The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed. The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians. Key to this struggle, was the work of the Eighteenth-century jurist, Emmerich de Vattel, whose widely read text, The Law of Nations, guided the framing of the United States as the world's first constitutional republic. Vattel had challenged the most basic axioms of the Venetian party, which had taken over England before the time of the American Revolution, and it was from Vattel's The Law of Nations, more than anywhere else, that America's founders learned the Leibnizian natural law, which became the basis for the American System.
The study of The Law of Nations by the delegates to the Continental Congress, to answer questions "of the circumstances of a rising state," is reflected in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. The central ideas of that document are coherent with Vattel's arguments on the criteria of a people to overthrow a tyrannical sovereign. The Declaration of Independence states that governments are instituted to fulfill the "inalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and can be changed if they fail to meet these obligations to the people.
The Law of Nations and The Constitution
To this day, Great Britain does not have a written constitution, but instead a collection of laws, customs, and institutions, which can be changed by the Parliament.
The only place of appeal which the American colonists had for unjust laws was to the King's Privy Council. Attempts by the colonists to argue that actions by the British Monarchy and Parliament were unlawful or unconstitutional would be stymied, if they stayed within this legal framework which was essentially arbitrary. Although Vattel praised the British constitution for providing a degree of freedom and lawfulness not seen in most of the German states, his principles of constitutional law were entirely different from the British constitutional arrangements. Consequently, the American colonists attacked the foundation of the King and Parliament's power, by demanding that Vattel's principles of constitutional law be the basis for interpreting the British constitution.
The adoption of a constitution, by the Constitutional Congress in 1787, based on Leibnizian principles rather than British legal doctrine, was certainly not inevitable. However, British legal experts such as Blackstone, who argued that the Parliament and King could change the constitution, were increasingly recognized by the Americans as proponents of arbitrary power. The early revolutionary leaders' emphasis on Vattel as the authority on constitutional law, with his conception that a nation must choose the best constitution to ensure its perfection and happiness, had very fortunate consequences for the United States and the world, when the U.S. Constitution was later written.
Hamilton was a delegate to the convention which wrote the Constitution in 1787. His main concern was not the institutional arrangements of the government, but its purpose, and the creation of a central government strong enough to carry out that purpose. Three weeks into the convention, he delivered an all-day speech focussing on this. Whereas many of the delegates to the convention saw the purpose of government from the Lockean standpoint of "life, liberty and property," Hamilton's speech, coherent with Vattel's "Principle Objects of a Good Government," located the purposes of government as "the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture," "tranquility and happiness at home," and, "sufficient stability and strength to make us respectable abroad."