Thomas Jefferson and Richard Bland, like Adams, claimed their po­litical and legal privileges as Englishmen in confrontation with Parlia­ment; but they did not invoke any American fathers. They followed the Whig view by transferring the origin of rights, liberties, and self-government to the old Anglo-Saxon order, which was already corrupted by the Norman invasion and was now to be destroyed once and for all in America.¹⁴ This conception was the Whig tradition common to both En­gland and America,¹⁵ but understandably it played a lesser role in New England (Adams thought little of the transfiguration of the old Saxons¹⁶). Similar difficulties arose concerning the beginnings of the other colonies: the proprietary colonies owed their origins to a feudal institution; Geor­gia was the failed result of a philanthropic entrepreneurial spirit that aimed to empty London's debtors' prisons; and Maryland was a Catholic island in a Protestant sea.

Massachusetts—which offered its sister colonies a self-confident tra­dition of solid beginnings, solid founders, and an aggregate of motives for self-assertion tested over a long period of time—was both instigator and driving force of the independence movement. Furthermore, the Mas­sachusetts of 1776 was no longer the City Upon the Hill of 1630; and the structure of the cult of the hero and of historiography, formally un­changed, contained a content whose sentiments, doctrines, and attitudes were, not least as a result of the Great Awakening, already shared throughout America to such an extent that they could be accepted by the comrades-in-arms in the other colonies.

These concepts included the he­roic element of the "errand into the wilderness"; the English elements of traditional rights, freedoms, and self-government; and the Protestant ele­ment of the freedom of religion and conscience. Thus the New England tradition of heroes and history substantially encompassed the entire American past: the forefathers came to America as free men paying their own way, took possession of the land by their own blood and sweat, and always proved their original freedom-loving cast of mind by resistance to every imperial encroachment on their privileges and their right to self-government.¹⁷

The process of becoming a nation is also heralded in the project of an American history. In 1774 Ebenezer Hazard wrote, "When civil states rise into importance, even their earliest history becomes the object of speculation." Since it was therefore important to make available materi­als "to lay the foundation of a good American history," Hazard proposed a collection of important documents under the title "American State Papers."¹⁸

But long before Hazard could realize his plans, George Chalmers, a Tory who had returned to England as early as 1775, had composed an American history, Political Annals of the Present United Colonies (1780). All the historians of the new Republic learned from this book, and it communicated to them three basic elements of the New England tradi­tion: (i) The beginnings of the colonies, unlike those of the European nations, are known and open to historical examination; (2) Puritan New England, though no bastion of religious freedom, always marched at the head of the colonial civilizational process, and since the transfer of the charter of its Bay Colony to America, it thought of independence within or outside the Empire; (3) The Revolution began and ended as a defense of existing rights and liberties.¹⁹

It is true that other strata and facets asserted themselves in the historical self-understanding of the Republic; but I am here dealing for the moment merely with the recurrent dominant symbolic pattern in which the New England dovetailing of the cult of the hero and historical thought was effective. In his History of the United States (1834-1876), George Bancroft laid down this conception, which was in force well into the twentieth century. Bancroft, a student of Heeren's in Göttingen, follower of Andrew Jackson, and "high priest of American nationality,"²⁰ located the American mission of a City Upon the Hill in a universal drama written by God and applying to all man­kind, whose climax is the realization of freedom in the organization of American society.²¹