Richard Vague traces the class division and enmity that has characterised Trump’s presidency back to America’s colonial beginnings.
Many thought that the presidential elections of 2016 and 2024 revealed something new in American politics; namely, a profound vitriol and division between the liberal elite of the coastal cities and working- and middle-class voters in the country’s interior, rallying behind a defiant leader, who were motivated by their economic struggles, their religion, a contempt for big government, and a variety of culture war issues. And perhaps in some respects these elections did reveal something new. However, the seeds of this very enmity and division have been present since the country’s founding and were acutely relevant in the epochal July 1776 vote for independence.
The division was most dramatic and pronounced in Pennsylvania, which was split between the wealthy Anglican and Quaker merchant elite in Philadelphia and the largely Scots-Irish Presbyterian “middling and lower sorts” (a term from that era, denoting their economic status) that had been pouring into the colony and putting down roots largely in the western, interior region. More than 52,000 had arrived in the Delaware Valley between 1730 and 1775, and were joined by Baptists, Lutherans, and other anti-authoritarian acolytes of the Great Awakening. Meanwhile, the elite were deeply entangled with British wealth and finance, and most did not see the need for independence from Britain.
The cultural and economic divisions in Pennsylvania were particularly consequential because of the colony’s size, wealth, and location at the geographic heart of all the states. It was simply inconceivable to declare independence without Pennsylvania, even if all the other states assented. If Pennsylvania had not assented, that would have doomed any attempt at rebellion by the other colonies.
The “middling and lower sorts” were artisans and mechanics in Philadelphia, and farmers on the colony’s western frontier– often directed there, in fact, by the elite to serve as a human buffer against Native American attacks.
The elite, especially the merchant traders, had ascended powerfully in Philadelphia and other colonial cities because America was in the midst of the greatest economic expansion in world history. The country, and in particular fertile Pennsylvania, was the Silicon Valley of its day – a beacon for ambitious British entrepreneurs. In the eighteenth century, the colonies’ population would skyrocket from 200,000 to 5 million while their collective economies grew from nothing to one-third the size of mighty Britain’s. The elite were reaping the wealth and benefits of this expansion.
In contrast, the “middling and lower sorts” were artisans and mechanics in Philadelphia, and farmers on the colony’s western frontier– often directed there, in fact, by the elite to serve as a human buffer against Native American attacks. They formed a faction that was transforming Pennsylvania from a colony that was cooperative with the King and Parliament to one that was vigorously resistant. During their long years in Northern Ireland and Scotland, these commoners had been politically alienated and economically excluded, suffering disadvantage and hardship at the hands of the English. Thus, they had ample cause to resent and even hate the King and Parliament. Pennsylvania’s neglect of their needs–as made clear by a Philadelphia newspaper editor when he wrote “the back countries are a dead weight upon us; they pay very little towards the support of the government”—only deepened their radicalism. The commoners, who were located in the western region of the colony, also wanted and needed protection from Native Americans, while pacifist Quakers opposed any military actions and pursued lucrative trade with those Native Americans. Since Quakers controlled the colony’s government, they repeatedly failed to provide adequate funding for a military defense against Native Americans.
Many among this faction of the middling and lower sorts, which was increasingly viewed as the radical faction, were imbued with “a fierce individualism,” writes Arthur Herman, “which saw every man as the basic equivalent of every other, and defied authority of every kind. Any man who claimed to be better than anyone else had to be ready to prove it, with his words, his actions, or his fists.”
Religion also divided Pennsylvania’s elite and radical factions. Anglicanism and Quakerism were the de facto religions of the establishment. Meanwhile, Presbyterianism and other new denominations had begun to flourish in America, with these radicals as their congregants were predominantly western farmers and immigrant artisans and laborers in the port cities. Their churches were more anti-authoritarian and less formal, and they emphasized a more personal, emotional relation to God.
Economically, the radicals were both debtors and tenants of the merchant elite. Philadelphia’s merchant elite had accumulated enough capital to be creditors and landlords to the middling and lower sorts. The colony’s courts would become a fault line between the elite and commoners, since they adjudicated creditor laws and as such came to be perceived as vital enforcement agents to the elite.
While it is an oversimplification, radicals were less likely to have much formal education and, based on temperament and especially their economic lot, they were more likely to be resentful, anti-elite, and anti-authoritarian. This faction would emerge as the radical political and economic foil to the merchant elite.
The elite would come to label this faction pejoratively as “the Democracy” because of their insistence that they be included as voters. Elites had little desire for true democracy and for them “democracy” was a term of derision; for the middling and lower sorts, it was a term of pride.
Other cultural differences, faint echoes of which we can hear in 2026, abounded as well. Eventually, radicals would deny funding to the American Philosophical Society and take over the College of Philadelphia as elite (and elitist) institutions. They wanted to ban theater. Even the treatment of yellow fever in the raging epidemics of the 1790s dramatized this political polarization: people’s politics could be identified by whether they were for the radicals’ method of bloodletting or the more palliative conservative alternative.
Some historians characterize this elite-versus-radical dichotomy in Pennsylvania as one of urban globalists versus rural localists, and this description has some validity: in general, radicals looked inward and westward while the financial elite looked outward and eastward, across the Atlantic Ocean. The radical and elite division probably sounds familiar. It has lingered, echoing through decades to the politics of the twenty-first century as a persistent division between the interior and the coasts – a division forged by culture wars, finance, values, temperament, and religion.
In 1763, the tension between the radicals and the elite erupted – brutally –in western Pennsylvania. A group of Scots-Irish settlers known as the Paxton Boys massacred the remnant of a tribe known as the Conestoga that had been living on Penn family lands they coveted. They declared that it was “against the Laws of God and Nature that so much Land Should lie idle while so many Christians wanted it to labour on and raise their Bread,” and then marched eastward toward Philadelphia, intent on murdering the Lenape and Mohicans who had been moved to the city for their own protection. Benjamin Franklin joined other dignitaries and traveled to Germantown to intercept and subdue the mob.
By 1775, fissures with the British had emerged, and deepened, but before the idea of independence had even been formally introduced, the Pennsylvania government instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress “to dissent from and utterly reject, any Propositions, should such be made, that may cause, or lead to, a Separation from our Mother Country, or a Change of the Form of this Government.”
The conservative Thomas Smith would characterize their view of the upper crust in Philadelphia by contemptuously asserting: “know ye, we despise you.”
The elites were correct to be worried, because some bold Pennsylvanians were indeed beginning to whisper the language of independence. They were joining other colonials who voiced that desire because of taxation and other more well-known catalysts of the American Revolution. They supported independence from Britain, but they wanted far more than that: their protest against Britain was also a protest against the elite. They longed for a new egalitarian democracy, without class. They’d been especially battered economically in the years immediately preceding the Revolution and, for them, democracy had become an idea that also implied an economic leveling.
The conservative Thomas Smith would characterize their view of the upper crust in Philadelphia by contemptuously asserting: “know ye, we despise you.” This sort of burning contempt in the pro-independence faction for the colony’s financial elite echoes today.
Essentially, then, not only did the deeply personal, core issues that animated the factions help define and fuel the American Revolution, but they also planted seeds for a distinctly American struggle—an inner revolution—between liberty and power that would be reprised for centuries to come.
How did Pennsylvania end up voting for Independence, given its government’s prohibition against that very thing? It became possible because the state’s radicals engineered a highly skillful, months-long coup d’etat that resulted in the complete dissolution of that government by June of 1776.
In May, 1774, radicals had been disgusted when Pennsylvania’s state government, known as the Assembly, refused to support the call by Virginia to create committees of correspondence to support Boston and a boycott against the Intolerable Acts. So they acted outside of the Assembly’s authority to create a completely new, extra-legal body called the City Committee, which would serve as this committee of correspondence. Then when Virginia sent out a call to hold a colony-wide Continental Congress to consider these matters, the Pennsylvania Assembly would again resist, and this new City Committee would push the Assembly to respond. In June, in another extra-legal maneuver designed to ensure its own legitimacy, the City Committee assembled several thousand “freeholders and freemen” from across the colony to vote to affirm its authority and recommendations.
The radicals on this committee would sagely resist demanding too much from the Assembly in its early days, seeking only to recommend delegates to the new Continental Congress, rather than recommending the further step of a boycott. Over time, it would quietly usurp certain duties of the increasingly indecisive and beleaguered Assembly. When the colony wide boycott was finally enacted, it was the City Committee that was its diligent and tough enforcer. After Lexington and Concord, it was involved in organizing militias, suppressing dissent and preparing for war. In parallel, radicals campaigned for more seats in Pennsylvania’s Assembly, and though they never attained a majority, they gained enough seats to block a quorum, a power they would soon enough choose to employ.
Brilliantly, in the spring of 1776, they conspired with Massachusetts’ Samuel and John Adams to get the still-nascent Continental Congress to pass a resolution that questioned the very legitimacy of all of the colony’s governments. When that passed, they pounced. With it, they now had in hand what they needed to destroy Pennsylvania’s Assembly and create a new state government out of whole cloth. No longer patient, they wasted no time, sending out handbills across Pennsylvania for a May 20 mass meeting to be audaciously held in the State House courtyard to consider the legitimacy of Pennsylvania’s Assembly. That meeting drew over 4,000 people in the soaking rain and they voted their approval for a “Provincial Conference and Convention” to start on June 18 for the purpose of creating a completely new state government.
At the same time, radicals flexed their muscle within the Assembly itself. Throughout May and early June, radical members repeatedly chose to stay away so that the Assembly could not reach a quorum, mercilessly repeating this tactic. With that, as of June 14, the Pennsylvania Assembly would finally die, never again mustering a quorum.
The new Provincial Conference met from June 18 to June 25 to set the ground rules for the Provincial Constitutional Convention, which would convene on July 15 to draft an entirely new constitution and bring a new state government into being.
This skillfully architected coup d’etat of Pennsylvania’s government was now complete. Thus, at the epochal moment in July of 1776 when the delegates at the Continental Congress were faced with a vote on the radical proposition of independence, Pennsylvania’s representatives were delegates to a state government that no longer existed.
Then came the dramatic moment. On July 1, 1776, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia held a preliminary vote for independence. Pennsylvania’s seven-man delegation voted against it, four-to-three, led by “no” votes from the powerful elites Thomas Willing, John Dickinson, and Robert Morris.
Yet enough other states had voted yes that the question of independence advanced to an official vote the next day. Delegates were on edge, because what they truly needed from the vote was unanimity, and they could not realistically proceed if Pennsylvania opposed them. Intense deliberation and rancor followed throughout the night. It was likely Ben Franklin who convinced the duo of Dickinson and Morris to absent themselves the next day, so that the Pennsylvania delegation’s vote was transformed into a three to two vote in favor of independence. The dissolution of Pennsylvania’s state government had left them free to take this action.
America was now an independent nation. But the division between these factions was exacerbated even during the earliest days of the Revolution. The rank and file of both the congressional army and the state militias were populated largely by the middling and, especially, the lower sorts, since the wealthy could gain exemption through the payment of fines. This rank and file felt mistreated due to their poor pay as well as the elites’ easy avoidance of service. They quickly gleaned that those who did not serve could stay home and make very good money, while those who served were paid a pittance even as their families suffered in poverty. They rightly accused the elites of an inequality of sacrifice.
Whether a source of consolation or despair, the fundamental struggle between coastal elites and the middle class in the country’s interior has been staged and restaged episodically from the days of the American Revolution forward.
Whether a source of consolation or despair, the fundamental struggle between coastal elites and the middle class in the country’s interior has been staged and restaged episodically from the days of the American Revolution forward, albeit with some variations. We should not have been surprised to see it emerge once again in the elections of 2016 and 2024.
In the 1787 and 1788 battle over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which happened over ten years after the vote for independence, these middling and lower sorts made an uneasy common cause with the patrician Thomas Jefferson to form the Anti-Federalist faction, and later helped to elevate him to the presidency. This was against the efforts of Philadelphia’s elite, who by this time had come together as the Federalist party. The middling and lower sorts backed Jefferson because, like him, they were debtors to creditors in Philadelphia and Britain and, like Jefferson, they feared that the Philadelphia merchant elite would form an aristocracy just as oppressive as the British aristocracy they had recently defeated.
Today, in important respects, the division between red states in the country’s interior and blue states of the “coastal elite” reprises this earlier division.
But they were not viscerally connected to Jefferson. In 1828, they finally found a leader to whom they were: the fierce and unrelenting Andrew Jackson – the ultimate Scots-Irish Presbyterian – and they cut loose when they did. On his inauguration day, Jackson threw open the doors of the White House and his followers rushed in to be close to him, shoving past waiters, colliding with each other, and standing on the fragile furniture in work boots just to get a glimpse.
In 2016 and 2024, those who carried that same spirit would find their leader, too. And today, in important respects, the division between red states in the country’s interior and blue states of the “coastal elite” reprises this earlier division. Both parties today have plenty of support from different members of the billionaire class, so that in itself is not the defining difference between them. Instead, as we saw in the Revolutionary era, many of the divisions and differences stem from deeply held values. As noted, one example came when the radicals of the 1770s took over and remade the College of Philadelphia, which they saw as an elitist bastion; to serve instead the different and broader needs of the state. Today, there is a similar assault by the current administration on many elite universities.
The founding generation learned the lesson that the forces of democracy and populism, the wants and needs of the middling and lower sorts, could not be ignored. Both of today’s major parties would do well to heed that same lesson, not just in words but in deed.
The economist, Thomas Piketty, writes about the Brahmin left, his term for Western liberal parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters who do not feel they represent their own values and priorities. These parties, instead, are dominated by the so-called intellectual elite and voters with high levels of formal education. Some believe the continued desertion from the Democratic Party of those working-class voters will be fatal to the party over time. Republicans have been attracting working-class voters since the 1980s and in 2026 are led by a figure who appeals to many of them in style and rhetoric. But surely there is a potential gap between his appeal and style – a style that attracts the political heirs to the Scots-Irish middling and lower sorts – and what he might achieve on their behalf. It remains to be seen if the president will truly give preference to their economic needs rather than those of the ultrawealthy with whom he has surrounded himself, and whether they will see benefit or injury from his forceful actions on tariffs and trade.
Through their struggles with independence and the Constitution, the elites in the founding generation learned the lesson that the forces of democracy and populism, the wants and needs of the middling and lower sorts, could not be ignored. Both of today’s major parties would do well to heed that same lesson, not just in words but in deed. And both should remember the dangers, shown historically time and again, of traveling paths too extreme.
The story of the founding of America is the story of how early Americans, in spite of these deep divisions, managed to create a democracy – and then defend and preserve it through its politically and economically tumultuous first decades. Neither political faction prevailed in its points entirely, which is why the colonies could win a war and then found a democracy that has survived for 250 years. The seeds of the nation’s enduring divisions and conflicts were evident at its founding. Yet so too were the seeds of its political and economic greatness – the capacity for adaptation, compromise, moderation, and goodwill, which prevailed over the extremes and were essential for American democracy to take hold.
In America’s founding era, moderation eventually prevailed. As we have recently seen, we cannot take for granted that events will always turn out that way.
Adapted from The Banker Who Made America, Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, by Richard Vague
