Our favored categories can start to look strange when we turn a light\n on the realities of the American Revolution. The revolution involved \ncoalitions of people who were deeply divided regionally, economically, \nsocially, politically, so anything the big-time founders did agree on \nwill be pretty revealing.
I\u2019d say they were largely agreed on the virtues of representative \ngovernment \u2014 it\u2019s what they\u2019d had for generations, what they saw being \nthreatened \u2014 but to question your question somewhat, I\u2019d also note that \nacross the board, from the planters to the financiers to the upper \nfarmers and lawyers, the right of representation in no way equated with \ndemocracy, which at the time would have meant \u201cmanhood suffrage\u201d: \ndisconnecting the right of political participation from property \nownership.
The founders who held power were agreed in their fear and loathing of\n that idea. Their ideology of rights and liberty was bound up, from \nancient times \u2014 at least in their minds it was \u2014 with protecting \nproperty. So both the economic liberalization promoted by the \nhigh-finance Hamilton,\n and the more agrarian program that the slave-economy Madison advanced \n(once he realized what his old friend in nationalism Hamilton was up \nto), recoiled from democracy, a term the founders used negatively \nwhenever they referred to placing power in the hands of the \nunpropertied.
That free yet unpropertied class was big, by the way, in founding-era\n America. In my view, egalitarian goals, as you\u2019ve put it, were not on \nthe minds of any of the well-known founders, for all of their other \ndifferences. \u00a0That includes mutually divided nationalists like \nWashington, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams and state-sovereigntist, \nanti-nationalists like Patrick Henry.
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