For what purpose were the American colonists fighting when they started the Revolutionary War? The answer to that question is not as simple as you think, and it had important consequences for what happened afterwards.
One obvious answer would be simply for self-determination. The key question here was nationality, not the oppressiveness of British rule. If you accepted that, due to distance and differences in ethnicity and religion, Americans had become a new and distinct nation, it followed logically that they needed to govern themselves in order to realize their full potential. Federalists generally accepted this formula.
On the other hand, some of the patriots framed the issue as a rejection of a despotic British central government. If you followed this formula, your ideas of what should happen thereafter revolved around the protection of state and local rights. Anti-federalists accepted this line of reasoning.
Creating a system of government that resembled Great Britain’s in many respects was not a problem for people like Hamilton whose primary objective was not to make radical changes to the system, but simply to run it themselves in the interests of Americans, not the British. The Constitution largely reflected their views. For someone like Patrick Henry, on the other hand, oppression from the system was the problem, and it was a horrible mistake to try to recreate it. Henry and his allies consequently supported the Articles of Confederation, and ferociously opposed the Constitution.
This division of opinion still runs through our politics today. I will discuss it at length in my next two posts on federalism.