What Was the Revolutions Political and Constitutional Resolution?
The American revolutionary leadership studied the past, in part, to build ideologies and world views for shaping the future. “Given the social and cultural structure of the United States during the 1780s, we can deduce that men differed radically over what constitutes the Good Society.”89 Lee Benson, together with other writers, “assume[s] that the characteristics that predisposed men to agrarianism tended also to predispose them to distrust the State.” And, “it follows, therefore, that the new nation should be a decentralized, loose confederation of the several independent states.” On the other hand, “within a liberal republic, the logical corollary of ‘commercialism’ was a system derived from the proposition that the State could function as a creative, powerful instrument for realizing the Good Society…[T]hey believed the State must be strong and centralized.”90 While Benson acknowledged that not “all agrarians were federalists” or “all Commercialists nationalists,” nonetheless, “a m
