence states, rebelling patriots were interested in securing "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."
In early 1776, Thomas Paine's incendiary pamphlet "Common Sense" galvanized popular support for an official announcement of independence from Great Britain, which emboldened Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues to employ uncompromising language in their subsequent Declaration of Independence. Paine's pamphlet was inspired by a British style of polemical literature, which had earlier been practiced by literary figures, satirists and philosophers such as John Milton, John Locke, Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. "One of the surprising aspects of the American writings is the extent to which they include the stylistic modes associated with the great age of English pamphleteering," notes Bernard Bailyn in his influential text "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution." Through inexpensive pamphlets, American commentators were able to unite readers across the 13 colonies to support a common patriotic cause.
Prior to the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791, several important official documents provided a legal precedent for American independence. Three of these documents are the Magna Carta of 1215, the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and the English Bill of Rights of 1688. Such documents contributed to a rich source of British common law, to which the colonists appealed in defense of their rights against what they perceived to be offensive acts of the British Empire.