Introduction
What does it mean to be an American? Many citizens seem uncertain about what our country stands for, even amid celebrations of its 250th anniversary. Answers often point to a singular element: a people, a place, or an idea. But our country is all that and more. America is defined by the intertwining of people, place, and principles. Each of these elements offers its own contributions, but together they also form an organic reality and an exceptional nation.
James Madison’s theory of separation of powers and checks and balances provides a helpful analogy.[REF] Each of the three branches of the federal government has particular functions and responsibilities, yet they are not strictly cordoned off from one another. Each holds a piece of the others. The President can reach into the legislative process with a veto, the Senate into the executive with its power to confirm.[REF] This ongoing dynamic binds the parts into a coherent whole and ensures that all act with fidelity.
Something similar is true of people, place, and principles. Each component is uniquely valuable even as they cohere.
Americans are a people, united for the most part by a common language, religion, manners, and history. Beyond these are human elements like goodwill and gratitude that foster harmony and come through association. The establishment of civic friendship requires unity in a common cause.
America is also a place, a homeland, and human beings love their home. Its expansive territory as an extended republic supports deliberation and the sovereignty of the people. The qualities necessary to settle the frontier—self-reliance, adventurousness, and grit—still resound as part of the American character. The land has helped to develop America’s people and principles, just as they have developed the land. That land is shared across time, and the building of a civilization upon it has established ties of gratitude linking ancestors, contemporaries, and posterity.
A shared understanding of justice further binds a people. America is a nation grounded in natural law and dedicated to human equality, unalienable rights, and self-government. These principles inform the contours of our political institutions and how we treat each other, thus involving the “people” aspect of our national identity.
People, place, and principles shape one another, and that shaping is what makes America a nation rather than a mere plot of land populated by disparate tribes of varying beliefs.
People
The operative word for a people is “unity.” John Jay’s Federalist No. 2 provides a good starting point to examine how Americans are a “united people.” Jay wrote that the Founding generation was “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….”[REF]
Jay’s formulation points to a common culture. Most colonists came from Britain, and the British Constitution supplied some measure of established convention. Early settlers believed in the rule of law in general and the British common law in particular. Concepts familiar from British experience, like separation of powers, would even find their way into America’s Constitution.
A common British culture laid the groundwork for the American culture, yet Americans also grew to distinguish themselves as a distinct people, including through the development of their own form of the English language.[REF] In 1789, America’s “founding lexicographer,” Noah Webster, wrote in Dissertations on the English Language, with Notes, Historical and Critical, that “Now is the time, and this the country, in which we may expect success, in attempting changes favorable to language, science and government…. Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government.”[REF]
Being an independent nation meant developing a national language of America’s very own to “reconcile the people of America to each other, and weaken the prejudices which oppose a cordial union.”[REF] To that end, Webster wrote on the rules of grammar and pronunciation; produced textbooks, a spelling book, and a dictionary; and advocated for the establishment of schools. American English should be distinct from the King’s English but uniform internally and adopted broadly.
Webster is most famous for producing his two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828.[REF] The dictionary is a valuable resource for scholarship on the Founding and early republic and is still cited by contemporary originalist Supreme Court justices to discern what terms meant in the 18th century. That uniquely American language underlies the Constitution.
A common religion can be as important as a common language in constituting a people. The influence of Christianity on the American Founding is well established.[REF] The Great Awakening swept through America in the 1730s and 1740s; 70 percent to 80 percent of American colonists attended religious services on a regular basis and often listened to sermons about Revolutionary principles; and the most referenced work of the Founding generation was the Bible.[REF]
As a result, Americans were bound by an immense commonality of morality and the virtues born of religious practice. In colonial times, leisure was precious, and deciding to devote that leisure to worship was a revealing choice. (Today, it is a telling decision amid our culture of distraction.) An individual reserving an hour or more of his week to contemplate the divine and morality and to practice humility in bowing and genuflecting has a tremendous effect on the character of his community as well as his own character. Such character formation was open to all, regardless of financial resources or social status.
As George Washington explained in his Farewell Address, it is possible to develop a moral framework through reason alone, but “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”[REF] Common religious beliefs and practices help to bind and preserve a nation by securing the virtuous citizenry on which a republic depends.
Manners as well as morals contribute to the national character. With the possible exception of George Washington, who copied out a handbook of Rules of Civility at a young age, no Founder thought more seriously about the importance of manners than Mercy Otis Warren.
Everyday practices are the bedrock of individual character, and manners reflect underlying principles and support virtue. Consider the effrontery and discomfort Americans today experience when customers are rude and condescending to waiters: They are not your servants! Aristocracies are characterized by clear distinctions and formalities. The “republican spirit” is more modest, requiring “patience, probity, industry, and self-denial” and a “simplicity of life and manners,” according to Warren.[REF]
As a people, Americans tend to be informal, hardworking, spirited, friendly, and a little bit gritty. Their manners do have characteristic corruptions and vices as well, however. In her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Warren cautioned that “the hurry of spirits, that ever attends the eager pursuit of fortune and a passion for splendid enjoyment, leads to forgetfulness; and thus the inhabitants of America cease to look back with due gratitude and respect on the fortitude and virtue of their ancestors.”[REF]
The degradation of manners is tied to the degradation of virtue, including gratitude. Paraphrasing Xenophon, Warren considered ingratitude to be the “source of all enmities among men,” and an ungrateful man could not “love the gods or even his parents, friends, or country.”[REF] Warren also saw manners as bein
