For the founders, the purpose of civic nationalism was not to erase or replace ties of kinship and commonality but to create and augment them. Their goal was to meld together a population not necessarily descended from the same ancestors or professing exactly the same religion and to ensure that they all spoke the same language, were attached to the same principles of government, practiced their faiths freely and without sectarian strife, and were or would become similar in manners and customs. If the precise circumstances Jay described in Federalist No. 2 were never strictly true, the goal of
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