"Americans relied on the organic growth of institutions to fit circumstances and experience. The true “genius” of American politics, he said, was that Americans had no political philosophy. Instead, they shared the common assumption “that institutions are not and should not be the grand creations of men toward large ends and outspoken values; rather they are organisms which grow out of the soil in which they are rooted and out of the tradition from which they have sprung.” The American Revolution was simply an attempt to preserve political institutions and practices inherited from Britain and adapted to the circumstances of American life. Even the Civil War “did not represent a quest for a general redefinition of political values” because it was an essentially conservative struggle between differences of “constitutional emphasis,” not different political theories."