The phrase "natural rights of Englishmen" is vague and meaningless

The attitude of progressives never ceases to amaze me. I should be used to it by now, you would think I would be - considering how many of their books I thumb through. But I don't think it's possible to entirely get used to things such as this:

The phrase "natural rights of Englishmen" is vague and meaningless in the history of constitutional development and political philosophy, and deserves to stand with that other equally abused phrase, much on the lips of the colonists at this time, "taxation without representation." Neither had any literal meaning in fact, but as historical influences each became a phenomenon of far-reaching significance.

Men have died for a false creed; the colonists fought under the banner of a false philosophy. The importance of the Stamp Act congress does not lie in the declaration of principles which it enunciated. It lies in the accomplished fact that amid a thousand centrifugal tendencies that were keeping the colonies apart as the inhabitants of thirteen separate communities, there had arisen a conscious purpose of uniting to support a common interest. Premature as it was and almost a mockery in the light of the history of the years that followed, the remark at the congress of Christopher Gadsden, a man whose impulses generally outran his judgment, was in a sense a prophecy, "There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on this continent, but all of us Americans." The congress marks the end of an era, and inaugurates a period of disturbance, disorder, suffering and war, destined to culminate in armed revolt from British authority, and the eventual overthrow of the power of king and parliament in America.

This comes to us from one of the many revisionist Progressive "historians" who wrote 100 years ago. This was Charles McLean Andrews, in 1912 he wrote a book titled "The Colonial Period". The quote above are the last two paragraphs of the book, page 251. Just to highlight how awful all of this is, here are the two lines from Christopher Gadsden's speech. As you will see, Andrews only quoted the second line: (Gadsden speech excerpt, page 680)

We stand on the broad common ground of those natural rights that we all feel and know as men. There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on this continent, but all of us Americans.

It was the progressive historians who removed America from its heritage of Natural Rights and Natural Liberty, doing crap like this. They just omit what they don't like, and pass it off. It then becomes cemented because there are far too few historians outside of the overwhelming body of progressive historians. They've had free reign for 100 years to destroy American History. Fundamental transformation? What else would people want, they've been lied to about what America really is(was).

http://tinyurl.com/oouqjha