The United States of America, it can be argued, was founded by the discontented. Surely the American Revolution stands as the final expression of the colonials' discontent with Mother England. But it was not only towards England that the American peoples prior to the Revolution responded negatively: resistance to exploitation and oppression - from every sphere of influence - is a recurrent theme. Nor was discontent with the colonial situation limited to the white males who took up the gun in rebellion and thereafter reserved the mantle of "American" almost exclusively for themselves (at least in terms of political power and legal existence). Rather, several groups co-existed in the American colonies prior to 1800, divisions of race and sex as well as that of ethnic European groupings. Each group expressed its discontent, its resistance to the encroachments upon its rights, in varied forms corresponding to situation and cultural orientation.
The original Americans, obviously, were the Native American peoples, misidentified in great cultural ignorance by Christopher Columbus as "Indians." Unlike the European settlers of the 1600s who, despite their differences of language and religion, shared some common historical connections left over from the only-recently challenged cultural dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, the Indians who inhabited North America at that time were exceedingly diverse. Perhaps this was only natural, the broad expanse of the Americas overwhelmingly larger in scale than the compact Atlantic communities of Europe where the colonial settlers originated. Nevertheless, the Spanish explorers, Dutch landsmen, French trappers and English settlers who first imposed themselves into the Indians' world presented a far more unified front than the Iroquois and the Natchez and the Pequots - and all of the other Native Americans whose lands were suddenly being occupied by strangers with odd ideas about property and p...