America: a New England, a New World
New England has played a commanding role in the development of the United States. The texts The Birth of the Republic and America, A Concise History offer a balanced and rational appraisal of the region's impact on American history. The curious blend of Puritan religion, strident intellectualism, and Anglicized culture that define New England has also to a large extent defined the United States as a whole. Although other regions have influenced the course of our Nation's history, none has had the overarching and widespread influence that New England has. The Puritans were religiously oriented, and focused on the divine, rather than the political. Although their concern was more with the hereafter than the here and now, they emphasized how behavior in the here and now would affect the individual's situation in the hereafter. The Puritans sought to influence others to their way of thinking with respect to the way life should be governed, legally and morally.
New England's influence on American political affairs started well before the Revolutionary war. The Puritans who settled New England "believed that each congregation should be self-governing, free from control by either a religious or political hierarchy. In that sense they anticipated the 'separation of church and state'" (Morgan, p. 45). The separation of church and state would become one of the hallmarks of American Democracy, and the New England Puritans' influence in crafting the doctrine is unimpeachable. Having fled religious persecution in England, the Puritans ensured that such persecution could never happen in America. Indeed, "in Rhode Island there was no legally established church; every congregation was autonomous, and individual men and women could worship God as they pleased" (Morgan, p. 48). Although these are rights and traditions we take for granted today, in the early 1600's New England's adoption of thes...