There was always conflict in America, amongst it's own people. Loyalists argued against the Revolutionary War. People wanted to abolish slavery then, some didn't. The Whiskey Rebellion was a minor skirmish, but it showed how Americans could turn on each other at the drop of a hat. We were only a nation for 80 years before we had a civil war. It seems we were always combative within our own ranks. Your thoughts?
They were trying to build something. There is always going to be conflict when you are trying to build something. Everybody is not going to agree on how things should be in their country, just like today. I think that we have come a long way since then, but it not surprising that they fought so much in order to establish this "new world."
The United States is geographically gigantic and enormous, so with that alone I would expect that somebody would be disagreeing with somebody else about something just out of statistical probability. I simply can't think of any one dictator being able to command that much territory in an organized enough way that all its people would shut up. I think people have a tendency to fight one another, but I also believe that it would take a more devastating failure of economic infrastructure than America had even in its recession, perhaps combined with a more purist ideology to standards and applications that I can't even conceive, to turn those disagreements into wide-scale violence and hostility.
