Were they conservative or liberal.
But regarding the papacy, and conservative and liberal, and powers that be in general, aren't they all trying to conserve their own power, wealth, and influence?
Not all. The corrupt, yes. But there have also been people who were not corrupt. What follows is a small overview of what they accomplished and how they went about doing it.
I will quote from one of the greatest experts of all time, and let you decide for yourself what the early Americans were like. The book all the quotes come from is American Institutions and Their Influence and the author is Alexis de Toqueville. All the quotes come from the first chapter. The numbers you see are the footnotes he used for documentation for what he had to say. The documentation came from court records, legislative and township records, etc....
The settlers who established themselves on the shores of New England all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. Their union on the soil of America at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor, These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time, All, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and their acquirements, The other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of New England brought with them the best elements of order and morality, they landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children. But what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking, They had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country, the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain, Nor did they cross the Atlantic to improve their situation, or to increase their wealth; the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile, their object was the triumph of an idea,
The emigrants, or, as they deservedly styled themselves, the pilgrims, belonged to that English sect, the austerity of whose principles had acquired for them the name of puritans. Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it
corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories, It was this tendency which had aroused its most dangerous adversaries, Persecuted by the government of the mother-country, and disgusted by the habits of a society opposed to the rigor of their own principles, the puritans went forth to seek some rude and unfrequented part of the world, where they could live according to their own opinions, and worship God in freedom.
Now I will jump ahead in the same book and author:
This happened in 1620, and from that time forward the emigration went on, The religious and political passions which ravished the British empire during the whole reign of Charles 1., drove fresh crowds of sectarians every year to the shores of America. In England the stronghold of puritanism was in the middle classes, and it was from the middle classes that the majority of the emigrants came, The population of New England increased rapidly; and while the hierarchy of rank despotically classed the inhabitants of the mother-country, the colony continued to present the novel spectacle of a community homogeneous in all its parts, A democracy, more perfect than any which antiquity had dreamed of,
started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society
The legislators of Connecticut{30} begin with the penal laws, and, strange to say, they borrow their provisions from the text of holy writ,
"Whoever shall worship any other God than the Lord," says the preamble of the code, "shall surely be put to death." This is followed by ten or twelve enactments of the same kind, copied verbatim from the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery,{31} and rape were punished with death; an outrage offered by a son to his parents, was to be expiated by the same penalty The legislation of a rude and half-civilized people was thus transferred to an enlightened and moral community The consequence was, that the punishment of death was never more frequently prescribed by the statute, and never more rarely enforced toward the guilty.
The chief care of the legislators, in this body of penal laws, was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which they did not subject to magisterial censure, The reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed, The judge was empowered to inflict a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage,{32} on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not infrequent, We find a sentence bearing date the first of May, 1660, inflicting a fine and a reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed,{33} The code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures, It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity{34} Innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious,{35} is checked by a fine or a flogging, In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself upheld in Europe, renders attendance on divine service compulsory,{36} and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment,{37} and even with death, the Christians who chose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own,{38} Sometimes indeed, the zeal of his enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco,{39} It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws. In 1649 a solemn association was formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair.{40}
If, after having cast a rapid glance over the state of American society in 1650, we turn to the condition of Europe, and more especially to that of the continent, at the same period, we cannot fail to be struck with astonishment, On the continent of Europe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy had everywhere triumphed over the ruins of the oligarchical and feudal liberties of the middle ages. Never were the notions of right more completely confounded than in the midst of the splendor and literature of Europe; never was there less political activity among the people; never were the principles of true freedom less widely circulated, and at that very time, those principles, which were scorned or unknown by the nations of Europe, were proclaimed in the deserts of the New World, and were accepted as the future creed of a great people. The boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble, that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without precedent was produced off-hand by the imagination of the citizens, In the bosom of this obscure democracy, which had as yet brought forth neither generals, nor philosophers, nor authors, a man might stand up in the face of a free people, and pronounce amid general acclamations the following fine definition of liberty:{52}7
"Nor would I have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty 'sumus omnes deteriores;' it is the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it, But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good: for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives, and whatsoever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof, This liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority; and the authority set over you will, in all administrations for your good, be quietly submitted unto by all but such as have a disposition to shake off the yoke and lose their true liberty, by their murmuring at the honor and power of authority.II
So were these people conservative or highly radical in their day? I say they were very radical politically for their day. They were far, far ahead of their contemporaries in Europe and elsewhere in the world. They were the forerunners of the liberal thinkers of the 1700s such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and men such as John Stuart Mill.
de Toqueville says it was their legacy that spawned the greatness of the political system of liberty in the US that existed in his day, and he traces all of this out in the book I quoted from here. It is a fascinating read, and it dispels so many modern day errors and misrepresentations of what the US was always meant to be, and how it was meant to be governed. God most definitely had His hand in this.