invoked time-honored British principles (no taxation without representation, trial by jury) and employed modes of resistant familiar to the Crown. British measures of the 1760s such as the Stamp and Sugar Acts, the Quartering Duties, and Townshend Duties were ôsometimes assailed in the name of natural rights, bur far more frequently in the name of the ærights and privileges of freeborn Englishmen.Æö As the conflict deepened, however, colonial leaders came to believe that the British Crown and Parliament were engaged in an immense conspiracy to destroy American liberties and their attitude shifted from of calling for such natural rightsö to demanding independence and autonomy. As Foner states, the radicals of the American colonies such as Samuel Adams, came to believe that they had both the right and the duty to resist arbitrary authority and that liberty itself was identified with the cause of God.
Richard Hofstadter has argued that one of the factors leading to the radicalization of the American Revolution and the events lead
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