A very interesting post.
This question of the "revolutionary" credentials of Washington, Jefferson is very much on my mind now since I am doing background research on a chapter in my book on Marxism and Indigenism that will argue that the seed of American imperialism was planted at least a century before the Spanish-American war and the annexation of Hawaii.
While most of us have heard about the nefarious "Manifest Destiny," there is much less knowledge about the ideological roots of the American "revolution" which Henry sketches out. I want to add to this, based on Chapter one of Reginald Horsman's "Race and Manifest Destiny", titled "Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons." Horsman makes the case, with ample documentation, that the founding fathers believed in the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and drew upon the Germanic race mythology of the historian Tacitus.
Slave-owner Thomas Jefferson was more into this race mythology than any other of the gang of reactionaries who split from the mother country. What they sought was to build a racially pure republic that would express the Magna Carta ideal in its purest essence. They viewed the British parliamentary system as the culmination of a tribal struggle against the impure Norman tribes. Horsman writes:
"Jefferson was particularly intrigued by the problem of the actual location in Germany of the tribes that had invaded England, and he copied large sections from those authors who had attempted to describe specific homelands on the European mainland. When he read of the original Saxon homeland in the Cimbric Chersoneus of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, this was no idle reading and copying. Later, in 1784, when he proposed an ordinance to create new states in the Mississippi Valley, he suggested the name Cherronesus for the Denmark-like area between Lakes Huron and Michigan--not a name of the new America but an echo of the old Germanic tribes. In the time of the later Roman Empire, Jefferson believed, northern Europe was inhabited by tribes who lived close to nature and had a form of government that reflected the natural rights of man. Some of these tribes, generally known as the Anglo-Saxons, left northern Europe in the middle of the fifth century and established in England a form of government based on popular sovereignty. In his stress on the attributes of the particular peoples involved in creating Saxon free institutions, Jefferson was foreshadowing the later interest in the racial origin of Anglo-Saxon accomplishments."
To put it succinctly, Jefferson was interested in creating a racial state, not a revolutionary democracy. He succeeeded beyond his wildest imagination.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)