The irony is that this was the real argument of Bruce Johansen’s book
Forgotten Founders (1982), which first kicked off the “influence debate”—an argument that largely
ended up getting lost in all the sound and fury about the constitution: that ordinary Englishmen
and Frenchmen settled in the colonies only began to think of themselves as “Americans,” as a new
sort of freedom-loving people, when they began to see themselves as more like Indians. And that
this sense was inspired not primarily by the sort of roman- ticization at a distance one might
encounter in texts by Jefferson or Adam Smith, but rather, by the actual experience of living in
frontier societies that were essentially, as Calloway puts it, “amalgams.” The colonists who came
to America, in fact, found themselves in a unique situation: having largely fled the hierarchy
and conformism of Europe, they found themselves confronted with an indigenous population
far more dedicated to principles of equality and individualism than they had hitherto been able
to imagine; and then proceeded to largely exterminate them, even while adopting many of their
customs, habits, and attitudes