250 Years Later: A History Lesson from the American Revolution

Are We Guarding Their Sacred Trust?

​April 19, 2025, is the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. It’s a story most Americans know pretty well, but here at PPSA we’d like to highlight one of the more obscure portions of that history, but one that is of ultimate importance to the all-but-impossible dream the Revolution would eventually make real: The Bill of Rights.
 
The subject of today’s lesson? General warrants. If that doesn’t ring a bell, then be glad, because that means the Bill of Rights largely did its job. General warrants were one of the primary tools of tyranny King George used to oppress, even terrorize, the Colonists. Armed with general warrants, the Crown’s agents could search anywhere they wanted, for anything they wanted, and for any reason — or, even worse, for no reason at all.
 
General search warrants don’t name a specific person or place and don’t state what the authorities are looking for – making it possible to target people without reason or cause, and almost without limits. As you can imagine, such writs were widely abused. To quote the Declaration of Independence, the King “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Barging into homes, destroying property, searching belongings, and seizing whatever they wanted. And not just homes – shops, ships, banks, churches. Americans had had it.
 
And on April 19, 1775, they said enough was enough. And they meant it. Sixteen years and 8 months would pass between that day and the day the Fourth Amendment was ratified. The Fourth Amendment exists because it was, and is, the best answer to the outrageous indignity of general warrants. That’s what historians call a “direct line.”
 
It's appropriate on this occasion to also recall a recent historical reminder from Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who happens to represent a district from Maryland, one of the thirteen original colonies – “The Old Line State” – a moniker earned in blood defending Washington’s army on multiple occasions. 
 
Speaking recently at a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on government surveillance, Raskin quoted James Madison: “The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” It’s no accident of history that Madison drafted what would become the Fourth Amendment. Two and a half centuries later, patriots of all stripes are called once again to hold the line against a modern, invasive, and warrantless surveillance state.
 
That we are still battling unlawful searches and seizures suggests, in a sense, that some things never change. But it also proves the timeless wisdom of those original ideas – that some things should endure. In the Fourth Amendment and Bill of Rights, the Founders left us a sacred trust. “The right to be let alone,” wrote Justice Louis Brandeis, is “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued.”

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