The legacy of the Founding Fathers, itself tinctured by Puritan ideas, was equally important. In the development of new countries, while the people are engaged in liberating themselves from colonial status and forging a new identity, intellectuals seem always to play an important role. The leaders of the American Enlightenment did so with signal effectiveness: they gave the new republic a coherent and fairly workable body of ideas, a definition of its identity and ideals, a sense of its place in history, a feeling of nationality, a political system and a political code.
