How did the United States avoid (or recover from) post revolution corruption?

The answer is the legacy of the racist British Empire - my country's shame, which too many of my fellow countrymen still see as its pride.

The British Empire wasn't fundamentally different from other colonial empires. It supported and nourished public institutions in its colonies - for white people (i.e. its own colonists).

Individuals like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin probably existed in Ghana and other mostly nonwhite colonies, but where were the representative assemblies they could use to form their country? The British brutally kidnapped, murdered and enslaved the inhabitants of west Africa for hundreds of years. In 1764 Franklin became the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Do you think that at this time something like the Pennsylvania assembly could have come into existence in the land now called Ghana, in this environment of repression and murder? Would the British have permitted it to persist if it had, somehow, been conceived?

Even after the slave trade was abolished, Britain extracted every scrap of wealth that they could find in its colonies, and left them with nothing. You might have heard that Ghana was called the Gold Coast. They didn't call it that because they sent lots of gold there. The gold came from there to here.

I say this not to make the British Empire somehow exceptional, but to demonstrate that it wasn't. Every attack I've made on it could and should be made against the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French and any other colonial empire. Likewise, the United States was and is not exceptional. Former mostly-white colonies such as Canada and Austrialia have a great legacy from the British Empire... for white people, anyway. In Australia the indigenous population came >< to being exterminated.

You premise your question on the non-corruption of the US shortly after independence. This may be true in relation to its white citizens. Ask yourself, though, would its American Indian population at the time have seen the US as 'not corrupt'?

One reason that is often cited is the system of indirect rule used by the British. In the American colonies, the colonist were first of all, mostly from the UK. Americans have many similarities to the British even today, but there are cultural differences too. The American colonists were mostly allowed self-rule as long as they paid taxes to the king and traded only within the British Empire. (The economic system was mercantilism, so these trade arrangements with the British were exploitative.) The laws put in place in the US were thus appropriate to the needs and will of its people. In Ghana, or the "British Gold Coast," most people were native and only a few British people lived there to administer the colony. These administrators wrote the laws of Ghana and put them in place. The British appointed leaders for the people. These weren't the best leaders for the people, but who were the easiest for the British to manipulate. In many instances, the British are known for bribing tribal leaders to make indirect rule more effective and more peaceful. This most likely occurred in Ghana and contributed to problems of corruption after independence.

The USA has a complicated history that others have already highlighted. I will focus on the Ghanaian side of things.

A clue to Ghana's (and most African countries') post independence problems is none other than Kwame Nkurumah. Look up Thomas Sankara too.

Most of Africa's elite are corrupted by past colonial powers and those who resist are killed in cold blood. Their choices are either to get in line or perish.

The French are some of the worst at this as they rely heavily on the CFA grants from 14 African countries to support their (French) economy. African leaders that resisted this arrangement were summarily executed or removed by French supported opposition.

More recent examples are Gbabo in Ivory Coast and Gaddafi in Libya.

To have widespread corruption you need to have a big state so that you have a lot of politicians and bureaucrats that can be corrupt, or you have to have valuable natural resources, so there is a big incentive for corruption.

The newly created USA did not have any of these. Hence there was not really that many people to corrupt, nor that much reason to be corrupted.

What evidence leads you to believe that the post-independence United States was not corrupt:

• Senators were appointed/elected by state legislatures until adoption of the 17th Amendment in 1913.
• In the opinion of James Madison, the Senate was intentionally established to protect and preserve the rights of landowners (perhaps, read slave-owners) from the oppression of the majority:

Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability."

• The Tammany Hall political machine and its kin elsewhere in the country dominated the electoral results across the United States through at least its first 150 years.
• Most states had property restrictions on the right to vote into the 1820's. The 14th Amendment in 1868 laid the groundwork for lifting these by penalizing states that restricted adult male sufferage, but only the and the 15th Amendment in 1870 granted suffrage to adult males of any race and skin colour, though the Southern states flagrantly violated the spirit of this for another 95 years.

It is important to remember that the American Revolution was the struggle of wealthy land-owning white men on one continent to preserve their rights, freedoms and privileges from oppression by other wealthy land-owning white men on island thousands of miles away. Much rhetoric was published to inspire less affluent white men, and their wives children and slaves, to care about this issue, but it would do a great disservice to history to imagine that the Revolution was, at the time, about rights and privileges of those less affluent souls. Only over time, as the rhetoric of the Revolution slowly overcame the de facto status quo, did the United States become the country that we now know.

Update - Secret Ballot:
This was not generally in place for more than 100 years after Independence, in 1884, with remnants lasting even later.

Update #2:
Note that prior to the secret ballot, electoral corruption was as easy as going to the nearest bar with a wad of cash, ad blatantly buying votes with rounds of drinks. This practice was widespread.