The United States is famously a nation founded on universal principles, not on blood. At least, that is the theory proclaimed today. Many American colonists and revolutionaries had a different view: they thought of their rights as an ancient inheritance based on their blood. Instead of declaring the universal rights of man, as French revolutionaries later did, Americans often insisted on their inheritance as Englishmen. At every opportunity in proclaiming their liberties, they harped on their ancestors and their descendants – fathers, children, posterity and so on. For the most part, they did not mean spiritual ancestors or descendants; they meant flesh and blood. The transformation from blood descent to spiritual descent came later, expressed most eloquently by Abraham Lincoln drawing on the words of the Declaration of Independence.

At the time of independence, many Americans believed that this inheritance was unchanging from ancient times, from ‘time immemorial’. No king or parliament could rightfully alter this birthright of the English people. The body of this inheritance was the fundamental laws of England, especially as expressed in Magna Carta. Magna Carta was pre-eminent as an embodiment of the fundamental law because its antiquity demonstrated the endurance of the inheritance. To early Americans, Magna Carta not only symbolised the general idea of a government constrained by a formal charter, but it described specific rights. The right Americans most often invoked in connection with the Great Charter was the right to trial by jury. The barons at Runnymede certainly did not intend to enshrine common law trial by jury, which hardly existed in 1215. In linking Magna Carta with jury trial, Americans were following a line of thought that had begun in the late Tudor period with antiquarians interested in tracing the ancient constitution of England, in many cases back to the Anglo-Saxons. Edward Coke and others in the seventeenth century celebrated this link between Magna Carta and jury trial in their battles against royal prerogative.