It has been written that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could barely stand to be in the same room together. If Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had been contemporaries, they would have had difficulty being on the same planet with each other. The differences between Hamilton and Jefferson were to an extent differences between conservative and liberal philosophies. But Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Republican party, was by any definition an aristocrat, a thinker, a philosopher, a man who abhorred violence. He and Hamilton lived on the same social plane, though Hamilton's origins were more humble than those of Jefferson. Andrew Jackson, however, was a commoner, a man of humble origins, a fighter, a brawler who killed a man in a duel, and a figure who would have been distinctly out of place around Jefferson's table in the White House or at his home, Monticello. Andrew Jackson symbolized a new age, called by historians “the Age of the Common Man.”

A person living in 1700 or 1800 or even earlier would not have been overwhelmed by the advances made during the previous century. But imagine Washington or Jefferson looking ahead about 100 years to the automobile, light bulb, telephone, cross-country railroads (200,000 miles by 1900), ocean-going streamships, airplanes, skyscrapers, factories full of heavy machinery and thousands of other advances. Although geniuses like Franklin and Jefferson might have foreseen such developments in their imagination, most people in 1800 could hardly conceive of such things. If one surveys the advance of science and technology over the centuries, it is apparent that for long periods the changes in the lives of working people were incremental. Sometimes, in fact, progress tended to reverse itself; the engineering achievements of the Romans, for example, were not replicated for much of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. And a person earning a living and in manufacture or farming in 1800 would not have led a life drastically different from the life of a small tradesmen or farmer a thousand years earlier. As many historians have pointed out, it is impossible to underestimate the impact that the growth of technology had on the lives of ordinary people.The rate of change in human society began to pick up in the early 1800s and has been accelerating ever since. Arguably, even the 20th century did not have such a profound impact on the way people lived their lives as the 19th.

The American colonists had just fought a long and bitter war against a powerful centralized government; they were wary of creating another. The Second Continental Congress, which continued to function as the government of the new United States following the Declaration of Independence, drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1777. They had Articlesorganized themselves sufficiently to conduct the war, but even during the fighting, the states werejealous of their own prerogatives. For example, when Washington's army was marching from Boston to New York early in the campaign, a welcoming party from the government of Connecticut approached the advance units and inquired by whose permission this "foreign army" was being brought into Connecticut. United in the cause of war, they still were separate political units jealous of their independence. Preoccupied as Congress was with the conduct of the war, and occasionally having to move to avoid the British Army, they failed to find sufficient agreement on the Articles until they were ratified on March 1, 1781.

By the mid-1780s it had become apparent to men like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and others that the United States could not survive and prosper under the Articles of Confederation. Although the Articles said that the United States was to be a permanent union, it was not a nation so much as a federation of sovereign nations. There was no executive authority, no national judicial system, and no mechanism to collect revenue for the collective use of the states. What the Articles did create was a "firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence," but the mechanisms to provide for that, and defense were clumsy and awkward at best. Although many of the other provisions within the Articles were preserved in the Constitution, as independent nations, each having one vote in the Confederation Congress, it would have been virtually impossible to conduct business in the national interest. Meetings were held for the purpose of calling for amendments to the Articles of Confederation, but a convention was called for that purpose, Madison, Hamilton, and others quickly decided to scrap the articles and create an entirely new document. The result was the United States Constitution.

The story of life on the slave plantation in the antebellum South has been told, retold, and told yet again as historians have struggled to wrestle the truth out of a reality that was difficult to understand even in its own time. While a great deal has been written about the history of the “peculiar institution,” uncovering the details of life among the slave population has proved to be elusive, for various reasons.