I commend to you a moving essay by Britt Blaser at Escapable Logic.
I don't know if I agree that “At our nation's birth, most voters were smarter, tougher, better educated and more patriotic than you and me” — that's edging a little in the Straussian direction for my taste — but it's a fine, heartfelt essay about war, heroics, politics, and the next election nonetheless.
Of course most voters then were smarter, tougher, better educated arnd more patriotic than we are today. They were all white, well-to-do landowning gentry (who could therefore afford an expensive education and books) who knew what side their bread was buttered on (that the system they devised was in service to the), and they shat in unheated outhouses, and doing that even through one New England winter, will make anyone tough as nails.