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"Our country," as John Adams used that phrase in 1774, was Massachusetts, and he called his colony's delegation in Congress "our embassy." For Jefferson, until much later, "my country" usually meant Virginia. The decisive resolution (introduced in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, seconded by John Adams and adopted on July 2, 1776) that provided the occasion for the Declaration of Independence declared "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." Even until the Civil War the nation was commonly described in the plural, as "these United States."
In our homogenized age it is hard to realize how great seemed the differences between the colonies, how long were those miles that we now cover in an hour by air. Differences had accumulated as the population spread out and as the colonial decades wore on. In 1760 the shrewd Benjamin Franklin (experienced in trying to bring colonies together) said that even if, in the "impossible" event of "grievous tyranny and oppression," a few colonies should somehow ever come together, "those colonies that did not join the rebellion, would join the mother country in suppressing it." As John Adams recalled, "the colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them ... was certainly a very difficult enterprise."
A single nation spreading 2,800 miles across one of the most varied landscapes in the world was therefore beyond the imagination of those whom we call our founding fathers. The generation that fought the War for Independence and wrote the federal Constitution doubted that a representative government could decently and efficiently rule a large area. The excesses and failures of the British Parliament in its effort to govern the colonies seemed an obvious illustration. When Patrick Henry argued against ratifying the federal Constitution in the Virginia Convention (June 9,1788), he called for a single example of a great extent of country governed by one Congress. "One government," he insisted, "cannot reign over so extensive a country as this is, without absolute despotism." Americans were fighting against the evils of being governed at a distance.