Soon after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which formally concluded the Revolutionary War, leading Americans began to discuss among themselves how to create a more perfect union that would secure the blessings of liberty and avoid the dangers of democracy that Shays's Rebellion portended. Their aim in part was to create a government that would restrict the potential for misrule by the demagogue and the mob – or by the majorities in the state legislatures – and provide a local habitation for such words as “liberty,” which had, in their view, been corrupted by the British into an “airy nothing” and was now being misinterpreted by the American people. “The meaning of the word liberty has been contested,” declares Alexander Hamilton in 1784. Opposed to the disenfranchisement of ex-Tories sponsored by the New York state legislature, Hamilton protests, “The name liberty applied to such a government” that makes a man “the innocent victim of the prevailing faction” “would be a mockery of common sense.” He insists instead that the “true sense” of “liberty” must be “the enjoyment of the common privileges of subjects under the same government.” Others were no more sanguine that the “true sense” of liberty would prevail in the contests of the day. “It is really very curious to observe,” remarks Edward Rutledge in a letter to John Jay in 1786, “how the people of this world are made the dupes of a word.