“Are your people getting mad?,” George Washington asked Benjamin Lincoln when he heard the news of what was happening in New England in the autumn of 1786. “Many of them appear to be absolutely so,” the Massachusetts general replied, “if an attempt to annihilate our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered as evidences of insanity.”[1] By the end of the 1780s, America’s revolutionary elites increasingly resorted to the same explanation. What could possibly explain the conflicts that were starting to tear apart the new republic? How could the same people who fought for the Revolution now have such different ideas about what its outcome should be? Continue reading →