What philosophers contributed to the American independence?

American independence was dependent on some earlier principles of republicanism developed by ancient Roman thinkers like Cicero but was really more properly understood as a product of the Enlightenment. Early Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and his Two Treatise on Government were very important to the conception of American independence.
One can see key philosophical elements in the thinking of founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, who was influenced by Enlightenment principles of equality and rational government and by the writing of Locke. Even more radical and deeply egalitarian in his Enlightenment views was Thomas Paine, whose thoughts penned as Common Sense became deeply influential in the quest for American independence.
Most of the founding father were deists, skeptical of any one form of organized religion but nonetheless believing in the divinely inspired rightness of the American experiment.