Justifying Revolution

"The American imagination still exalts the "Founding Fathers" as the prime movers of the Revolution, and the War of Independence has become the stuff of legend. But America is not simply the invention of great men or the outcome of an inevitable political or social movement. The nation was the product of a hard, bloody, and destructive war. Justifying Revolution explores how the American Revolution's opposing sides wrestled with thorny moral and legal questions. How could revolutionaries justify provoking a civil war, how should their opponents subdue the uprising, and how did military…