The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was, among other things, the colonists’ counter to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The declaration, written by Thomas Jefferson, only referenced London’s effort to partition North America obliquely, complaining that King George III incited “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages” to wage war on settlers. But two years earlier, Jefferson, in one of his first political tracts, had clearly condemned the Crown’s effort to restrict migration. “America was conquered,” Jefferson wrote in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” by its settlers,

at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public. Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for the settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.

“A Summary View” captures an argument, especially popular among the Virginia rebels in the years leading up to the American Revolution, that the ideal of modern liberty, founded on property rights, can be traced back hundreds of years to Saxon Germany. It was there, in the early centuries of the millennium, where freemen first governed themselves as equals, holding land “in absolute right,” in Jefferson’s words. When Old World lords tried to encumber their rights, these Saxon heralds of American freedom fled, first to Britain and then to the New World.