It was Nature, feminine and dynamic, propelling all things.  With so many Americans severally convinced that this had become ultimate truth, was not a further reflection bound to occur to a nation that was, above all other nations, embedded in Nature:  if from vernal woods (along with Niagara Falls, the Mississippi, and the prairies) it can learn more of good and evil than from the sages,* could it not also learn from that source more conveniently than from divine revelation?  Not that the nation would formally reject the Bible.  On the contrary, it could even more energetically proclaim itself Christian and cherish the churches; but it could derive its inspiration from the mountains, the lakes, the forests.  There was nothing mean or niggling about these, nothing utilitarian.  Thus, superficial appearances to the contrary, America is not crass, materialistic: it is Nature's nation, possessing a heart that watches and receives.
Perry Miller.  Nature's Nation.  (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967)  201.

This then is my opening proposition: that the decisive factor shaping the founding conceptions of "America" and ot "the American" was material rather than conceptual; rather than a set of abstract ideas, the physical fact of the continent. [. . .] Americans saw themselves as building their civilization out of nature itself, as neither the analogue nor the translation of Natural Law, but as its direct expression.  Fusing the political with the natural, human volition with its object, and hope with destiny, they imagined an all-encompassing universe that in effect healed the lapsarian parting of man and his natural kingdom.

I see [. . .] the powerful presence of a civilization conceived to be inherent in nature, springing forth coeval with each American as an organic part of his very individuality.  [. . .] Huck Finn escapes from a society that claims to be civilized into a nature that really is:  both ethically and aesthetically, the raft and presumably the West are not just nicer places but specifically more civilized.  They are never jungle like, but are pastoral very much in the style of the Forest of Arden.

Myra Jehlen.  American Incarnation (Cambridge:  Harvard UP, 1989) 3; 9; 15.