Rush eventually threw all the notes and documents for his once-planned memoir of the Revolution into the fire. Americans, he felt, had no national character and little likelihood of ever acquiring one: “We are indeed,” he said in 1812, “a bebanked, a bewhiskied, and a bedollared nation.” America’s revolutionary experiment on behalf of liberty “will certainly fail. It has already disappointed the expectations of its most sanguine and ardent friends.”
