I believe so. If I remember correctly, George Washington was asked (repeatedly, and with great pressure) to be the King. He flat out refused, famously responding that we should not trade one King George for another (we won our independence during the rule of King George III). George Washington was really the only man with enough political power on all sides to warrant this position, and everyone else just looked like upstarts. So when George Washington turned it down and called for a new kind of Government, since the Autocracies of Europe were considered by us revolutionaries of America to be a failed system, everyone listened. We formed a representative democratic republic modeled after Roman and Greek systems, added the judicial and executive branch, and asked Washington instead to be the first President. Again, I believe that Washington pressed for it to be an election based position, and required elections to be held even though he was the clear winner. It was the principal that mattered. And he made his opposing candidate his Vice President, which set the standard for a while (to make the runner up in presidential elections the VP) until Presidents started nominating their running mates. Also, after he was elected, he put term limits of 4 years in place because started to refer to Presidents as if they were Kings... they could hold the position for life and maybe even choose whether to appoint a successor like a Roman emperor or (probably not) submit to elections. I think Washington had been President for 2-3 years before this became apparent and he changed it. He was elected for a second term, but then did not accept he nomination for a 3rd. He stated then that 2 terms was enough for any president, and any longer would be too much for any man. This set the precedent for 2 term limits, but no limits were officially put in place... it was a gentleman’s agreement. That lasted until Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940s when he served his 3rd and 4th term. He is the only president to serve more than 2 terms, and he had to run under a party he created himself, because the standard political parties would not nominate him for more than 2 terms under the gentleman’s agreement from Washington. In Roosevelt’s fourth term, he conceded that he 2 term limits should be made official. I have heard (but don’t know for sure) that his concession included admitting that he had not accomplished much more in this second 2 terms than he had in his first 2 terms, and the loophole that allowed for unlimited terms was too much power for any man. The 22nd amendment was passed in 1947 and ratified in 1951, 162 years after Washington was elected our first president.

Edit: forgot about the articles of confederation. I don’t know much about them, so I’m hoping someone can give a better answer. But they established the 13 colonies as 13 “states”, so as to unite us instead of having us be “the 13 countries of America”. There is a lot of history there about state’s rights and what power there really was at the federal level. Basically States allowed for the unification (“United States”) and formation of the Federal Government under the condition that they could succeed from the union. And that’s where most modern historians stop because the obvious next part of that history is the civil war. So, again, I’m hoping someone can give a better answer :)

That being said, the articles of confederation were a representative democracy. Of course, I imagine that there was probably talk to monarchies for each colony before the articles, because that’s what people were the most familiar with. But giving credit to revolutionary Americans, they shed the autocratic models that failed them and strove to create something different and, I think, better.