America’s Rebel Empire

July 4, 2025

By Nathan D. Hitchen

Every July 4, we celebrate America’s break from the British Crown. But looking closer, we see in the patriots’ appeal to the king against Parliament, the union of states in a federal commonwealth, and the unitary office of the presidency something strange. What if the United States of America is less a rejection than a reimagination of Great Britain’s imperium? What if the first country to rebel against the British Empire is, in fact, its last living heir?

In casting off George III, the Founders recovered something older—a version of the British constitution more ancient, royalist, and ultimately stronger—than what America left behind in 1776. Instead of a constitutionally hereditary king, they created a constitutionally elected monarch and called him “President.” Instead of a federation of imperial realms, they forged a federation of free republics and called them the “United States.” Transforming royal prerogative into executive authority and imperial federation into federal union, the Founders reformed the British Empire.

To understand how this came to be, we need to recover how American colonists understood the British Empire, especially in the years before independence. Parliament’s claim to legislate for the colonies marked a sharp break with the earlier imperial arrangement, in which royal charters had allowed colonial autonomy under the king’s feudal authority. Patriots thus saw themselves as obedient rebels—not overthrowing English law but faithfully defending an older political settlement that Parliament had corrupted or abandoned.

Many colonists considered themselves subjects of the king, believing that his prerogative crossed the ocean but that Parliament's authority ended at Britain's shore. As such, each colony operated as a distinct realm with its own laws and legislature, connected to Great Britain through a quasi-feudal relationship with the king, who had personally chartered them. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and other patriots held that America was part of the king’s dominions outside Parliament’s jurisdiction, like Scotland or Ireland before their Acts of Union.

Adams in 1773 wrote that in America, “we hold our Lands agreeably to the Feudal Principles of the King,” and in 1775 advanced the colonies as self-governing realms under royal charter:

How, then, do we New Englandmen derive our laws? I say, not from parliament, not from common law, but from the law of nature, and the compact made with the king in our charters. . . Massachusetts is a realm, New York is a realm, Pennsylvania another realm, to all intents and purposes, as much as Ireland is, or England or Scotland ever were.

Jefferson recounted in his autobiography that he took the only “orthodox” constitutional stance for Americans in the imperial crisis, “which was that the relation between Great Britain and these colonies was exactly the same as that of England & Scotland after accession of James & until the Union.” Hamilton argued similarly: “I deny that we are dependent on the legislature of Great Britain; and yet I maintain that we are a part of the British empire—but in this sense only, as being the freeborn subjects of his Britannic Majesty.”

The Patriot Theory of the British Empire

According to a popular narrative on the Right, the American Revolution was a revolt of free individuals against the very idea of central authority—a Lockean uprising in defense of pure liberty. The idea—peddled by various writers of “just-so” stories about the American Founding—that Americans were revolutionary individualists, Lockean liberals, or Enlightenment enthusiasts doesn’t square with their appeals to feudal dependence on a king. Historian Eric Nelson calls the position of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and others the “patriot theory of empire,” which was a direct descendant of Royalism, the political cause of those who took the king’s side against Parliament in the English Revolution from 1642-1660.^[1]

That this patriot theory of empire was a throwback was not lost on Britain’s leaders, including King George and his first minister Lord North, as they puzzled over how best to confront colonial arguments that pitted the king against Parliament that had won constitutional supremacy over the monarchy in the Glorious Revolution of 1688—a settlement regarded as essential to British liberty. King George held that he was “fighting the battle of the legislature” in America in defense of Parliament.^[2] According to North, it was the king’s friends and ministers who “contended for the rights of parliament, while the Americans talked of their belonging to the crown. Their language therefore was that of Toryism.”^[3] 

The trouble began, in the colonists’ eyes, not because of royal tyranny, but because Parliament tried to assert supremacy over their legislatures—with taxes, regulations, and laws passed in London without colonial consent—and the king neglected to defend their rights, which were, in their view, his rights. What they wanted, at least initially, was not independence, but a return to a federal empire: a personal union under a monarch who served as a common executive authority—a check on, not a puppet of, Parliament—who balanced the interests of multiple English realms, each with its own legislature.

As Jefferson wrote in 1774, “it is now . . . the great office of his majesty, to resume the exercise of [the legislative veto], and to prevent the passage of laws by any one legislature of the empire, which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another.” Yet North insisted that the war “did not originate in a despotic wish to tyrannise America, but from the desire of maintaining the constitutional authority of Parliament over the colonies.”^[4] Thus, the American Revolution was a civil war over the nature of the empire, namely where sovereignty resided: Crown or Parliament. Patriots sided with the Crown.

In this light, the Declaration of Independence—while usually seen as a philosophical break from monarchy—can be interpreted as a vindication of American rights to the old British imperium as patriots took it to be: one king ruling many legislatures of different realms. The king that colonists rejected had abandoned his balancing role and tipped the empire toward a centralizing Parliament. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s complaints blame George III for enabling rather than preventing Parliamentary tyranny.

The Presidency is the Monarchy Patriots Wanted

The Founders didn’t reject monarchy—they reimagined it. In demanding that King George rein in his ministers, the American patriots sought to reverse the trajectory of English history. With the U.S. President, Americans fashioned the constitutional monarch George III failed to be. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution restored a regime not seen in Britain since before 1688, which tilts away from legislative supremacy.

The President of the United States resembles the strong monarchy of the Stuart kings—James VI and I, Charles I, and Charles II—who exercised authority across legislative and judicial branches. The Stuarts summoned and vetoed legislation, commanded the military, appointed officials, and issued pardons. Sound familiar? Not to the British. Their royal executive last vetoed a law in 1708, who receives a budget from the legislature, has made no military or foreign policy decisions since the American Revolution, and whose pardons depend on “ministerial advice.”

The presidency was designed to capture the strengths of monarchy (independence, energy, decisive leadership) without its weaknesses (corruption, hereditary rule). In these ways, the U.S. President wields more governing power than any British monarch since the 17th century. As G.K. Chesterton noted in What I Saw in America in 1922:

The American Republic is the last medieval monarchy. It is intended that the President shall rule, and take all the risks of ruling. . . All the popular Presidents, Jackson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, have acted as democratic despots, but emphatically not as constitutional monarchs. In short, the names have been curiously interchanged; and as a historical reality it is the President who ought to be called a King.[5]

From Federal Empire to Federal Union

In transforming a federation of imperial realms into a federation of republican states, the Founders did not abolish the architecture of British imperial structure but reinvented it, translated it from kingdom to republic, from hereditary rule to elective government. Just as each American colony had once operated as a semi-autonomous realm under the personal authority of the king, so too did each American state become a self-governing commonwealth within a federal union.

Now, in the American federation of states, a union of distinct political communities—each with a home legislature, judiciary, and governor—send delegations to assemble in a Congress and legislate within a defined jurisdiction, and they are joined under a common executive power “presiding” for the whole. The result is a republic that replicates the imperial federation within the British Empire many patriots hoped to preserve. In their vision, the king’s proper role was to serve as a constitutional mediator among these realms. That vision failed in London, but it triumphed in Philadelphia.

The unifying figure was still an executive: the President of the United States, who, unlike a ceremonial sovereign, serves as both head of state and head of government. He does not merely reign; he rules. As Adams wrote in 1789, “Let us now consider what our Constitution is, and see whether any other name can with propriety be given it, than that of a monarchical republic, or if you will, a limited monarchy.”

Crucially, the President is elected by the states through the Electoral College, where each state acts almost like a constituent realm, casting its votes in a constitutional compact reminiscent of the pre-union British dominions—Scotland, Ireland, or the American colonies—which in the patriot theory of empire once stood in relationship to the Crown as coequal partners under a shared monarch.

Today, small-government or so-called “freedom” conservatives invoke a myth of rugged individualism and suspicion of government power. But the Founders didn’t fear government—they feared unbalanced power.

The Royalist Republic

Meanwhile, Britain has gone in the opposite direction. The American war was the last hurrah of the British monarchy, and especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom evolved into a parliamentary republic. The monarch remains, but as a constitutional ornament, not a political force. All real power lies in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister, not the king, governs. Britain calls itself a monarchy, but its political system operates entirely on republican principles.And so we arrive at the great irony: The United Kingdom is a constitutional republic disguised as a monarchy, whereas the United States is a constitutional monarchy disguised as a republic.

As we celebrate the patriots who fought for our independence, we might also remember this: they weren’t just fighting the British Empire, they were fighting for their version of it. A rebel empire. If that’s what we are, we should not retreat from political authority—we should reassert it to govern this complex, plural nation. A union of realms sharing history, a strong constitution, and the will to reform.

Happy Independence Day, America.

Nathan D. Hitchen is a graduate of the Institute of World Politics, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Rutgers University, and an alumnus of the John Jay Institute.

[1] Nelson, Eric. The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 9.

[2] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 22.

[3] Shain, Barry Alan, ed. The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, & Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congresses (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2014), 5.

[4] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 80.

[5] Chesterton, G.K., The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. XXI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 128.