Shays' Rebellion was all of four years after
Shays' Rebellion was all of four years after the sucessful end of the War of Independence, and was limited to Massachusetts; at the same time, Washington was president, and the Constitutional Convention had already been called...
The Newburgh Affair was over in 1783.
Pretty thin reeds for a counter-revolution, when the men who had won the first one were well aware of the need for reform, the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, and were both in command and working toward reform...
Almost all the Western Hemisphere republics passed through a period of internal instability after independence, ranging from border conflicts to separation vs. union to intraclass struggle...the US, however, didn't really face those, and the question worth asking is why.
In comparison to some of the other newly-independent Western Hemisphere republics, the US had the tremendous advantages of:
- a lengthy history and practice of local self government, and
- a lack of (essentially) unresolved issues from the revolution, and
- an open and (essentially) exploitable frontier, and
- a much greater potential for economic growth, and
- a (generally) better geographic, political, and cultural position in relationship to European investment and immigration.
For the USians to foul up all those advantages prior to the period of national consolidation, one would need a
much deeper social crisis (or crises), a standing army/miltary caste, a sectional crisis (or two), and so on...
And none of those are really apparent in the early United States.
That's not exceptionalism, it is simply recognition that the US did not face the potential causes of conflict that (for example) the Latin American republics did after independence, which - chronologically - can be summed up as:
- race/caste;
- unrealized independence, especially in a period of global war;
- separation vs. union;
- boundary disputes;
- interstate territorial conquest;
- intrastate militarized political conflict;
- resource conflict;
- intraclass conflict;
- exterior intervention, on political/strategic and economic grounds;
- religious conflict;
The US had tremendous advantages in the immediate post-independence years, some of which were well understood and others were not; there were many elements of the preceding centuries of European settlement of what became the US that left deep fault lines that would produce conflict (slavery being the most obvious), but the reality of the late Eighteenth Century was that the US had a lot more breathing space after independence than much of Spanish or Portuguese "America" did in the middle of the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era in the early Nineteenth Century...
There was a reason men like Washington kept cautioning about becoming entangled in great power politics, after all...
Best,