That there is a grand empire, and it need not be a British one. The American Revolution provides a new timbre to apocalyptic thinking, because it combines what is the traditional religious sense of conversion, spiritual conversion and new birth with a political sense of a civil liberty. And when the Stamp Act came and mobilized the colonies, Revere did a wonderful engraving, trying to convince people not to use stamped paper. And there he used for his imagery a beast-like dragon, very much like the beast in Revelation, with wings of a dragon, a fierce tail, talons clutching the Magna Carta and ripping it to shreds, and the colonists being ground underfoot. For preachers, the Revolution was something they firmly grounded in the prophecies, scripture.
Colonials come out of the America Revolution with a new sense of possibility.
One might almost say, a millennial sense of what is possible. So much so that they are comfortable in the 19th century of speaking of a manifest destiny, that this tremendous republic, which has won a revolution against all odds, has now the opportunity to become a republic that will spread all the way across the North American continent, and by its example, bring wisdom, religious belief, and a sense of millennial possibility to the rest of the world.