John Winthrop, the most important founder of Puritan Massachusetts, organized much of his legal and political thought around the concept of covenant. In constitutional terms, this meant that while all authority comes from God it must be grounded in mutual consent to be legitimate. For Congregationalists like Winthrop, this applied to church as well as state, and the decentralized nature of congregational ecclesiology required active political intervention. In matters of the law, Winthrop combined traditional English institutions and procedures with covenantal ideals. He opposed the codification of Massachusetts’ laws, favoring customary or common laws, because he feared that, without discretion on the part of judges, the punishments handed out would lack equity and violate the covenantal ideal of charity. This charitable and communitarian ethos was exemplified in his irenic statesmanship and relatively lenient treatment of dissent among his fellow covenanting Congregationalists.

Like any disciple of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson believed that knowledge was power. Indeed, freedom itself was, as he informed François D'Ivernois, “the first born daughter of science.” It is therefore hardly surprising that historians have seen education as central to Jefferson's political thought. Education for Jefferson was “one of the primary functions of republican government,” according to Norman K. Risjord. The distinguished scholar of American education Lawrence Cremin saw it as “a crucial element in the Jeffersonian program,” while Paul A. Rahe has concluded that it was “a central, lifelong concern” of the Virginian. As Ralph Lerner has noted, Jefferson believed that public education was critical to his entire political project; “if self-governance were not to become a hollow or a bitter joke, a people had to be prepared, qualified to rule itself.” Richard K. Matthews has put the point even more forcefully, claiming that public education was an essential precondition of Jefferson's “faith in the people” and their ability “to govern themselves.” Perhaps Merrill D. Peterson expressed the scholarly consensus most succinctly: public education was “the backbone of Jefferson's republic.” Education was then, understandably, a lifelong concern of Jefferson's. In the 1790s he unsuccessfully sought to transfer the College of Geneva, one of the premier institutions of higher learning in Europe, to the United States. During his presidency, he urged Congress to amend the Constitution so that funds could be appropriated for public education and a national university. In his retirement, he tried to establish a public lending library in his native state, offered an architectural plan for East Tennessee College, and designed a curriculum for Albemarle Academy as part of a larger educational scheme.