“Not race or place, but ideas, have always been at the root of what it means to be an American.”
2023
This was certainly not true of the founders as we will see below. It only became true when that criminal proto-Marxist Lincoln fundamentally changed the definition of America with the support of the immigrant Revolutionary German Forty-Eighters.
So, sans Sandlin America was a race and place and not merely about ideas. America was founded as a ethno-nation.
That was the original intent. Yes, it was a confederacy but all members of the confederacy were European in their origin. American was a nation where all the European cousins married one another. So … if you’re not non-Jewish European, you’re not American. And you can probably make the case that originally Eastern Europeans need not apply.
“The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.” — George Washington
Or this description of the “new American man”:
(America qua nation began as a mostly English but also Western, European people:)
“…whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes… What, then, is the American, this new man? He is either a European or the descendant of a European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared.”
Letters from an American Farmer in 1782
Or John Jay’s comment that American are a single people:
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, without which a common and free government would be impossible.”
~~John Jay, Federalist #2
Or John Dickinson:
“Where was there ever a confederacy of republics united as these states are…or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs?”
~~John Dickinson, Delaware delegate to the constitutional convention
