In 1787, while most of America's great men worried that the American Revolution had gone too far, Philadelphia doctor and philosopher Benjamin Rush worried that it had not gone far enough:

Rush, though, was no radical. Much like his contemporaries, Rush was concerned by ‘the perishability of revolutionary time’, worried that virtue would give way to corruption and doom the republic even before it had a chance to develop. By fashioning America as a damsel in distress, Rush hoped his chivalric prose would convince the republic's heroes to stand against the dangers that threatened the young nation. It was fitting language for a man Jeremy Belknap described as America's Mr Great-heart. Much like Great-heart, the Philadelphia philosophe, ‘attack[ed] without mercy all the Giants, Hydras, [and] Hobgoblins’ that thwarted his pilgrims from reaching the “Celestial City”’. Though Rush presented a litany of problems, there was one subject conspicuously absent from his call to action. Indeed, while Rush no doubt wrung his hands over questions of ‘government’ and ‘finance’, his attention settled upon one hobgoblin in particular: the ‘half-civilized’ farmers at the margins of the republic whom he hoped to mould into proper and modern citizens.