On the way to the pivotal battle of Saratoga, General Horatio Gates stopped to discuss the future of America with Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Years later, Rush recalled:

"The pleasant day we passed together in the month of July, 1777, on your way to take command of the army which captured General Burgoyne, can never pass from my mind.  We feasted upon schemes of national happiness, for the words 'national glory' had no place then in the political vocabulary of the United States.  They should be written or printed with red ink whenever they are used, to denote that they have issued in all ages and countries from rivers of human blood."

Generals Washington and Lafayette also "feasted upon schemes of national happiness.  "I wish to banish from my letters the word war," Washington wrote to his French disciple:

"I wish to see the young people of this world at peace, all busy and happy in fulfilling the first and great commandment: Increase and multiply. As an encouragement, we have opened the fertile plains of Ohio to the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed of the Earth.  All those who are overladen, broken down, seeking a soil to cultivate, may come and find the promised land flowing with milk and honey."

When the young Republic became embroiled in the world war then raging between England and France, General Gates was dismayed. "If my skill were equal to my respect and affection for you," Rush assured his old comrade,

"you should not only enjoy your wishes to see the close of the present war... but you should live to see all the fond hopes we entertained during our Revolution completely realized, of the extinction of wars, and of universal liberty and happiness pervading every part of our globe, for these events are predicted in holy writ and must come to pass as certainly as the rising of tomorrow's sun."

"Ah, why will men forget that they are brethren?", wondered Thomas Jefferson.  "Honor! Dignity! Glory! How I hate the words when applied to kings or governments!  To engage in a war in defense of either of them is nothing but duelling upon a national scale... A single life outweighs in value all the ships in the world, and yet thousands of these must be sacrificed to indemnify us for the loss of a few cargoes of sugar and rum... sacrificed to the pride of administrators!"  His opponent, Colonel Hamilton, agreed that "true honor is a rational thing."

In 1794, the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania sent a circular around the country, warning of "the aristocratical faction" which was busy "disseminating principles unfriendly to the Rights of Man-- at the same time so artful as to envelop their machinations with the garb of patriotism."  This aristocratical "patriotism" was unlike the patriotism of the common people.

As the Democrats knew, the upper classes were by no means loyal to the Republic, and they proved it in the war of 1812, when American capitalists bought British government paper at discount and sold it in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, forcing the banks to stop specie payments and driving the Republic into temporary bankrupcy. "Is our nation worth a war?", Rush asked John Adams.

"Would it not have been more correct and more in unison with our habits and principles, had Congress, instead of declaring war, sent an advertisement to be published in all the newspapers in Europe, drawn up in some such form as the following?

For Sale-- to the highest bidder-- The United States of America"

In a Fourth of July speech in 1834, the Jacksonian Democrat Frederick Robinson remarked that "the capitalist, if he loves the banks, the insurance companies, and all the corporate joint stock institutions of 'our country, our whole country,'  thinks, perhaps, that this love is patriotism." 

Karl Marx would later assert that "the working class has no country," but he had it backwards.

The ruling class has no country.