A Letter to Bernard Romans (ca.1720-ca.1784)
Dear Bernie,
In 1776, the United States did not yet truly exist.
At least not in the way modern Americans imagine it.
There was no coast-to-coast republic.
No fifty-state union.
No interstate highways slicing through mountains and deserts.
No airports linking oceans in hours.
No satellites drifting silently above a continental superpower.
There were only thirteen fragile British colonies clinging nervously to the Atlantic coastline like barnacles gripping the edge of an enormous unknown continent.
And even those colonies did not fully think of themselves as one people yet.
A man from Virginia often identified first as Virginian.
A merchant from Boston viewed the world differently from a rice planter in South Carolina.
A Quaker in Pennsylvania held different religious assumptions than a Puritan in Massachusetts or an Anglican in Georgia.
Different economies.
Different accents.
Different priorities.
Different fears.
The “United States” began less as unified nation…
and more as a reluctant coalition arguing itself into existence.
And there you stood, Bernard Romans, mapmaker, surveyor, naturalist, helping chart a landscape still being imagined politically even as it was being measured geographically.
The colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard in three broad regional groupings.
New England:
Massachusetts,
New Hampshire,
Rhode Island,
Connecticut.
The Middle Colonies:
New York,
New Jersey,
Pennsylvania,
Delaware.
The Southern Colonies:
Maryland,
Virginia,
North Carolina,
South Carolina,
Georgia.
Each region developed its own distinct personality long before independence.
New England’s rocky soil encouraged fishing, shipbuilding, trade, and maritime culture rather than large plantation agriculture. Puritan influence shaped education, religion, and social structure deeply. Towns clustered tightly around churches, harbors, and commons.
Massachusetts became revolutionary nerve center partly because its people were already accustomed to intense civic participation and argumentative town meetings.
Which is a polite historical way of saying:
New Englanders have been professionally opinionated for centuries.
Meanwhile the Middle Colonies became remarkably diverse.
Dutch traders.
English merchants.
German farmers.
Swedish settlers.
Quakers.
Jews.
Catholics.
Protestants.
Philadelphia and New York evolved into bustling commercial ports where cultures mixed more visibly than elsewhere in colonial America.
Pennsylvania especially carried radical ideas about religious tolerance and pluralism through William Penn’s Quaker vision.
And then there were the Southern Colonies.
Virginia’s tobacco plantations.
South Carolina’s rice wealth.
Georgia’s frontier tensions.
Enormous fortunes emerged there…
alongside one of America’s deepest original sins:
slavery.
The Southern economy relied heavily upon enslaved labor from the beginning. By 1776, enslaved Africans formed major portions of the population in several colonies, especially South Carolina.
Even before independence, the future tensions of America already lived inside the colonies themselves.
Freedom and bondage.
Democracy and hierarchy.
Local identity and national ambition.
The contradictions arrived early.
Still…
despite all their differences, these colonies attempted something astonishing in 1776:
they declared themselves one people anyway.
On July 4th, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, formally severing ties with Great Britain.
Imagine the audacity.
A scattered chain of vulnerable settlements facing the largest empire on Earth suddenly announced:
“We are a nation now.”
Without certainty.
Without military superiority.
Without guaranteed survival.
Just paper, ink, philosophy, stubbornness, and enough collective anxiety to power an entire century.
Honestly, it was either visionary courage or the most elaborate group project meltdown in history.
And even then, unity remained fragile.
The colonies shared:
grievances,
British legal traditions,
resentment toward taxation,
and growing revolutionary identity.
But culturally?
Economically?
Socially?
They often resembled uneasy siblings more than seamless nation.
The union formed politically long before it formed emotionally.
Then came the 19th century.
And the former colonies became the engine of an expanding republic.
The original thirteen states anchored America’s explosive growth westward.
Settlers crossed Appalachia.
The Louisiana Purchase doubled national territory.
Roads, canals, and railroads stretched inland.
And populations from the original colonies carried eastern legal systems, political ideals, religious traditions, and cultural assumptions westward into new territories.
The East Coast became the republic’s institutional parent.
Meanwhile industrialization transformed the northern states rapidly.
Textile mills emerged in places like Lowell, Massachusetts.
Factories expanded.
Immigration surged.
Cities grew denser and wealthier.
The former colonial ports evolved into industrial and financial powerhouses.
New York especially exploded into global commercial giant.
Meanwhile the South doubled down on plantation agriculture.
Cotton replaced tobacco as king.
Enslaved labor expanded massively.
Economic dependence upon slavery deepened.
The old colonial divisions hardened into sectional identity.
North versus South.
Industrial labor versus plantation agriculture.
Federal authority versus states’ rights.
And eventually the unresolved contradictions inherited from the colonial era detonated into Civil War.
The same original colonies that once united against Britain now turned violently against one another.
Virginia became battlefield.
South Carolina ignited secession.
Pennsylvania hosted Gettysburg.
The republic nearly tore itself apart over tensions embedded inside its foundations from the beginning.
Yet after the Civil War, the former colonies still remained national anchors.
Financially.
Politically.
Culturally.
Then came the 20th century.
And the original colonial corridor transformed into the beating industrial heart of global superpower America.
Millions of immigrants arrived through ports like:
New York,
Boston,
Philadelphia,
Baltimore.
The descendants of old colonial settlements now operated:
factories,
universities,
banks,
shipyards,
newsrooms,
and political institutions influencing the entire world.
The Eastern Seaboard became infrastructure itself.
And perhaps nowhere was this transformation more dramatic than New York City.
Once a colonial trading port called New Amsterdam…
now global financial capital.
Wall Street emerged from colonial commerce into international economic nerve center.
Meanwhile Washington, D.C., positioned between Maryland and Virginia, evolved into epicenter of American political power.
The old colonial geography still shaped modern authority.
Then came highways.
Interstate 95 effectively paved over ancient colonial travel routes linking Boston to Georgia through one enormous urban corridor.
What once required days on horseback became hours by automobile.
And later:
minutes through fiber optics.
The colonies blurred together physically.
At the same time, America began preserving its colonial past aggressively.
Colonial Williamsburg.
Independence Hall.
Freedom Trail.
Historic districts.
Living museums.
The nation increasingly treated the colonial era both as:
historical foundation…
and cultural mythology.
Sometimes honestly.
Sometimes selectively.
Because remembering history is easier than confronting all of it.
And now…
we arrive in 2026.
The semiquincentennial!
Two hundred and fifty years after independence, the former colonies remain among the most influential regions on Earth.
Together they encompass:
major financial centers,
elite universities,
biotechnology hubs,
government institutions,
historic landmarks,
shipping networks,
media empires,
and densely populated metropolitan regions housing over 110 million people.
The old colonial coastline became the BosWash megalopolis:
Boston to Washington, D.C.
One nearly continuous corridor of infrastructure, commerce, politics, and culture.
The muddy roads of 1776 became:
high-speed rail,
international airports,
digital communication grids,
massive ports,
and endless rivers of traffic.
Bernie, your maps would look like science fiction now.
And yet…
the old regional personalities still survive stubbornly beneath the modern machinery.
Boston still carries intellectual intensity and revolutionary memory.
New York still pulses with ambition and commercial energy.
Philadelphia still feels beautifully haunted by founding ideals.
Virginia still radiates old political gravity.
Charleston still whispers through layers of elegance and historical pain.
The colonies became states.
The states became economic engines.
But the regional souls endured.
And perhaps most importantly:
America still wrestles with many of the same questions born among the colonies themselves.
How much power belongs locally versus federally?
How do radically different cultures coexist inside one republic?
What does freedom actually mean?
Who fully belongs inside the American promise?
The geography expanded.
The technology evolved.
The arguments remained.
Bernie, if you could travel across America in 2026, you would likely stand speechless before:
towering skylines,
bridges spanning impossible distances,
millions crossing state lines daily without noticing,
aircraft tracing invisible paths overhead,
and smartphones connecting people instantly across territories your generation considered unimaginably distant.
You would marvel at the scale.
But We suspect you would also recognize something deeply familiar beneath all the complexity.
America remains what it was in 1776:
a collection of very different people still attempting to share one enormous unfinished experiment together.
Still arguing.
Still negotiating.
Still improvising unity from diversity.
Still trying to become “one nation” in real time.
And perhaps that tension itself became the nation’s defining characteristic.
Not perfect agreement.
But stubborn coexistence.
With old maps, restless coastlines, colonial ghosts, and thirteen stubborn stripes still stitched defiantly into the future,
—The Radical Left 🗺️🖤
And dear reader, perhaps the deeper question after 250 years is this:
What actually holds a nation together?
Shared geography?
Shared laws?
Shared enemies?
Shared values?
Shared myths?
Because the original colonies were never truly identical.
They were fractured, argumentative, economically unequal, culturally distinct, and often suspicious of one another from the beginning.
And yet…
they built something together anyway.
Maybe that is the real American experiment:
not the elimination of difference…
but the endless, exhausting, remarkable attempt to hold together despite it.