The Free Towners linked their messaging to liberty’s revolutionary salad days, when New England’s Americans founded their own communities, each one vibrant with the promise of a future shaped by its residents. But of course, they were not really breaking ground on some hitherto undiscovered frontier. In much the same way Englishmen had once crashed through the bramble of what they thought was a New World, they were actually inserting themselves into a long-established community of natives who regarded them not as benign colonists, or liberators, but as invaders.
