Absolutely! Really, the men who we now call the Founding Fathers represented the more conservative faction of the Revolution. Their ultimate victory in the creation of the US Constitution came after the defeat of several more radical and populist factions.

In the years before the shooting phase of the American Revolution, we can probably divide the free American population into four segments. The historical record says little of those who remained neutral or apathetic, and in any case the nature of their views meant that they did not take much action. Supporters of British tax policy were rare - very few Americans were content with British claims that the colonies were virtually represented in Parliament. Most people with political opinions were moderate protesters. They took part in non-importation/non-consumption, and encouraged their neighbors to do likewise. The more literate and active among them organized Committees of Correspondence to coordinate protest movements and share political ideas. Mostly, they wanted to work within the existing system to reform Parliament's relationship with the colonies. On the most extreme edge were violent protesters like the Sons of Liberty. These men tended to be of lower socioeconomic status, though the movement's best known leaders, like John Hancock, Sam Adams, and Isaac Sears, were wealthy or well-to-do. These men attacked the property and persons of tax collectors, customs agents, political officials, merchants, and anyone that would violate non-importation agreements. The actions of this set are familiar to any American schoolkid: tarring and feathering tax collectors, instigating the Boston Massacre, and destroying East India Company property at the Boston Tea Party. That Boston shows up twice on that list is no mistake: the radical faction was stronger in that city than most other places in the colonies.

As tensions mounted and acts of economic protest more frequently turned to physical violence, rifts appeared between the moderate and radical protesters in some colonies, while in others they moved closer together. In New York, the two factions had very little coordination, culminating in New York not sending a delegation to the First Continental Congress. In Massachusetts and Virginia, protesters from both factions took over the colonial militia system, creating a military force ready to oppose any military attempts the royal government took to enact their policies.

When open warfare broke out in 1775 and continuing through the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the radical wing enjoyed its heyday. Men flooded into militia and Continental regiments under short-term enlistments, prepared for a quick demonstration of their patriotism and manly fortitude that would scare the British away from serious military action. As colonies transformed into states, they composed new constitutions that generally included on large, strong legislatures and weak governors (New York was an exception to this, while Pennslyvania had no governor at all). Suffrage expanded, including universal white manhood suffrage in Pennsylvania. New York's wartime economy largely ran on the state confiscating the estates of loyalists that had fled or been driven out, breaking up the usually large holdings into smaller farms, then selling them to the loyalists' former tenants - the biggest campaign of land redistribution during the war.

As the war dragged on, however, radical fervor gave way to more moderate, pragmatic military and political leadership. The elected officers and short-term soldiers of the early war army were replaced by a dedicated, government-appointed officer corps commanding long-term professional^1 soldiers. Early war radicals, like Hancock and Sam Adams, were passed over for leadership roles in the Congress and the military, and unhappily faded from the leadership of the Revolution. When the Philadelphia militia, formerly the most powerful radical faction in the country, began attacking people who had collaborated with the British during the occupation of the city in 1777-78, the upper and middle classes of the city formed their own militia and defeated the radicals in a messy riot outside of a suspected loyalist's house. By the end of the war, moderate or conservative (for, you know, people engaged in a violent revolution to overthrow the government) men held most positions of power across the newly United States.

Between the end of the war and the ratification of the Constitution, more democratic and leveling factions enjoyed newfound popularity. Most states had a cultural and political divide between coastal merchants, who tended to be more moderate and dominate the political institutions of the state, and back-country farmers who felt under-represented and under-served by the state government. The most serious flare-up of these tensions was Shay's Rebellion in Massachussets, where a former Continental Army captain raised a small army of backcountry farmers and marched on Boston before being turned back by the state militia.

Shay's Rebellion helped spark the Constitutional Convention, where delegates, most of whom were extremely wealthy slaveholders, looked to reform the American political system with an eye towards curbing democratic excesses. While the specter of Shay's Rebellion was on the minds of the delegates, many were worried about the flood of less wealthy, seemingly self-interested men into government since the start of the Revolution. These sorts of men had passed a number of troubling pieces of legislation, including abolishing slavery in several states and making it easier for debtors to either delay payments to the creditors or pay them back with goods and services instead of hard cash. Fearing social upheaval and financial ruin, the delegates drafted a constitution that created a federal government superior to the individual states that had only one directly elected component, a small (compartive to the total population of the United States) House of Representatives that was generally inferior to the Senate whose senators would be appointed by their state legislatures.

Ratifying the Constitution was a contentious process, and many of the surviving radicals from the Revolution became Anti-Federalists opposed to the passage of the document. Most of these, in turn, became members of Jefferson's small-government Democratic-Republican Party as the first party system coalesced.

Still, the victory of the moderate/conservative Revolutionaries was short lived. The generation born during and after the War of Independence would elect Andrew Jackson in a wave of celebration of The Common Man^2, and democracy^3 replaced republicanism as the guiding principle of the American political system.

Sources and Readings:

T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution

Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Making of the US Constitution

Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible Philip Ranlet, The New York Loyalists

Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class. The Philadelphia Militia and “Lower Sort” During the American Revolution, 1775–1783

Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War

David Waldstriecher, Slavery's Constitution

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Notes:

^1 Professional in the sense that military service was their one job during the war, and not farmers who picked up a musket to drill for a few hours on the weekend. There's a whole other historical discussion about the professionalization of the military that views even the British during this period as a thoroughly amateur force.

^2 Jackson, a hugely awful figure, was of course hardly a common man, owning large plantations in Tennessee.

^3 "democracy" in this case being limited to only white men.