April 19 was the 250th anniversary of American militiamen routing the best army in the world. Seven hundred British troops arrogantly came out of Boston early that day in 1775 to seize firearms and gunpowder in Concord, Massachusetts. By the time the tattered remnants of that force escaped back to Boston, hundreds of British troops were left dead, wounded, or captured along the road. The “shot heard around the world” became one of the most dramatic blows against tyranny in modern history.

But the hard truths of the American Revolution are being obscured by Leviathan-loving pundits. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—President John F. Kennedy’s court historian and a revered liberal intellectual—declared in 2004, “Historians today conclude that the colonists were driven to revolt in 1776 because of a false conviction that they faced a British conspiracy to destroy their freedom.”

The colonists revolted because they were being bayoneted down the road to serfdom. The British parliament passed law after law trumpeting Americans’ legal inferiority to their foreign masters. The Sugar Act of 1764 resulted in British officials confiscating hundreds of American ships, based on mere allegations that the shipowners or captains were involved in smuggling. To retain their ships, Americans had to somehow prove that they had never been involved in smuggling—a near-impossible burden.

The Declaratory Act of 1766 announced that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” That meant Parliament could never do an injustice to the Americans, since Parliament had the right to use and abuse colonists as it pleased. That law was modeled after an earlier British dictate—the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719. The British were notorious for treating the Irish as bad or worse than slaves. Perhaps the most influential political philosopher in America in the pre-Revolution times was John Locke, who warned in his Second Treatise on Government in 1690: “He who attempts to get another man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him.” Colonists paid fierce attention to........

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