In the course of the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, no one disputed that the people were sovereign, but how this sovereignty was to be embodied proved quite controversial. The post-Revolutionary generation faced the challenge of creating a republican form of government from an oppositional popular politics. Federalists responded by claiming for their Constitution, and for the national government it created, a monopoly on the legitimate representation of the people. They championed the official over the popular and invoked the idea of the nation to authorize this transfer of authority. It was a transfer that would not go unchallenged, and, as a result, the constitutional politics of the early republic repeatedly posed the question of whether popular sovereignty could survive the transformation of the demos into a nation.