Colonial America and the American Revolution

Albion’s Seed is a great book about the four migration folkways into the colonies from Great Britain during 1629 through 1775. The groups had many characteristics in common which may be what made future union possible, but the groups were also different. Puritans hated Quakers. Everybody hated Catholics. The competing regional cultures created quite a laissez-faire outcome between the community-based groups and more individualistic groups.

The Revolution had been profoundly argued well in advance. It wanted to conserve the good things of their past British lives. In the 1830s disputes centered on the United States being either a compact school of independent states forming a confederation or a nationalist school of a single people in the aggregate. The British thought they were dealing with thirteen independent and sovereign states.

From the 2001 History of Liberty seminar.