1 - Introduction

Summary

Like most American stories, the one of the American people is, by most standards, a success story. It is the story of a self-made people – an eminently political people. After all, the ambition of a handful of Puritans spread in the wilderness to “be set as lights upon a Hill more obvious than the highest mountain in the World,” was to be fulfilled to an extent never dreamt of by their contemporaries, although through means never imagined by the original protagonists. Also like most American stories, it is one that generally tends to be depicted in broad strokes, with heroes and villains, winners and losers, divided in rather well circumscribed and easily identifiable camps. Thus, in the winning camp one finds, besides the Puritans, Patriots, Federalists, and Northerners, while the losers’ camp is occupied by Loyalists, Antifederalists, and Southerners. One of the primary aims of this book is to use the intellectual history of compromise as a tool for revealing some of the shades and hues that have been erased from this overly simplified picture, thus clarifying key moments in the making of the American people.