For the founding father, England was tangible, familiar, almost home. His campaigns for republican independence, and identity as a homespun American, were very much a last resort
At the core of American political culture is a foundation myth. When, during the 1770s, the colonists threw off the tyranny of George III, they not only won independence from British imperial rule, but also achieved a kind of self-realisation; Americans-in-waiting became fully fledged Americans. This aspect of the country’s founding legend is, of course, largely nonsense, but a version of the story is hardwired into American identity, and not just among Tea Party activists. It remains an integral component of civic education in American high schools, and is difficult enough to dislodge even at university level.
Yet over the past half century or so several brilliant American historians have unpicked various strands of this fabric. We know that 18th-century colonists referred to themselves as English or British; that identification with one’s own particular colony easily trumped any sense of a shared identity as Americans; and that, with the percolation of English cultural standards and consumer lifestyles throughout the mid-18th-century colonies, anglicisation was the dominant trend in colonial life in the decades preceding the American revolution.
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