Braddock’s defeat opened a cultural gulf between the colonies and the British. The Americans realized that the British didn’t understand America. They realized that America was a very different place. In a way this was more of a shock to the southern states that patterned themselves after the British social order than to New England, but to all it drove home that the British pattern of history would not be the American pattern, and that opened the door to a deep rethinking of what America was.
