Juan Cole explains how colonial America was in many ways just as sectarian as present-day Tunisia, Libya or Egypt:
We should remember that the Thirteen Colonies that made the revolution starting in 1776 were religious societies. They had undergone the Evangelical Great Awakening, and millenarian and anti-papal movements were rife. Religious Americans fought the British for religious as well as material reasons. While the framers of much Federal law and of the Constitution were most often Enlightenment Deists and relatively secular in outlook, the mass of Americans were otherwise. Even the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbade Congress to designate an official American religion, was considered solely a Federal initiative, and states often had Established religions. Massachusetts had an established church until 1833, and its constitution still mentions requiring state and local institutions to raise money for and support the Protestant church.
Cole also reminds us how unstable the new nation was:
Americans forget that in the 1780s the Articles of Confederation did not work very well, and there were problems of too little federal government. They forget the Rhode Island farmers’ strike, Shays’ Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the various slave revolts, the continued conflicts with Native Americans, etc., etc. Thomas Jefferson, less timid than our contemporary pundits, remarked after Shays’ revolt that ‘a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ You have a sense he wouldn’t be that alarmed by contemporary Libya. They forget that 15 years after the constitution was written, the vice president of the United States killed the first secretary of the treasury in a duel.
(Illustration of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, by J. Mund)
The Dish 