YES, THERE WERE FUNDIES IN THE BEGINNING :-(

Forrest McDonald claims that there were two main categories in American republican thought, one was systematized and the other wasn't.  He further breaks down the systematized into two main groups, the puritan and the agrarian, and describes the differences between the two this way (p.71)

What distinguished puritanical republicanism from the agrarian variety was that the former sought a moral solution to the problem of the mortality of republics (make better people), whereas the latter believed in a socioeconomic-political solution (make better arrangements). Almost nothing was outside the purview of a puritanical republican government, for every matter that might in any way contribute to strengthening or weakening the virtue of the public was a thing of concern to the public—a res publica—and was subject to regulation by the public. Republican liberty was totalitarian: one was free to do that, and only that, which was in the interest of the public, the liberty of the individual being subsumed in the freedom or independence of his political community.

This attitude has obvious links to Edmund Burke's insistence on a government of men, not laws, and D. James Kennedy's horrible vision of a Fundie America.