Federalists and the Coming of Age

Over the last few days I've been thinking about a new alternative way to approach the Federalists and the 1780s in America, which is quite different from my previous formulations. It stems to some extent from my thinking about sympathy, and the potential novelistic qualities of history.

My thesis (as you know!) intends to examine the social, cultural, and intellectual background of the movement for the Constitution. My thought is that this can be done through the lens of 'coming of age,' the moment of achieving - or the struggle to achieve - adult status. This approach seems to have many possible overlapping and not-mutually-exclusive forms, encompassing both various levels of metaphor, and various levels of psychological experience. I hope to draw out my thinking on all of this over a series of posts here, which I might then be able to turn into some sort of coherent plan.

This idea did not occur to me in a systematic way: like perhaps most ideas, it was presented to me as an answer without a question. So the first job is to work out what the question is. I don't think that's so backward and facile as it might sound, though; I imagine that this is only a process of expressing questions that already existed unconsciously, based on my reading and work so far. The cart cannot have come entirely before the horse! These are the questions I think might generate fruitful answers using this new approach:

What drove the leaders of the movement for the Constitution? What linked them together, and relatedly, why was the politics of this moment so transient (preceding comprehensive realignment in the 1790s)? And, perhaps most interestingly, how can we explain their ambivalence to power, and the tensions in their thought over aristocracy and republicanism, inheritance and independence, conservatism and revolution?