Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this!

There were a number of questions facing the United States after the War ended. There was a nominal national government in the form of the Continental Congress, but it had barely survived the war and was in many ways powerless.

Arguably the most immediate issue facing the new nation was what to do with loyalists - Americans who remained loyal to the British crown during the war. In the final months of the war, thousands of loyalists fled the new nation for Canada and other outposts of the British Empire. Their properties, which in some cases were substantial, was often divided between active patriots. Loyalists that stayed faced a variety of community and political exclusion, though this generally slackened over time.

Political participation and suffrage transformed following the end of the war. Women had been involved in the revolutionary process in a number of ways, including some women gaining the right to vote in New Jersey. With the war over and the need for mass politics reduced, women were gradually excluded from the political sphere. New Jersey revoked women's right to vote in 1807.

White male suffrage increased after the American Revolution. The flood of new people into political life challenged the traditional ruling class. In the years between the end of the war and the drafting of the Constitution, elites like Washington lamented that so many unworthy men in public life would ruin the nation and unmake everything the Revolution had achieved.

Politically, the biggest problem facing the Congress was it's inability to tax. This prevented it from paying the debts the nation incurred during the War. The ensuing inability for the nation to get credit or much value to its currency. These factors helped spark Shay's Rebellion, which the Congress was powerless to stop due to its inability to raise an army. That the revolt failed was more a product of chance than anything the government did.

The perceived social instability, coupled with the very real weakness and economic powerlessness of the government created by the Articles of Confederation, caused the states to send delegates to a Constitutional Convention to amend the Articles. Instead, they ended up drafting an entirely new document.

What did all look like for the common person? The economic pinch would likely have been distressing. The expanding and changing political landscape may have either cost you your place in public life or substantially increased your standing in society, depending on what you did in the Revolution. If you could, you would likely exercise whatever political rights you had, since they were viewed as a part of American (male) identity.

On the frontier, life changed significantly. With major Native American powers like the Iroquois destroyed or displaced, the edges of Euro-American settlement became both more peaceful and more populous as colonists and immigrants rushed in.

A good survey of this period is the Oxford History of the time, Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty.