The condition for this state was the general acceptance "of proposi­tions identifying the purposes of the original settlers with the cause for which the revolution was fought"⁹—a premise we have already encoun­tered in our examination of Adams' self-understanding. Although this view found its confirmation in the traditions of most colonies, it inevi­tably led to an overwhelming influence of the New England Puritan tra­dition on the new republic's understanding of history ^I0 (which found its analogy in politics and to a lesser extent in the social order, thanks to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787).

In the other colonies there was no cult of the fathers and of heroes that was as lavish, William Penn in Pennsylvania excepted;¹¹ and the New England historiography, from the chronicles of the first settlers to Thomas Hutchinson's masterwork, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1764), stood alone at the top. Subsequent historiography contributions of the Smith clan for the middle colonies, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania descended directly from New England writings. In the South, historical consciousness overstepped the threshold of articulation only in three histories of Virginia, all written between 1705 and 1750.¹²

This supremacy of the New England tradition of history is not acci­dental; New England historiography was the explication of the City Upon the Hill, its origin and its crisis; it was expressed in an intense intellectualism, which radiated dynamically into the social reality, and this in turn was shaped along the concept of the "New England way of life" and established a self-confident political regime. As a jeremiad, created by an awareness of crisis, New England historiography always expressed an interest in the concrete beginnings and in the founders of the New England polities, in order to renew the original substance of society through revivals.

Beginnings and founders were, so to speak, on the record and original in the sense of a politically and intellectually autonomously engendered society, which represents itself. Only New England could lay claim to a founding out of a spirit of separatism, outside the British empire, which one had voluntarily joined, and in the realization of an apocalyptically inspired new order (although only Plymouth—but not Massachusetts Bay—had understood itself as a separatist community). Once the self-interpretation of the Revolution had engaged in a speculation on American origins up to illuminating their significance, it necessarily had to cling to the New England tradition.¹³

In spite of Captain John Smith, the beginnings of Virginia were visible only in blurred outline; historiography kept to the reform policy of the Virginia Company (1619 — 1624), or the transformation of Virginia into a Crown colony (1624); it further saw Virginia closely connected with the political quarrels between Parliament and king and with the opposi­tion to Cromwell—in short, in the imperial context.