Magna Carta's Influence On The US Constitution

Improved Essays
Imagine a group of wise leaders around an ancient table studying various historical documents from Medieval England all the way to the Age of Enlightenment. Once, all these documents came together these leaders and started to create the perfect government. These wise leaders are the American Founders who created the US Constitution.Throughout history the Age of Enlightenment influenced the American founders, meanwhile, the Magna Carta and English Bill of Rights both correlated to the idea of limited government and natural rights philosophy, which all helped create the US Constitution. To begin with, the Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which, developed new ideas of government and technology. In the textbook “We the People” Montesquieu develops an idea for governments and asserts that, “ the form of a society’s government corresponds to the social, economic, and geographic conditions of that society”.This quote reveals an …show more content…
In the textbook, “We the People,” the narrator asserts that the English Bill created, “limitations on the Crown’s power to raise money to guarantees of free speech.” This quote suggests that England went through many tough times when the Crown or monarch abused their power, which was a common fault that needed to be fixed. Therefore, England created the English Bill of Rights which established many constitutional principles including the rule of law, a representative government, and basic rights including freedom of speech. Furthermore, these principles related to the natural rights philosophy by creating rights that every human needs including freedom of speech, debate, and religion. These rights established in the Bill all fulfill the quote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” by giving people the rights they want and this quote is often correlated to the natural rights

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    Some European documents we took ideas from to build our government was the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. As a matter of fact, American colonists wanted to implement some ideas of the enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Montesquieu. Not to mention the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence. Some of the key ideas that the American colonists wanted to preserve in the Magna Carta and the English Bill were that they wanted to protect the church right in which every person had the right to choose what religion wanted to believe and to which church they wanted to go, not only the church rights were protected, but also they didn't want New taxes without the community agreement, this was made to prevent the king…

    • 160 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The U.S. Founding Fathers were influenced by many great thinkers and past societies when they collectively wrote the famous documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that shape our government and country. After events such as the Boston Tea Party, Americans, to put it bluntly, were fed up with Great Britain’s jurisdiction. They desired to form their own government, completely dissimilar to England’s, thus the Founding Fathers essentially sat down and devised an effective government system, and together with the combination of ideas from inspirations such as John Locke and Charles Montesquieu they created a novel U.S. government. John Locke was a key influence on both the Declaration of Independence (which declared…

    • 768 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many people in the America’s thought that the constitution needed a Bill of Rights. Ideas created by the writers of the Enlightenment about the nature of people and government were agreed upon the Framers of the constitution. The Enlightenment was created in the 1700s for encouraging knowledge, reason and science attempting to improve societies.…

    • 396 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Southern colonies all have similarities and differences between their reasons for settlement and daily lives and culture. Each of their governments contributed to the American democracy that we have today. The New England colonies were colonies around Rhode Island and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They mainly consisted of people from England who were looking for religious freedom.…

    • 611 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The first amendment of the Bill of Rights includes freedom of speech, right to petition, assembly, religion and freedom of expression. The Bill of rights was created for the anti-federalists who didn’t want to ratify the constitution because it didn’t directly state the rights of citizens. In 1735 there was a court case, Crown vs John Peter Zenger, that brought John…

    • 600 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rebellion Dbq

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Unlike John Locke’s idea that these rights of life, liberty, and property were God given, these rights were King given, and therefore could be taken away by a future king or queen. Later in 1689, Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights entailing the enumerated rights of all citizens of England, and guaranteed clearly the rights to life, liberty, and…

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Enlightenment was key in influencing and determining nearly every part of the colonies and the colonial independence movement, especially on government, politics, and religion. If it wasn’t for the figures and central ideas of the Enlightenment, the U.S. would have been very different because the Enlightenment influenced many key figures from American history such as Thomas Jefferson, ideas like freedom from oppression and natural rights came straight from Enlightenment, and almost every part of life, even religion, were strongly affected by the Enlightenment. Key figures in the creation of the US like Thomas Jefferson were vastly motivated and moved by the Enlightenment which meant that the country was as well. As the creator of the Declaration…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The founding fathers were among the greatest thinkers of their time, to the founding documents they took inspiration from other American and European thinkers. America was founded on the these founding documents; The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. The Enlightenment ideals of Deism, Liberalism and Republicanism were written into our founding documents the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence was written to make the colonists fight against the royal crown legitimate.…

    • 915 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Enlightenment influenced life in America today because it first tipped the first domino to what lead to America becoming independent. The first passage states, “Reason had led many thinkers to the conclusion that kings and queens were ordinary mortals, and that conclusion implied many kinds of uncertainty.” (93). This first domino was people realizing that kings and queens were humans like themselves which of course lead to a Civil war in England and the American revolution. So in short two ways the Enlightenment influenced America is that it played a role in use being a free country and two the enlightenment showed is that all humans are equal and for that reason we elect a president instead of praising a king or queen.…

    • 660 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dorinda Outram’s book The Enlightenment contains the chapter “Enlightenment and Government” which highlights that contrary to popular belief, not all philosophes had the same ideas when it came to the ideal government. Outram focuses on the misconceptions people had about the Enlightenment and bring to light the true differences people had about government during this time period. Outram discusses the relationship between the Enlightenment and government, a relationship that has had few research. Through the lives of three leaders in Enlightenment and government John Lock, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is clear how philosophes greatly differed yet had many similarities in the way they viewed government. John Locke’s view of government is based on the idea that all men are in a state of nature by God; Locke refers to this state as perfect freedom in Second Treatise on Government.…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Governments have changed throughout the years but one thing that has not and that is people voicing their opinions on the way their society runs. Many intellectual thinkers throughout the Enlightenment had voiced their opinions on how to make a government run more effectively. Writers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire voiced their opinions on government and the United States heard it loud and clear. The Enlightenment was a remarkable time for development and it had a substantial influence in the United States government.…

    • 1297 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    With the conclusion of the French and Indian War, Great Britain now was the strongest and largest nation in the Western hemisphere with multiple colonies spread on the east coast of the Americas. Although they won the war, it did come with a cost; a price that Britain threw onto the American colonists. The ideas enticed by the Enlightenment period, the results of the French and Indian War, and the passage of acts because of the colonists rebellious actions all provoked the American Revolution. During the time of the Enlightenment, a handful of influential scholars and leaders released their views on the world.…

    • 1025 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Tristan Utech Mr. Westlund U.S. History 10/10/15 Comparative Essay of the “Declaration of Independence” and “Common Sense” Two documents quite essential to the founding of America may actually have much more in common than just being a tool for action. The two documents addressed are “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine and “The Declaration of Independence” written by Thomas Jefferson.…

    • 1664 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Enlightenment is the belief in the power of human reason and the modernizations in political, religious, and educational principle. Knowledge is thought to only come from the meticulous study of past occurrences. The Enlightenment spread beliefs that thoughts should guide all human activities. These freedoms, however, were especially limited to the freeborn Englishmen. Once the Declaration of Independence claimed “unalienable” rights, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was the foundation for all future governments.…

    • 1397 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1-The American enlightenment was a development to organize the human limit for a reason as the most elevated type of human accomplishment. The most conspicuous of the Enlightenment thinkers were John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. This ideas inspired both harmony and conflict with religious leaders. Settlements faced off regarding how the Enlightenment idea of “natural rights” may impact their activities as pilgrims under the tenet of the British crown. Also America’s first college, Harvard was founded in 1636 and nine colleges were founded during the colonial period.…

    • 810 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays