Shays’s Rebellion filled Alexander Hamilton with dread. In 1786, armed men shut down courts in five counties across Massachusetts and, early the next year, marched on the federal armory in Springfield. The mobs included debtors trying to prevent the courts from foreclosing on their farms, and opponents of centralized government. The insurrectionists believed that the newly adopted Massachusetts Constitution, drafted in 1779 by John Adams, would shift power from the poor to the rich, from the many to the few, from the backcountry to Boston, from democracy to aristocracy. They were led by Daniel Shays, a dashing Revolutionary War veteran who’d had to sell a sword given to him by the Marquis de Lafayette to pay his debts.

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Observing the rebellion from New York, Hamilton worried that civil unrest in Massachusetts could augur the rise of a demagogue on the national stage, one who might pander to angry debtors across America and threaten the stability of the new nation. The insurrection was eventually put down by a private army hired by Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin, after members of the state militia refused his call to do so. But what might have happened, Hamilton wrote, if, instead of Shays, the rebellion “had been headed by a Caesar or by a Cromwell”?

In Hamilton’s view, the greatest threat to the American experiment was a demagogue who might flatter the people, overthrow popular elections, and consolidate power in his own hands. “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics,” he wrote in “Federalist No. 1,” “the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people.”

Afraid that Shays’s Rebellion might spread, Hamilton and James Madison called the Constitutional Convention in 1787. George Washington agreed to attend, because he shared Hamilton and Madison’s concern that, under the Articles of Confederation, the new nation was vulnerable to men like Shays. “I could not resist the call to a convention of the States,” he wrote to Lafayette, “which is to determine whether we are to have a Government of respectability under which life, liberty, and property will be secured to us,” or one “springing perhaps from anarchy and Confusion, and dictated perhaps by some aspiring demagogue.”

From the October 2018 issue: Jeffrey Rosen on how James Madison’s mob-rule fears have been realized

A central goal of the convention was to check populist mobs in the states and empower the national government to defend itself. Because the undisciplined Massachusetts militia had failed to stop Shays, the new Constitution gave Congress the power to nationalize the state