Idolizing America -- Literally

This, from a Fourth of July oration in 1832 (quoted in Henry L. Watson, Liberty and Power (Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 43):

"The independence of the United States of America is not only a marked epoch in the course of time, but it is the end from which the new order of things is to be reckoned. It is the dividing point in the history of mankind; it is the moment of the political regeneration of the world."