Same time, same place but so very different

From Bret Stephens’ review of Edmund Morgan’s latest book:

in Philadelphia in 1787, Mr. Morgan uncovers one more instance of witch hunting, this one barely remembered, concerning an old woman named Korbmacher who died soon after being brutalized by a mob. Not much else is known about the incident, but Mr. Morgan is struck that this outbreak should occur in the same place where the Founders were gathering for the Constitutional Convention, the very summit of Enlightenment thought and action. There is no record that the founders took note of poor old Korbmacher. But the event was widely noted in the Philadelphia press, and Mr. Morgan suspects an influence on the thinking of the convention, specifically its distrust of popular rule. “It shocks us a little,” he writes, “as we read Madison’s notes of what his colleagues said, to find them at the very outset of the Convention fearful of an ‘excess of democracy’.