"The American Adam, like his descendants today, sought to free himself from the past and to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.” Nineteenth-century writers and orators restated again and again, in a great variety of forms, Jefferson’s doctrine that the earth belongs to the living. The break with Europe, the abolition of primogeniture, and the looseness of family ties gave substance to their belief (even if was finally an illusion) that Americans, alone among the people of the world, could escape the entangling influence of the past. They imagined, according to Tocqueville, that “their whole destiny is in their own hands."