from the 'The American Revolution' by Gordon S. Wood

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/550925.The_American_Revolution

The Revolutionary leaders were not naive and they were not utopians -- indeed, some of them had grave doubts about the capacity of ordinary people. But by adopting republican governments in 1776 all of them held to a more magnanimous conception of human nature than did supporters of monarchy.

   Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies of their subjects. Republics lacked all the accoutrements of patronage and power possessed by monarchies. If republics were to have order, it would have to come from below, from the people themselves, from their consent and virtue, that is, from their willingness to surrender their personal desires to the public good. Much of the Revolutionary rhetoric was filled with exhortations to the people to act virtuosly telling them, as Samuel Adams did, that 'a Citizen owes everything to the Commonwealth.' Republicanism thus stressed a morality of social cohesion and devotion to the common welfare, or res publica. Several of the states in 1776 -- Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia -- even adopted the name 'commonwealth' to express better their identification with the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries and their new dedication to the public good. ....