Public and Private After the Revolution

The Revolution transformed the landscape of public space in America. People's conceptions of their own and others' public roles were challenged, redefined, and threatened. Elites were in a sense at the forefront of this change, because it was they who were most exposed by the removal of previous colonial elites. They had to radically adapt their conceptions of their own public and private lives. This seems to have resulted in all sorts of exagerrations and contradictions, which shifted and settled through the early national period. As Peter Thompson points out in Rum Punch and Revolution:

Lurking behind this contradiction between self-interest and community development was a fundamental tension between the values and imperatives of private life and those of an idealized but imperfectly realized public world. [p8]

During the 1780s, i.e. after the first great public test of the war itself, revolutionary elites faced anew the challenge of negotiating between private and public roles. The idea or ideal of retirement to private life was strong for men like Washington and Hamilton, both of whom spent the 1780s mostly out of public office. Others like Madison, remained in public life but shifted between national and local spheres.

How did questions of public and private spheres affect other future Federalists; did their answers differ from future Antifederalists? What was the relation between emerging conceptions of the public sphere and the constitutional project? Can that movement perhaps be defined as a deliberate attempt to shape a public sphere - or to define a public/private relationship - for the new nation?