Various - Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850.

They rose into existence as a state under the banner of right and justice. In their case, too, the revolution from which their history dates was an act of defense. They claimed guarantees and asserted principles which were inscribed in their charters, and which the English parliament itself, though it now refused them to its subjects, had formerly triumphantly claimed and asserted in the mother-country, with far greater violence and disorder than were occasioned by their resistance.

They did not, to speak strictly, attempt a revolution. Their enterprise was, no doubt, great and perilous. To achieve the conquest of their independence, they had to go through a war with a powerful enemy, and the construction of a central government in the place of the distant power whose yoke they threw off: but in their local institutions, and those which regarded the daily affairs of life, they had no revolution to make. Each of the colonies already enjoyed a free government as to its internal affairs, and when it became a state found little change necessary or desirable in the maxims and organization of power. There was no ancient order of things to fear, to hate, to destroy; the attachment to the ancient laws and manners, the affectionate reverence for the past, were, on the contrary, the general sentiments of the people. The colonial government under the patronage of a distant monarchy, was easily transformed into a republican government under a federation of states.

Of all the forms or modes of government, the republican is unquestionably that to which the general and spontaneous assent of the country is the most indispensable. It is possible to conceive of an absolute monarchy founded by violence, and indeed such have existed; but a republic forced upon a nation, popular government established contrary to the instinct and the wishes of a people – this is a spectacle revolting equally to common sense and to justice. The Anglo-American colonies, in their transition, into the republic of the United States, had no such difficulty to surmount; the Republic was the full and free choice of the people; and in adopting that form of government they did but accomplish the national wish, and develop instead of overturning their existing institutions.

Nor was the perturbation greater in social than in political order. There were no conflicts between different classes, no violent transfer of influence from one order of men to another. Though the crown of England had still partisans in the colonies, their attachment had nothing to do with their position in the scale of society; indeed the wealthy and important families were in general the most firmly resolved on the conquest of their independence and the foundation of a new system. Under their direction the people acted, and the event was accomplished. And if society underwent no revolution, so neither did men's minds. The philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century, its moral skepticism and its religious unbelief, had no doubt penetrated into the United States, and had obtained some circulation there; but the minds to which they found entrance were not entirely carried away by them; they did not take root there with their fundamental principles and their ultimate consequences: the moral gravity and the practical good sense of the old Puritans survived in most of the admirers of the French philosophers in America. The mass of the population remained profoundly Christian, as warmly attached to its creed as to its liberties.

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