Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.

This formulation of “natural rights” is associated with Samuel Adams’s political writing in the early 1770s, when Massachusetts leaders were arguing that Parliament’s coercive measures and taxation policies violated the colonists’ inherent rights as free people. In this period Adams helped draft and promote statements of colonial grievances that grounded resistance in Lockean natural-rights theory—life, liberty, and property—and asserted that such rights pre-existed government. The line is commonly attributed to Adams in connection with Massachusetts’s 1772–1773 “Rights of the Colonists” declarations circulated amid escalating tensions that soon led to open conflict.

The quote compresses a classic Enlightenment/Lockean political creed into a colonial American key. By listing life, liberty, and property as “natural rights,” Adams frames political legitimacy as conditional: government exists to secure these rights, not to dispense them. The added clause—“together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can”—pushes beyond abstract philosophy to justify resistance, implying that when institutions fail to protect rights, people may actively safeguard them. The emphasis on property also reflects a common eighteenth-century view that security of ownership and consent to taxation were central to freedom.