The “United States of America” was never a consolidated unitary nation but was from the beginning, from colonial times, a disparate collection of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious peoples of different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. The Framers recognized this. The US Constitution created a decentralized federal republic of independent sovereign states who delegated explicit powers to the general government, reserving the bulk of their powers to the states and local governments. Their intention was never to create a ubiquitous European-style centralized nation-state, a leviathan with unrestrained tyrannical reach and power. There are many excellent books which outline this. Here are three: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America; The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765–1850; and Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865.

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