This was the great disjunction produced by the American founding. Americans may have changed their views concerning what made a government legitimate. The oppressions of the British Empire may have made them acutely conscious and jealous of what they now called their universal natural rights. But they were still the same people they had been before circumstances drove them to adopt this new theory of government. For the great majority of Americans there had been no lessening of racial, religious, or ethnic prejudice, no rethinking of the role of women, no gradual abandonment of religious
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