So what made the British-Americans free? Why were they called subjects & not citizens if as you say they were free? What was the political bond that was dissolved?
Hint...it wasn't English common law & FYI...a law that confers on a person a perpetual allegiance to a king without consent of that individual person affected & being required to get permission from the govt/king to relocate are not traits of a free man of any nationality
“So what made the British-Americans free?”
Common law. Also, various concessions from the monarchy, called constitutional law. Which is often indistiguishable from common law, as it was inspired by and upheld by common law.
“were they called subjects & not citizens if as you say they were free?”
The colonists, you mean? Well, as we all know they didn’t have the sort of privileges possessed by the native British. Couldn’t send representatives to parliament, for instance. Many accepted it as a natural outgrowth of the betrayal of age-old prerogatives by William the Conqueror, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Hanoverians, or whomever you put the blame on.
To some, Jefferson included, colonists had been unjustly tricked into accepting the authority of the crown. The idea being that there was a window where fleers were to be free, but they had been reenslaved by the unilateral actions of the tyrannical monarchy. In any case, the rationale for their re-liberation was a call back to the liberties they had enjoyed in the pre-Stuart, Tudor, William-ite, or whatever era.
“What was the political bond that was dissolved?”
The bond to Great Britain. The British empire. The crown. Whatever you want to call it.
“Hint...it wasn’t English common law”
What was it, then? “The Law of Nations”? No, that didn’t work in all the other countries that abided them. abstract reason? No. This was not the French revolution.
“a law that confers on a person a perpetual allegiance to a king without consent of that individual person”
Hate to break it to you, but the U.S. Constitution basically does just that. You can always renounce your ties and flee, but you could do that back in the day, too. Civil society is impossible without bidning children to the system without their consent. Anyone who takes popular sovereignty seriously must be an anarchist and nothing less.