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For much of our history, this nation was settled by victims of nationalism. The War for Independence was sparked by the inability of the British to find a fair status for "colonials" in their growing nation. Later settlers (for some reason we call them "immigrants") came as refugees from nationalism, from its excesses and its horrors. Some had been deprived of their rights in nations to which they really belonged. Others had been forcibly included in larger nations to which they felt no loyalty. Many came to escape the draft in dynastic wars. Some—indentured servants, transported criminals, or slaves—were brought here against their will.
Our American brand of nationalism was produced while people here were thinking of something else. The early British settlers already had their Old World nation, and long continued to feel themselves part of it. But they and all later comers to America —Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Jews, Negroes and many others—were willy-nilly committed to a common search in a strange land. How to make a riving and a new life? How to clear the wilderness and get crops to grow? How to lay roads, dig canals and build cities? How to construct and organize factories, to find customers, and to begin to trade profitably with the rest of the world? Out of this variegated common search came a nation.
This was to be a Byproduct Nation, made much less by people hoping to glorify the land of their grandparents than by people working to provide a decent, prosperous life for their grandchildren. European nationalism hallowed the past; this new American nationalism hallowed the future. The very same features that had made the Revolutionary generation wonder whether there could ever be one nation across the continent—the vastness of the land, the diversity of landscapes and climates, the conglomeration of peoples, the mixture of skills and traditions, the variety of religion—finally proved to be the nation's peculiar strength.
When American settlers moved westward across the continent, they, like the early Atlantic seaboard settlers, went in secession. They went away from pre-empted lands and diminished opportunities, from towns that to them seemed already crowded, to a new America in the West. They went not to build a nation but to find opportunity. The founding of the Western states, the writing of their constitutions, the building of their cities was as American an epic as the story of the first 13 colonies. These Americans too saw that they could not be decently governed at a distance. They too wanted statehood. The struggle for independence was relived again and again, on the prairies, in the mountains, in the new cities.