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Lie? Lmao. Those British soldiers from the Boston Massacre in 1770 Boston at the time were representatives of what many (of course, not all - there was already conflict between patriot and loyalist groups even within Boston) felt to be a foreign occupation force. Hundreds of soldiers, brought in from overseas and not the colonies, were stationed in Boston for the explicit purpose of making sure the tax was collected for Britain's foreign wars, that was the whole point. The soldiers were not neighbors and nor was the tax for local purposes. "Countrymen" is always a bit of a slippery term, of course, and is easily abused. Most students of history are well aware of how fierce anti-immigrant feeling was toward immigrants from Germany or Ireland, for example, in very strong language decrying how bad and evil and Catholic and hard-drinking and foreign-culture they were... and now many of those same descendants are easily considered true-blooded Americans. Weird how the categories of hate conveniently change, eh? Catholics then, Muslims now, maybe? I'm exaggerating a bit, but you're the one telling yourself a historical fairy tale. I say this as someone with probably very similar ancestry/family history (though further West).
I should also add that the country wasn't set up by people from Tennessee. It was set up and allowed/enabled to grow by the earliest patriots who came up with a system of governance based on the same principles that resulted in that defense of those soldiers, it was explicitly a governmental model that made a point to expand legal protection - but also cultural grace - to those beyond your immediate neighbors, friends, and family.
Your own native Tennessee was a particular hotbed of anti-British sentiment from its early history, especially around the 1812 war where your politicians were among the leaders of the war hawks, which is hardly the attitude of former brothers or cousins, adding additional irony. Or later on, when a lot of Irish immigrants showed up in Tennessee, making up over 8% who were explicitly foreign-born of the Memphis population at one point per this interesting longer article about the Irish in Tennessee, just as one example. Of note: while later attitudes changed (largely due to Southern hatred of Blacks being greater), and on the whole the attitudes weren't as sharply anti-Irish as elsewhere in the United States, even the mayor of Memphis used to use language like calling them a "special abomination" and the 'scum of the city slums'.
Hmm, a little uncomfortable, huh?
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