This paper attemps to understand a dilemma embedded in the Declaration of Independence: the expected costs of war against Britain far exceeded any possible war benefits, if these are construed simply as the removal of colonial taxation.

Two quite different, but equally plausible, theories of the “cause” of the foundation of the United States in 1787 have been put forward, first by Charles Beard (1913), and then by William Riker (1964). Beard’s thesis was that the preferences underlying the Ratification were generated by...