Patterson's paper is a condensation of two he had presented in 1988 and 1989, at conferences previous to the Carbondale Visiting Scholar Conference of 1989. He characterizes the early United States as harboring two contrasting political philosophies, agrarian versus mercantile capitalism. The agrarians, of whom Thomas Jefferson is of course the most illustrious example, followed the physiocrats in believing agricultural land to be the foundation of societies, therefore the manifest destiny of the new Republic was to conquer, and colonize more land. The mercantilists, primarily in Boston, emphasized civilization as the refinement of technologies, social order, and tastes. Both philosophies were cast in Enlightenment terms.