The colonies had not done well in defending themselves. A recent estimate suggested that 25% of the population ended up dead or seriously injured, with a very substantial percentage of housing and places of business burned to the ground.
Anyway, by the time you get to 1776 New Englanders had had a full century of Crown administration with semi-autonomous homerule in the former colonial areas. BTW, one of those colonies, Plymouth, had been incorporated into Massachusetts. Long Island had a questionable existence as part of New England since it's more settled parts were a rowboat away from New York. New York and New England created a "buffer state" called Vermont to better delineate their competing borders. That "state" was quite primitive and there's a good question of whether it ran itself, or was run by fur traders, or was simply administered by New England on an "as necessary" basis (obviously questions that can be asked right down to the present time).
New Englanders got a jump on Southerners in settleing the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions after the American Revolution. Their tradition of semi-autonomous rule within the far larger realm of a Crown entity called New England set them up to think of the "new states in the West" as being little different than the autonomous regions of New England.
In short, the New England concept of federalism was much more like that of Canada today than of Southern colonies then ~ which is only logical.
Some of the "new states" in the Ohio Valley did have some serious Southern immigration ~ mostly from Virginia (into Kentucky and Soutern Indiana, Ohio and Illinois) and North Carolina ~ into pretty much the same places. Later on there was serious imigration from South Carolina and Georgia as anti-slavery Southerners fled North to escape what can only be described as "persecution".
All of which is to say that federalism in the United States has been of two minds all along.
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