"A Democracy of Hell": Federalists' Imagined Anarchy, 1786-1789

"'THE times that tried mens souls,' are over," Thomas Paine closed in the 1783 American Crisis XIII. For many early American scholars, the Treaty of Paris represents America's transition from freedom fighting to state-building. However, for many of the 1780s, independence, union, and peace, were extraordinarily precarious. While Daniel Shays's "rebellion" brought tumult to a head, galvanizing America's Constitutional Convention, invocations of "anarchy" by Federalist writers remains largely unexamined. This paper looks at the emotional elements of anarchy through 18th-century "passions" discourse. Using works from John Adams, the "Hartford Wits," and Oliver Ellsworth, I assert that liberty and anarchy were understood similarly in terms of spirit and passion (Thumos). In opposing anarchy of the spirit, Federalists cultivated a discrete emotional landscape utilizing literary reference to John Milton's "Anarch." Alongside this, Federalists grounded spiritual anarchy with popular notions of "anarchy" in the Polish Republic. I argue that attempts by both historians and legal scholars to recover an "original" constitution overshadow historical contingency in the late-18th-century. Federalists were not clairvoyant or Machiavellian, rather grounded in their individual circumstances. Ultimately, emotional history makes room for a richer understanding of our inherited past and its burden.