This nation’s beginning is not obscured by the vagaries of the ancient past, nor do we need to reach back to a Herodotus-type history, where fact and fiction are blended to both inform and entertain.  The United States was founded in the bright light of recent history.  We know who the founders were, what they wrote, who they read; and as tenuous as it might be for one person to ever claim this about another, what they were thinking.  We group the men together who were instrumental in the formation of the United States and label the collective “the founders.”  This singular term is unfortunate for they were a group that was riven by internal conflict with the major players shifting positions in the years between the Declaration and the Constitution.  Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration but was absent from, and an early critic of, the Constitutional Convention.  Leading supporters of independence such as Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine turned ardent critics of where they believed the newly independent nation was headed.  Colleagues such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton became political enemies with the rise of bitter party politics between the Republicans and the Federalists.  Yet despite their profound differences, one transcendent belief allows us to group them as a unity.  This was their truth: liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the raison d’etre of good government.  The United States is not just a country, it is a cause.