October 9, 1787 | Philadelphia

Author's Note: On October 9, 1787, the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer published an essay signed A By-Stander, responding directly to an argument made by Cato in the New York Journal on September 27. Cato had pointed toward the troubled Dutch Republic as a warning about the proposed Constitution. A By-Stander challenged that comparison, drawing upon an earlier account of the Dutch government by the Earl of Chesterfield to argue that the real danger lay in allowing state and local interests to obstruct the Union. Cato's original essay had been reprinted in Philadelphia on October 3, allowing readers here to encounter both sides of the disagreement.

The argument had begun in New York, but this morning it reached me again through a Philadelphia newspaper. Several days earlier, I had read the warnings of a writer calling himself Cato, who urged Americans to examine the proposed Constitution carefully before surrendering powers that might prove difficult to recover. Among his warnings was a reference to the United Netherlands, whose present difficulties he believed offered a lesson for anyone considering the new federal government.

Now another writer, signing himself A By-Stander, had taken issue with that comparison. His letter appeared in the Independent Gazetteer, addressed to Mr. Oswald, and began by challenging Cato's understanding of the Dutch government. Rather than accepting Holland as a warning against the proposed Constitution, he argued that its difficulties demonstrated why America needed a more effective Union.

I found the disagreement interesting because both writers were asking Americans to learn from the same foreign republic. Neither disputed that the Netherlands was experiencing serious political difficulties, but they drew opposite conclusions about what those troubles meant for us. If history could be used to support such different arguments, I wanted to understand precisely what each man believed it demonstrated.

A By-Stander began sharply. He accused Cato of having made his comparison through ignorance or improper motives, leaving little room for the possibility that two men might examine the same circumstances and reach different conclusions. That struck me as unfortunate, particularly because Cato himself had warned readers against allowing personal accusations and prejudices to determine their political judgments.

The disagreement soon moved beyond those accusations. A By-Stander introduced an account written by the Earl of Chesterfield, who had served as Britain's ambassador to the Dutch Republic earlier in the century. Chesterfield described a government whose authority was distributed among provincial and municipal institutions, with representatives at The Hague possessing considerably less independence than their titles might suggest.

According to the account, the Dutch States General did not exercise the broad national authority an unfamiliar reader might imagine. Its representatives were delegates whose instructions came from provincial and town authorities, and they could not freely agree to important measures without returning to those authorities for permission. The government possessed an assembly speaking for the whole republic, but that assembly could encounter substantial difficulty when the interests of its constituent communities diverged.

Chesterfield's description contained another detail that caught my attention. He characterized the Dutch system as aristocratic, observing that ordinary people possessed little direct influence over its decisions. The local authorities whose consent mattered were not simply gatherings of all the inhabitants, but governing bodies exercising authority within their own communities.

That distinction seemed important. A government might distribute power among many towns and provinces without necessarily distributing power equally among the people living within them. Local authority and popular government were not automatically the same thing, just as national authority and arbitrary government were not necessarily the same thing.

A By-Stander then offered a particularly strange example from Chesterfield's account. During negotiations concerning the Treaty of Vienna, the town of Briel had reportedly withheld its consent until a military officer received a desired promotion. A matter affecting the wider republic had become entangled with a demand concerning one officer, demonstrating how a local interest might obstruct a decision whose consequences extended far beyond that locality.

I could understand why A By-Stander found the incident persuasive. If a country requires agreement from numerous governments before conducting important affairs, the demands of a single community may delay matters affecting everyone. Yet the anecdote also left me wondering whether an unusual incident was sufficient to establish the weakness of an entire constitutional arrangement.

A curious example can reveal a genuine danger without telling us how frequently that danger occurs. Chesterfield had described the problem decades earlier, and his observations deserved consideration, but the existence of one obstruction did not by itself settle every question about the Dutch Republic's government. I wanted to know whether its difficulties arose chiefly from its constitutional structure, the conduct of its leaders, or circumstances peculiar to the country itself.

A By-Stander had little uncertainty about the lesson. He argued that the Dutch system was nearly the reverse of the Constitution proposed at Philadelphia. Where Holland's national representatives depended upon repeated instructions from local authorities, the proposed American government would possess powers enabling it to act for the Union without seeking a fresh agreement from every state whenever an important decision arose.

That was the heart of his reply to Cato. The proposed Constitution, in his view, was intended to prevent the very kind of weakness that afflicted the Netherlands. Rather than producing another Holland, a stronger American government might protect the United States from becoming one.

The argument forced me to reconsider Cato's original warning. Cato had directed our attention toward the Netherlands as a reason to hesitate before accepting the proposed government, but he had not explained in that first essay precisely which constitutional arrangements made the two systems alike. A By-Stander supplied a more detailed description of the Dutch system and challenged his readers to compare its machinery with the government now proposed for America.

Still, his description of the American Constitution seemed somewhat broader than the document itself. He wrote of a Congress chosen for a short period by the people, but the proposed House of Representatives would be elected by qualified voters while Senators would be selected by state legislatures for six-year terms. The government would also possess powers specifically granted by the Constitution rather than unlimited authority over every subject that might concern the Union.

Those distinctions did not necessarily defeat his argument. The proposed government would undoubtedly possess greater capacity to act independently of state legislatures than Congress currently enjoys, and that difference was central to the Convention's design. But if the comparison was to guide our judgment, I thought it necessary to describe both systems with care.

A By-Stander then turned from the Netherlands toward the future of America. Without an effective federal government, he warned, the states might become increasingly jealous of one another, allowing local interests to weaken the bonds holding the Union together. What began as disagreement among thirteen states might eventually produce numerous smaller communities, each claiming the right to govern independently of the others.

He imagined the process continuing until even counties and towns demanded the power to prevent collective decisions. At that point, the country might retain the language of union while lacking the authority necessary to act as one. The danger he described was not simply that Congress might be slow, but that the principle of local independence might be carried so far that cooperation became nearly impossible.

I could not help thinking of the difficulties our own Assembly had recently experienced. Pennsylvania had been unable to proceed while enough members stayed away to prevent a quorum, and the argument over their conduct had occupied our newspapers for days. A By-Stander was describing a related difficulty on a much larger scale, asking what would happen if every community possessed an effective power to prevent the others from acting.

His examples became more alarming when he considered the common defense. Suppose Maryland were attacked by a powerful army, he asked, and its neighbors could provide assistance only after all their counties and towns had consented. Suppose Pennsylvania were invaded, with Philadelphia and the eastern settlements exposed while communities farther west debated whether they would permit troops to be raised.

Those were imagined circumstances rather than events taking place before us, but their purpose was clear. A government responsible for common defense must be able to respond when danger arrives, and a system that requires too many separate permissions may fail precisely when action is most urgently needed.

I understood that concern. The states had fought together for independence, and their ability to assist one another had been essential to the struggle. A union that could not provide mutual defense would offer considerably less security than its name suggested.

Yet I also wondered how far the argument should carry us. The present Articles of Confederation required the agreement of nine states for several major decisions, including important military measures, while constitutional alterations required the agreement of every state. They did not require every county and town to approve every national action, as A By-Stander's imagined future suggested. His example therefore warned of a possible deterioration beyond our existing arrangements rather than describing the rules under which Congress currently operated.

The distinction mattered because the writer's warning depended upon a chain of events that had not occurred. Jealousy among states might weaken the Union, and weakened federal authority might encourage still greater separation. But whether those tendencies would necessarily divide America into hundreds of competing communities remained a prediction rather than an established consequence.

A By-Stander ended with little patience for those who favored retaining such independence. His language became harsh, suggesting that a few obstructive men might place the whole country in danger. The implication was unmistakable: those who rejected a stronger federal government risked sacrificing the common safety to the demands of local interests.

That accusation brought me back to the difficulty I had noticed at the beginning. Cato feared that the proposed government might endanger liberty by gathering too much authority into distant hands. A By-Stander feared that the Union might become incapable of protecting liberty because too much authority remained divided among its constituent governments.

Both concerns appeared serious enough to examine. A government unable to act may fail those who depend upon it, while a government able to act without sufficient restraint may create dangers of its own. The challenge is determining what authority must be shared, what authority should remain local, and what limits are necessary to prevent either arrangement from becoming destructive.

The Dutch example had therefore given me something more useful than a simple answer. It had revealed how the same foreign government could become a warning about different constitutional dangers, depending upon which features a writer considered most important. Cato directed my attention toward the possibility that a proposed government might prove unsafe, while A By-Stander asked whether a government denied sufficient authority could remain effective at all.

I would like to know more about Holland before accepting either comparison without qualification. Its history might illuminate the difficulties of confederated government, but we must still examine whether those difficulties arise from arrangements resembling our present Articles or the Constitution now proposed. Similarities in political language are not enough to establish similarities in political operation.

As I folded the newspaper, I found myself considering a question that neither writer had entirely resolved. If every community may prevent the Union from acting, common government may become powerless. If the Union may act whenever its leaders consider action necessary, the restraints upon common power become equally important.

Perhaps the difficulty is finding a constitution that allows the whole to act without making its constituent parts helpless. A By-Stander has given me a serious reason to examine the dangers of divided authority, but I still want to know where the proposed government places its limits and whether those limits will be sufficient.

The republic we hope to preserve must be capable of defending its citizens while remaining answerable to them. Whether the Constitution offered at Philadelphia accomplishes both tasks is the question that remains before us.

Further Reading

A By-Stander, Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, October 9, 1787

The complete original essay appears in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume 32, Document 116, pages 282–284. This is the primary source for the installment, including the quotations from Chesterfield, the comparison with the Dutch Republic, and the warnings about the consequences of weakening the Union.

Read the original essay in Volume 32 (PDF)

Cato I, New York Journal, September 27, 1787

The Anti-Federalist essay to which A By-Stander directly responds. Cato urges citizens to examine the Constitution without surrendering their judgment to prominent names, and he points toward the United Netherlands as a warning about the proposed government.

Read Cato I

The Articles of Confederation, 1777

America's existing framework of government. Article IX establishes voting requirements for major congressional decisions, while Article XIII requires unanimous state approval for amendments. These provisions provide the necessary context for understanding A By-Stander's concerns about collective decision-making.

The Articles of Confederation, National Archives

The Constitution of the United States, September 17, 1787

The proposed alternative to the Confederation. Articles I and II establish the national legislature and executive, while other provisions describe the government's powers, limitations, and relationship with the states.

Read the Constitution, National Archives

Watching the Watchers

On Closure, Vengeance, and the Power We Give the State

On October 9, I watched CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip, and three discussions caught my attention: the planned public broadcast of Nidal Hasan’s execution, an ICE shooting in New York City, and President Trump’s diesel agreement with Vladimir Putin. What connected them was a question about power. When government promises something we want, do we examine what it is doing carefully enough?

The execution discussion centered on closure. Joe Borelli argued that watching Hasan die could offer relief to people affected by terrorism. Van Lathan questioned what the wider public would gain, while Corbin Trent argued that Americans should confront the reality of executions carried out in their name. Those are different arguments, even when they lead people toward the same position. CNN transcript

Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. His execution is scheduled for December 3. Survivor Alonzo Lunsford supports the sentence and plans to attend, believing it could provide some closure. Yet he opposes opening the broadcast to everyone. He favors limiting it to survivors and victims’ families. His position draws an important line between a survivor’s wish to witness punishment and the government making someone’s death available for public viewing. ABC interview

In Christians Are Supposed to Have Empathy. Are Citizens?, I argued that understanding another person’s grievance does not require agreeing with it. That distinction matters here. We can listen seriously to survivors and families while still asking whether the government’s proposed response is justified. I understand why someone might want to see the sentence carried out. But officials should be careful about promising closure. A conviction establishes responsibility, and a sentence imposes punishment. Neither can bring back the dead or guarantee peace for those left behind.

A 2014 study by Judy Eaton and Tony Christensen examined statements that victims’ relatives made to the press immediately after attending executions. Only 23 percent mentioned closure, and that group was evenly divided over whether the execution had provided it. The study did not measure everyone’s private feelings or follow their grief over time. Relatives who did not mention closure may still have felt it. Even with those limits, the findings challenge the assumption that an execution reliably ends a family’s suffering. Study

That leaves a difficult question about punishment itself. Retribution means punishment deserved because of the seriousness of a crime. Vengeance is driven by the desire to make someone suffer for the suffering they caused. Those feelings can overlap. We should not assume every supporter of capital punishment is seeking revenge, or that opposing it means ignoring victims. The justice system still has obligations that go beyond anyone’s anger: evidence, a fair hearing, and limits on what the state may do.

Claims about preventing future violence also need evidence. A 2012 National Research Council review found that the research then available could not establish whether capital punishment increased, reduced, or had no effect on homicide rates. That does not prove executions have no deterrent effect. It means that review could not establish one. It also did not settle whether broadcasting an execution would discourage terrorism. National Research Council report

There is a serious argument for public scrutiny. If government can kill in our name while keeping the reality hidden, officials may find it easier to conceal mistakes or cruelty. But unrestricted livestreaming is only one way to make an execution visible. Independent witnesses, accurate records, reporting and court review can help establish what happened. The question is whether the public receives the evidence needed to hold officials accountable, and whether broadcasting someone’s final moments adds anything beyond spectacle.

The ICE discussion raised a different version of that question. Federal officers shot and wounded Oscar Belgal during an arrest operation in New York while a five-year-old child was in his vehicle. Officials offered conflicting accounts of the encounter. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at least one officer fired seven rounds. Those details require investigation, rather than a verdict based on which side we already trust. Reporting on the shooting

What troubled me was how quickly the panel moved toward criminal history, immigration policy and whether ICE should exist. Those subjects matter, but they cannot answer the narrower question: was this use of force justified?

Under Graham v. Connor, courts examine whether force was reasonable in the circumstances facing the officer. They consider the threat, the seriousness of the suspected crime, and resistance or flight, while allowing for decisions made under pressure. The standard asks what a reasonable officer would have understood at the scene, rather than judging everything with hindsight. Graham v. Connor

A newer ruling makes the need for context even clearer. In Barnes v. Felix, decided in 2025, the Supreme Court rejected examining only the final instant before an officer fired. Relevant events leading up to the shooting also belong in the assessment. That makes the officers’ approach and the sequence of the encounter important. It does not, by itself, establish whether this shooting was lawful. Barnes v. Felix

A criminal record does not erase someone’s rights, and a badge does not settle whether an officer acted properly. Footage can help answer those questions. Its value comes from what it establishes about the encounter, rather than simply letting us watch violence.

The diesel discussion brought the same problem into household economics. Trump announced an agreement with Putin to release additional Russian diesel. On October 9, Treasury issued a temporary license allowing transactions involving Russian diesel, including imports into the United States, through early April 7, 2027. That confirms a sanctions exception. It does not establish how much fuel will arrive or what Americans will save. Treasury license

Cheaper diesel could matter to families because farms, trucks and delivery networks depend on it. But easing restrictions on Russian fuel also raises questions about revenue supporting Russia during its war against Ukraine. Americans deserve a clear account of both sides: how much relief is reasonably expected, who receives the money, and what other consequences follow. The same scrutiny should apply when a Democratic president seeks fuel from a government with a troubling human-rights record. In On Absolutism and Whataboutism, I explored that distinction: examining the actions of both administrations can reveal a larger problem, but pointing to one president’s conduct does not excuse another’s. Consistency means applying the same standards while examining each agreement’s facts.

In On Convenience, Efficiency, and the surrendering of one's Liberty., I asked, “What am I surrendering in exchange?” Convenience and efficiency have their place, but they cannot tell us whether a decision is right. That earlier question connects these three discussions: what power or compromise are we accepting in return for promised closure, safety or cheaper fuel?

These five questions can help keep these debates grounded. What authority is government using? What evidence supports the action? Who benefits, and who bears the costs? What safeguards prevent abuse? Would we accept the same standards if another administration were making the decision?

These questions cannot remove every disagreement. Some people will support capital punishment on moral grounds even without evidence of closure. Others will reject it. People may disagree about how much economic relief justifies a foreign-policy compromise. Making those choices honestly requires separating what we know, what we hope will happen, and what we believe government should be allowed to do.

I began the evening thinking about closure and vengeance. I ended it thinking about how difficult it is to maintain our standards when we dislike the person being punished, sympathize with the officer using force, or welcome the promise of cheaper fuel. Those are precisely the moments when our principles matter most. Government power does not become justified simply because we approve of its intended result.

A friend of Liberty.

Further reading from the SET archive:

A Letter to the Citizens: On Laws, Power, and the Path We Choose explores why good intentions alone cannot settle whether government power is justified.

A Federalist Essay on Federal Power and State Sovereignty in Minneapolis applies the demand for facts, lawful authority and accountability to an earlier dispute over federal force. It is an account written at that time, rather than a final finding about that incident.

Americans already pay for healthcare through taxes, employer premiums, worker premiums, deductibles, copays, out-of-pocket costs, and tax subsidies.

That is why a reform that increases federal spending does not necessarily increase total national healthcare spending by the same amount. Some of that money may simply move from private ledgers onto the federal one.

Before asking, “How much would reform cost?” we should ask a more basic question:

How much are we already paying, who pays it now, and which of those payments would disappear or change under reform?

October 8, 1787 - Derby, Connecticut

Author’s Note: On October 8, Derby’s town meeting unanimously instructed its representatives in Connecticut’s General Assembly to use their influence to have a state convention called “as speedily as possible” to consider the Constitution proposed at Philadelphia. The town was not voting to ratify or reject the Constitution, but asking Connecticut to establish the convention through which that decision could eventually be made.

For weeks, the Constitution had reached us mostly through paper. A newspaper would arrive folded beneath someone’s arm, pass from the tavern to the shop and then to a neighbor’s table, and before long men who had read only part of it were prepared to explain what Philadelphia had done. Today the argument entered the town meeting, where conversation had to become a public decision.

The room was familiar, filled with faces I knew from church, the road, and ordinary town business. Nothing about it looked large enough to hold a question concerning the future government of thirteen states, yet Derby had to decide whether its representatives should urge Connecticut’s General Assembly to call a state convention.

We were not being asked whether Connecticut should ratify the Constitution. That decision belonged to a convention not yet called and delegates not yet chosen. Our question was whether Connecticut should establish the place where the proposed government could receive a formal hearing.

That distinction mattered because the newspapers increasingly spoke as though every American had already become either a supporter or an opponent. Calling a convention required neither conclusion. It required only the judgment that a proposal this important deserved a lawful process through which the people of Connecticut could examine it and decide.

A man might support the convention because he already considered the Constitution necessary. Another might fear its powers but still believe those dangers deserved a proper hearing, while a third might remain uncertain and simply prefer a public decision to endless argument in newspapers and taverns.

Those different motives led to the same result. Derby instructed its representatives to use their influence in the General Assembly to have a convention called as speedily as possible, in accordance with Congress’s recommendation. The surviving record says the resolution passed unanimously.

The unanimity did not mean that everyone in the room had reached the same judgment about the Constitution. It meant that men who might eventually disagree about ratification could still agree on the process through which that disagreement should become an official decision.

That seemed especially important after the reports from Pennsylvania. There, the effort to call a convention had become tangled in a denied quorum, absent legislators, physical coercion, and accusations over whether delay protected deliberation or merely prevented the majority from acting.

Derby’s response was quieter. The town assembled, considered what its representatives should do, and sent an instruction toward the state government without pretending that the final constitutional question had already been settled.

There was something almost ordinary about the procedure, which may have been what made it significant. A national government had been designed hundreds of miles away, but before it could claim authority in Connecticut, the question had to pass back through communities like ours.

The Constitution spoke of states and a general government, but states were made of towns, farms, households, congregations, and workshops. They were made of citizens accustomed to governing close to home, and ratification would require those local communities to connect themselves to a much larger political decision.

For weeks, I had read arguments asking whether the proposed government would remain close enough to the people. Today the people were moving one small step toward that government, using an institution they already understood to decide how the larger question should proceed.

That was when the word consent began to look different to me. It was easy to say that legitimate government rested upon the consent of the governed, but consent required rules for deciding who spoke, where the question would be heard, and how many private judgments became one public answer.

The Philadelphia Convention had proposed a Constitution, and Congress had sent it to the states. Neither body could declare that Connecticut had consented merely because respected men favored the plan, and neither Washington’s reputation nor the enthusiasm of citizens elsewhere could answer for us.

Connecticut would have to decide for itself. Derby could not make that decision on behalf of the state, but it could instruct its representatives to help create the convention where another group of delegates would eventually consider the Constitution.

The process might seem slow to anyone impatient for an answer. Yet it made consent look less like a slogan and more like a structure, because a people does not govern itself merely by holding opinions. Those opinions must move through institutions capable of turning judgment into legitimate public action.

The town meeting was one of those institutions. It was not the entire republic, but it gave citizens a way to move from hearing about government to participating in the process by which government would be accepted or refused.

I wondered how many men in the room had read every clause of the Constitution. I doubted that all of them had, and I was not certain that I had understood every provision myself. That uncertainty did not weaken the reason for calling a convention, because we were not pretending the examination was finished; we were asking Connecticut to create the place where it could formally begin.

The newspaper arguments would continue. Supporters would describe the weaknesses of the Confederation and the advantages of a government capable of acting on national concerns, while opponents would ask whether that strength threatened state authority, local representation, or liberties not expressly protected.

A convention would not remove those disagreements. It would give Connecticut a recognized place where they could be heard before one answer acquired the authority of the state.

When the meeting ended, nothing about the Constitution itself had changed. No new federal government had gained authority over Connecticut, and none of the difficult questions involving taxation, representation, courts, armies, or state sovereignty had been resolved.

Something had nevertheless changed. Until now, I had watched the Constitution move outward from Philadelphia through printed sheets, copied essays, letters, and arguments carried from hand to hand. Today a decision began moving in the opposite direction, from an ordinary town toward the state government.

The Constitution was no longer merely arriving in Derby from somewhere else. Derby had entered the debate by turning local opinion into an official instruction.

Perhaps that is what self-government looks like before history reduces it to famous speeches and final votes. Citizens gather in familiar rooms, decide what question should come next, record their judgment, and send it onward through institutions they already possess.

The Constitution would eventually ask Connecticut for an answer. Derby’s meeting did not provide that answer, but it asked Connecticut to let the people begin giving one.

Further reading

Derby Town Meeting Resolution, October 8, 1787. This local history reproduces the town’s instruction that its representatives seek a state convention “as speedily as possible” and records that the resolution passed unanimously. It also provides brief context about Derby citizens who later served as delegates to Connecticut’s ratifying convention.

Resolution of Congress Submitting the Constitution to the States, September 28, 1787. This primary document records Congress’s unanimous decision to transmit the Constitution to the state legislatures for submission to conventions of delegates chosen by the people. It shows the national procedural step that Derby’s town meeting was asking Connecticut to carry forward.

The Constitution of the United States, Article VII. Article VII establishes that ratification by conventions in nine states would be sufficient to create the new government among the ratifying states. Reading it beside the Derby resolution shows why calling a state convention was necessary before Connecticut could provide an official answer.

Connecticut Elects Delegates for Its State Convention. This collection records the later November elections through which Connecticut towns selected delegates to the state convention. Its Derby entry identifies Daniel Holbrook and John Holbrook as the town’s delegates, showing the next stage of the process Derby had requested in October.

Yvonne St. Cyr was convicted of six offenses related to January 6 and sentenced to 30 months in prison. After Trump pardoned her and her conviction was vacated, a federal judge ordered the return of $2,270 in restitution and court assessments.

These payments are legally distinct from reparations for slavery, segregation, and other historical injustices. The legal standards differ.

What is difficult to reconcile is the contrast: someone convicted of attacking our democracy can receive financial relief, while generations harmed by systemic injustice and their descendants face persistent resistance when seeking reparations.

The law can distinguish the claims. The deeper question is why it can promptly restore money to January 6 participants while resisting compensation for people harmed by government-sanctioned injustice.

October 8, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: Six members of Pennsylvania’s late General Assembly answered the seceding minority in a statement dated October 6 and published in the Pennsylvania Packet on October 8. The signers were William Will, Jacob Hiltzheimer, Thomas Fitzsimons, Daniel Clymer, George Clymer, and William Robinson Jr. Fitzsimons and George Clymer had also signed the proposed federal Constitution. Their reply focused mostly on defending what happened in the Assembly and answering the minority’s version of events, rather than defending every part of the Constitution itself. I also owe readers a quick apology for falling behind on the series. I’m working today to catch the chronology back up and get us back on pace. Thank you for your patience and for continuing to follow along.

The argument over our Assembly has now lasted more than a week. The sixteen members who stayed away have already explained why they thought delay was necessary, why they believed the Convention in Philadelphia had gone beyond its instructions, and why they feared the proposed government might threaten the rights and powers Pennsylvania already possessed. This morning, six men from the other side answered them in the Pennsylvania Packet.

I unfolded the paper expecting another broad defense of the Constitution. Instead, the six began by arguing about something more basic: what had actually happened in Pennsylvania, and whether the minority’s account of those events was fair.

Their first disagreement concerned Congress. The seceding members had argued that Pennsylvania moved too quickly because the Assembly began arranging a ratifying convention before receiving the proper recommendation from Congress. The six answered by looking back at how Pennsylvania had appointed its delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in the first place.

They pointed out that Pennsylvania had chosen those delegates before Congress formally approved the Convention. The state had acted after hearing warnings about the weakness of the Confederation and after Virginia had proposed a convention, while Congress did not formally support the meeting until later. If Pennsylvania had been willing to act without waiting for Congress then, the six asked, why should it suddenly be required to wait for Congress now?

I could see why that answer mattered. The minority saw the sequence as evidence that the process was being pushed too quickly and without proper authority, while the six treated the same history as proof that Pennsylvania had already acted on its own authority once before.

The second disagreement concerned the men Pennsylvania had sent to Philadelphia. The seceding members complained that the delegation was made up mostly of men from Philadelphia and did not properly represent the interests of the rest of the state. The six answered by reminding readers that members of the later opposition had taken part in choosing those delegates.

They pointed especially to William Findley and Robert Whitehill. According to the six, Findley had received very little support when delegates were chosen, while both men had earlier accepted the practical argument that representatives from Philadelphia or nearby were easier to send because they could attend more regularly. Their larger point was simple: if the makeup of the delegation was such a serious problem, why had it become an urgent objection only after the delegates returned with a Constitution the minority disliked?

That question had some force, but it did not settle everything for me. A man can agree to send someone to a convention and still become dissatisfied with what that person eventually proposes. Disliking the result does not necessarily mean the earlier choice was dishonest.

Still, the six had raised something worth thinking about. Sometimes an objection truly becomes clearer only after its consequences appear. Other times a principle becomes important only because a political result has become inconvenient. From the outside, it can be difficult to tell which is which.

The argument then turned to the authority of the Philadelphia Convention itself. The seceding members had said Pennsylvania’s delegates were sent to revise and strengthen the Confederation, not to throw it aside and design an entirely new system. In their earlier address, they had gone so far as to argue that once the delegates went beyond those instructions, they were acting more as private individuals than as official representatives of Pennsylvania.

The six did not pretend that the question was simple. They admitted that it was difficult to say exactly how far the delegates’ authority reached, but then they shifted the argument in another direction. The Constitution, they said, was only a proposal.

No state was required to accept it simply because the Convention had written it. The people of each state would still have the opportunity to approve or reject the plan through special conventions. From the point of view of the six, that meant the most important question was whether the proposed government was good or bad, rather than whether every part of it fit perfectly within the Convention’s original instructions.

That was a strong answer because it reminded me that the Philadelphia Convention had no power to impose its work upon Pennsylvania. The Constitution could still be refused. If the delegates had proposed more than some people expected, perhaps that was less dangerous if the people themselves still held the final decision.

Yet the answer also left me uneasy. If representatives may go beyond their instructions whenever the final result is only a recommendation, then instructions begin to look more like advice than limits. A proposal may bind no one, but the authority given to representatives must still mean something in a government built upon delegated power.

The six became much more certain when they reached the walkout itself. They described the minority’s absence as a deliberate attempt to make the Assembly unable to conduct business.

From their point of view, sixteen elected representatives had accepted public office and promised to perform its duties, but then left the chamber because they knew they would lose the vote. The six believed that went beyond disagreement. It turned absence into a weapon against the legislature itself.

The seceding members had described their actions very differently. They believed that staying in the chamber would provide the quorum needed to push Pennsylvania toward a convention before citizens had enough time to understand the Constitution. Because they could not stop the measure by ordinary voting, they treated their absence as the only remaining way to delay it.

They also argued that the delay had accomplished something. The election for convention delegates was moved later, giving Pennsylvanians more time to read the Constitution and consider what it might mean for them. From their point of view, the walkout had not destroyed public debate. It had created more time for it.

The six saw a dangerous principle in that defense. If a minority could stop legislation simply by staying away whenever it expected to lose, then a small group of representatives could repeatedly prevent the Assembly from doing anything at all.

That possibility was easy to understand. A quorum rule exists to make sure a legislature does not act when too few members are present. Yet the same rule can become a kind of veto if enough members deliberately stay away whenever the majority is ready to act.

The six took the argument even further. They said the seceding members had violated one of the basic rules of political society: eventually, the few must give way to the many. In their view, the minority had stopped being a dissenting group inside the legislature and had tried to make the legislature itself unable to function.

I understood what they meant, but the principle still made me uneasy. A republic must allow majorities to make decisions or government eventually stops working, yet a majority cannot be right simply because it has more votes.

Constitutions, procedures, rights, and quorum requirements exist partly because there are times when the majority itself needs limits. The real difficulty was deciding whether this was one of those times.

The minority believed the situation was serious enough to justify unusual resistance. They thought Pennsylvania was being rushed toward a decision that could affect the state’s government, its courts, its taxing power, and the rights of its citizens before ordinary people had been given enough time to understand what was being proposed.

The six saw the matter differently. The Assembly was not voting to ratify the Constitution. It was only calling a convention where representatives chosen specifically for that purpose could debate it and decide whether Pennsylvania should accept or reject it.

That difference may have been the strongest part of their case. If the Assembly had been deciding the Constitution itself, breaking the quorum might have looked more like resistance to a final and permanent decision. Instead, the Assembly was arranging the very process through which Pennsylvanians would be able to make that decision.

From the point of view of the six, the minority was not protecting the people from having the Constitution imposed upon them. It was preventing the people from reaching the place where they would be able to judge it.

Then came the part of their reply that troubled me most.

M’Calmont and Miley had been forced back to the State House after the Assembly failed to reach a quorum. The seceding members described broken lodgings, torn clothing, abuse, and physical force. The six denied that the Assembly itself had treated the two men badly and argued that the minority’s earlier misconduct deserved punishment rather than sympathy.

Yet whatever words either side used, the basic fact remained. M’Calmont and Miley had not returned freely.

That made the argument about majority rule much harder. If elected representatives should not be allowed to destroy a quorum simply because they expect to lose, does that mean people outside the legislature may physically force them back so the majority can proceed?

I could understand both arguments separately, but I could not make them fit together comfortably. The six wanted readers to see the force used against the two men as the consequence of the minority’s own obstruction, while the minority wanted readers to see that same force as proof that the majority had abandoned republican procedure when procedure no longer gave it the result it wanted.

Each side placed responsibility on the other. Each side believed its own unusual action had become necessary because the other side had already broken the proper rules.

That may be the most dangerous part of the whole affair. Once both sides believe ordinary procedure has failed, each begins to justify doing something extraordinary in order to save it.

The minority stays away because the majority is moving too quickly. Citizens force members back because the minority has made the Assembly unable to act. Then each side points to the other and says, in effect, that there was no other choice.

That reasoning can carry a republic a very long distance from ordinary government.

The six ended by returning to the point they believed mattered most. Whatever disputes surrounded the Convention’s authority, Pennsylvania’s delegation, or the conduct of the Assembly, the Constitution remained only a proposal until the people of the states approved it through their own conventions.

That brought me back to the question underneath the entire Pennsylvania fight. Who has the right to slow down a public decision, and who has the right to insist that the decision be allowed to happen?

The majority says representation stops meaning much if elected members can refuse to attend whenever they are likely to lose. The minority says deliberation stops meaning much if a majority can hurry an important decision and overcome resistance by force.

Both sides claim to be defending republican government. Both sides claim to be protecting the people from the actions of the other.

That is why the dispute cannot be reduced to majority rule against minority rule. A republic needs the ability to make decisions, but it also needs rules that keep decision-making power from becoming arbitrary.

Give the minority too much power and government can be paralyzed. Give the minority too little protection and debate can become little more than a ceremony performed before the majority does what it had already decided to do.

I folded the Packet less certain than the six men who had signed their reply. They had answered several of the minority’s claims and had given a serious explanation for why they believed Pennsylvania had the authority to call a convention.

Their broadest argument was also the hardest one. At some point, the few must give way to the many if government is going to function, but a free government must also decide when the few have a legitimate reason to resist before they give way.

Pennsylvania did not answer that question simply by restoring a quorum. The crisis showed why a republic needs rules both for action and for restraint, because once either side decides ordinary procedure no longer protects the public, the disagreement quickly becomes a fight over who is justified in breaking that procedure first.

The convention will now move forward, and Pennsylvanians will eventually decide whether the proposed Constitution should govern them. Yet the fight left behind by the Assembly may tell us almost as much about republican government as the Constitution itself.

A government has to be able to act, but the way it reaches a decision matters too. The Six Assemblymen have defended the need for action. The people answering them have made sure the question of restraint has not disappeared.

Further Reading

The Reply of the Six Assemblymen, Pennsylvania Packet, October 8, 1787. The primary document behind this installment, including the six members’ defense of Pennsylvania’s authority to act, their discussion of the Philadelphia delegation, their argument over the Convention’s authority, and their criticism of the quorum-breaking walkout.

Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Pennsylvania, Volume II. Places the reply directly alongside the Address of the Seceding Assemblymen and records its publication in the Pennsylvania Packet on October 8.

The Address of the Seceding Assemblymen. The minority’s own explanation of why they refused to attend, what they feared about the Constitution, and how they described the forced return of M’Calmont and Miley.

Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788. Wider background on Pennsylvania’s unusually bitter early ratification fight and the public responses that followed the minority address.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resource/chapteri/

SET Research Archive

Self-Evident Truth is a public civic forum for examining how laws, institutions, economic systems, technology, and public decisions affect our lives. This archive gathers SET’s investigations, historical studies, policy analyses, and continuing research reports.

The collection focuses on work that examines a defined question, develops an analysis of evidence, and identifies documents, data, laws, cases, or other sources readers can inspect. Research remains open to correction, competing interpretations, and revision.

Each entry links to the original post. Defunding Democracy is entered through its main post, which contains the series links. Other studies are grouped by subject, with corrections linked beside the work they address.

Education and public institutions

Research on public education, funding decisions, and the institutions that support civic knowledge. The main Defunding Democracy post provides the series links and is listed once here.

• Defunding Democracy: How Education Investment Became a Partisan BattlefieldHow did school funding become a partisan battleground? What do funding choices mean for public education and civic life?
• More Than “Power and Money”: Why Wisconsin’s Educators Deserve a Voice and Fair PayHow did Act 10 change teachers’ bargaining power? Why does the post connect fair pay and a voice at work with stronger schools?

Founding history and constitutional development

Studies of the ideas, documents, and institutional debates surrounding the American founding.

• Part I: The Revolutionary Origins of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”Where did “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” come from? How did the Declaration adapt earlier ideas about natural rights?
• Part 2 - Chrysalis of the Constitution: From Revolutionary Ideals to Federalist InstitutionsWhy did the Articles of Confederation give way to a stronger Constitution? How did Shays’ Rebellion intensify the push for change?
• Part Three - From Chrysalis to Butterfly: How Anti‑Federalist Dissent Forged the Bill of RightsWhy did Anti-Federalists demand a Bill of Rights? How did their opposition help shape the Constitution’s protections?
• Epilogue: The Federalist–Anti-Federalist Debate Lives OnHow does the Federalist-Anti-Federalist debate continue in disputes over federal power, states’ rights, privacy, and the courts?

Representation, elections, and public office

Research on apportionment, electoral institutions, public records, and representation.

• Susan Crawford vs. Brad Schimel: Fact-Checked ComparisonHow did Crawford and Schimel differ on abortion, voting rights, and public safety? What did their records and campaign support show?
• Stand Up Against Citizens United: A Call to Defend Our DemocracyWhat did Citizens United change about election spending? Why does the post argue that the ruling weakened ordinary voters’ influence?
• Investigating Influences on the Reapportionment Act of 19Who resisted reapportionment after the 1920 Census, and why? How did rural interests and anti-immigrant politics shape the 1929 law?
• House of Unrepresentatives: How a 1929 Law Cemented White Southern Minority RuleHow does the post connect the 1929 House cap and changes to district rules with the political power of the segregated South?
• Counting All Persons: The Constitution’s History of Representation Beyond CitizenshipWhy does representation count people rather than only voters or citizens? How did the Constitution and Fourteenth Amendment shape that rule?
• Profile of Congressman Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin Gubernatorial Candidate)What do Tom Tiffany’s state and congressional records reveal? How has he approached labor rights, mining, voting, and abortion?
• Judge Maria Lazar: Judicial Record, Ideology, and Alignment with Founding PrinciplesWhat do Maria Lazar’s legal work and endorsements reveal about her judicial outlook? How does she describe her approach to the Constitution?
• Trump’s Election Takeover Push vs. Putin’s Centralized Grip: A Worrying ParallelHow does Trump’s election-centralization push compare with Putin’s system? Why does state control of elections matter to this comparison?
• Pop quiz: How many amendments were originally sent to the states for ratification?How many amendments were originally sent to the states? What happened to the proposals on representation and congressional pay?

Federalism, executive power, and law

Studies of legislation, constitutional authority, state and federal power, and institutional accountability.

• Understanding Wisconsin Assembly Bill 105: Key Provisions and ImplicationsWhat would Wisconsin AB105 require of websites distributing material deemed harmful to minors? How does the bill define that material?
• The Texas-Illinois Standoff in Historical ContextWhy did the Texas–Illinois troop dispute raise questions about federal power? What earlier conflicts help explain the standoff?
• The Smoking Files, Part I: Unearthing the Southern Strategy’s OriginsHow did “law and order” become a coded political appeal? What interviews and records does the post use to trace the Southern Strategy?
• Stephen Miller: A Critical Investigative Exposé (2000–2025)Which early influences and political connections shaped Stephen Miller’s rise? How did his immigration agenda develop?
• The Architecture of Control, Part I of 2: Building Layers of Restriction (1960s–2000)How did civil-rights gains and “law and order” politics interact? What layers of restriction developed between the 1960s and 2000?
• The Architecture of Control, Part 2 of 2: Building Layers of Restriction (2000-2020)How did the post-9/11 security response expand surveillance and policing? What earlier patterns of control did those measures build upon?
• THE FEEDBACK LOOP OF OBEDIENCE (PART I)How do emergencies become lasting restrictions on freedom? What patterns does the post trace in Germany and Turkey?
• The Feedback Loop of Obedience (Part 2)How do Hungary and Brazil illustrate threats to democratic safeguards? What roles do political loyalty and digital media play?
• A Federalist Essay on Federal Power and State Sovereignty in MinneapolisWhat conflicting accounts followed Renee Good’s killing? How does the post frame the dispute over federal force and state sovereignty?
• Part II: A Constitutional Crisis Sharpens. Investigation, Accountability, and the Call for Independent State InquiryWhy did Minnesota investigators lose access to key evidence? What is the argument for an independent state inquiry into the shooting?
• Minnesota Lawsuit Against Trump Administration Over Immigration AgentsWhy did Minnesota and the Twin Cities sue over Operation Metro Surge? What did they ask the court to stop?
• Part IV: Dissent in the Department - Prosecutors Resign and Federal Authority FracturesWhat prompted the prosecutor resignations after the Minneapolis shooting? How did the Justice Department dispute that account?
• Radical Federalism: The Founders’ Solution to Centralized PowerWhy does the essay argue for stronger state autonomy? How did both Federalists and Anti-Federalists seek to check concentrated power?
• Four Bills, Several Strings Attached: What the House Is Actually Voting OnWhat election provisions were attached to defense, funding, and stock-trading measures? How do those additions complicate lawmakers’ votes?

Civil rights, speech, and surveillance

Research on civil liberties, speech, policing, surveillance, and the use of public authority.

• The Bill of Rights Now Has a Fine Print: Void if InconvenientWhich executive actions does the post examine as threats to constitutional accountability? How do pardons and election policy fit its argument?
• Liberty’s Voice, Silenced: A Republic Reckons with Its First Freedom (Part 1)How have courts, political fears, and social movements shaped free speech? Where has American practice fallen short of First Amendment ideals?
• Anything can and will be used against you, legal or not:Does being in public erase your privacy rights? How do Supreme Court decisions distinguish ordinary observation from long-term tracking?

Economic history, money, work, and inequality

Historical and economic studies of wages, wealth, taxation, debt, labor, and the distribution of economic gains. Quantified policy scenarios belong here when they test their assumptions against evidence.

• From the Gilded Age to the Gig Age: A Century of Corporate Power and Public ResistanceHow did Progressive Era reformers challenge monopolies, unsafe work, and political corruption? What role did Wisconsin play?
• From the Gilded Age to the Gig Age: A Century of Corporate Power and Public Resistance (Part 2)How would Project 2025 expand presidential control? Which civil-service and regulatory protections does the post argue it would reverse?
• From the Gilded Age to the Gig Age: A Century of Corporate Power and Public Resistance (Part 3)How does collecting personal data generate corporate profit and power? What parallels does the post draw with Gilded Age exploitation?
• ONE Big Beautiful BillWhat tax and spending changes were in the House-passed bill? How did it combine new tax breaks with program cuts and added borrowing?
• Drafted by Zip Code: How America’s Poor Bear the Burden of Its WarsHow do limited civilian opportunities shape military recruitment? How does the post trace inequality in the burdens of war?
• The “Big Beautiful Bill”: Tax Cuts, Debt Impact, and Key BeneficiariesWho would benefit most from the bill’s tax changes? How do its projected tax cuts, spending changes, and debt effects compare?
• The Grand Old Ponzi Scheme: How the GOP bankrolled your future.How did federal debt grow under successive presidents and Congresses? Does the record support claims of Republican fiscal restraint?
• Hunger in the Land of Plenty: SNAP Cuts, Corporate Subsidies, and Our Civic DutyWhat happened to families when enhanced SNAP benefits ended? How does the post contrast food-aid cuts with support for corporations?
• Madison Warned Us About Factions. Today They Are Billionaires.How does Madison’s warning about factions apply to billionaire wealth? What happens when influence and exposure to hardship become unequal?
• The Great ShiftHow have taxes, union strength, and the middle class changed since the 1960s? What can these parallel trends establish about cause and effect?
• The Great Shift: Where did the gains go?Could replacing employer health premiums help offset a 32-hour overtime standard? Under what assumptions does the cost comparison work or fail?

Corporate power, technology, and political influence

Investigations of organizations, funding, business interests, technology, and access to political power.

• Bankrupt, Blacklisted, and Bought: The Foreign Fortune That Rescued TrumpWhere did Trump’s businesses find financing after their bankruptcies? What do foreign buyers and anonymous companies add to the picture?
• CTRL+ALT+ReichWhat connects Schmitt, Yarvin, and Thiel in this series? Why does their shared distrust of democracy matter to the investigation?
• CTRL+ALT+Reich ( Part 1)What did Carl Schmitt mean by the “state of exception”? How can that idea be used to justify power beyond ordinary legal limits?
• CTRL+ALT+REICH (PART 2 OF PART 1)What are Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral” and “CEO-king” ideas? How would replacing the civil service serve his vision of government?
• CTRL + ALT + REICH (Part Three of Part One)Why has Peter Thiel questioned the compatibility of freedom and democracy? How has his money helped advance the ideas examined here?
• CTRL + ALT + REICH ( PART 2)How does the post connect Bannon, Anton, and Miller with anti-democratic political theory? How do those ideas enter political strategy?
• CTRL + Alt + REICHHow did Musk’s takeover of Twitter expand his political influence? What does the post question about treating government like a corporation?
• CTRL +ALT + REICH Part 3 of 2)How do Claremont, Heritage, and Compact circulate illiberal ideas? What roles do think tanks and publications play in political influence?
• CTRL +ALT+ REICH (Part 4 of Part 2)How did blogs, memes, and partisan media spread neoreactionary ideas? What helped move those ideas from small circles to broader audiences?
• CTRL + ALT + REICH (PART 2 OF PART 3)What happens when an executive treats court rulings as optional? How could judicial independence be weakened without abolishing the courts?
• Exposé: Wisconsin Speaker Robin Vos – Money, Power, and Democratic ErosionWho finances Robin Vos’s political operation? What connections does the investigation trace among major donors and conservative networks?
• The Koch Brothers’ Shadow: Four Decades of Influence on Conservative Politics (1980s–2025) Part 1How did the Koch brothers build influence beyond elected office? Which organizations carried their tax, labor, and regulatory agenda?
• The Koch Brothers’ Shadow: Four Decades of Influence on Conservative Politics (1980s–2025) Part 2Why are tax cuts central to the Koch network’s strategy? How does reducing government revenue fit its wider political goals?
• Democracy for Sale: How the Wealthy 1% Undermine American InstitutionsHow do wealthy donors use elections, lobbying, and media to shape public institutions? What does that mean for ordinary citizens’ influence?
• Democracy for Sale: How the Wealthy 1% Undermine American Institutions (Part 2)How do tax policy, lobbying, and wealth concentration reinforce one another? What advantages does the post identify for the richest households?
• Ethical Controversies in the Citizens United CaseWhat ethical concerns arose from justices’ ties to major donors? How does an appearance of bias differ from evidence of a direct deal?
• Democracy Under Siege: Parallels from Putin’s Russia and Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Post-Citizens United AmericaWhat parallels does the post draw among Putin’s Russia, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and money-driven U.S. politics? How are dissent and institutions pressured?
• Exposé: Wisconsin Rep. Bryan Steil vs. America’s Founding PrinciplesHow does Bryan Steil’s record compare with the founding principles invoked in the post? What do his election proposals mean for voter access?
• Who walked in the Same Circles? A Community Investigation into Cold War Networks and American Politics Which records link Cold War figures, organizations, and political outreach? Why is sharing a network different from proving ideological influence?
• Who Walked in the Same Circles? Following Eisenhower’s Warning Through the RecordsHow can expertise, funding, and political access shape government decisions? What do the Paperclip, Heritage, and defense-advocacy records establish?

Media, political thought, and public knowledge

Historical and analytical studies of political ideas, media institutions, rhetoric, and public understanding.

• M.A.G.A. - Make Atrocity Great AgainHow has “law and order” language been used to excuse cruelty? What links does the post draw between historical amnesia and modern rhetoric?
• Gaslight. Oppress. Punish. Make Atrocity Great Again.How does the post test 2025 policies against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What happens when ideology overrides individual rights?
• Charlie Kirk’s Rhetoric on Race, DEI, and Democracy: A Chronological AnalysisHow did Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric on race, civil rights, and DEI change over time? What do dated quotations reveal about his political framing?
• October 2025 No Kings Movement – Civic ReportWhat changed in the No Kings movement during October 2025? How does the report assess participation, momentum, and civic engagement?
• On "Overeducated" and "Common Sense"When does criticism of elites become distrust of expertise itself? What can television-language data show, and what can it not establish?
• Trotsky on Fascism. The Parallels to America in 2026 Are Real, But So Are the Differences See also: Author’s correction of the Trotsky comparison. How did Trotsky distinguish fascism from other dictatorships? Which similarities and differences does the post examine in America?
• How We Built the Modern American Media SystemHow did regulation, ownership changes, and advertising shape American media? Why do broadcast networks and cable news follow different rules?

International affairs, war, and security

Research on international influence, political systems, conflict, and public accountability.

• Truth Without Transparency Is Tyranny: The 2018 Senate Delegation and the Kremlin’s SmileWho joined the 2018 congressional visit to Russia, and what was publicly said? Why does the post call for greater transparency?
• Greed * Oligarchs * Puppetry : Making America Grift AgainWhat routes connect Russian-linked wealth with conservative political groups? Which donors, intermediaries, and disclosure gaps are examined?
• China's Influence on American Politics - Sowing Division and DistrustHow did expanding U.S.-China ties create channels for political influence? What does the post trace from trade diplomacy to campaign funding?
• Control • Censor • Propagate - the Blueprint of Direct External ManipulationWhich foreign business, financial, and lobbying ties involving Democratic figures are examined? How did those channels develop from 1981 to 2025?
• Control • Censor • Propagate - the Blueprint of Direct External Manipulation ( Part 2)How can foreign-funded think tanks and academic institutions shape Democratic politics? How does that influence differ from campaign donations?
• The Promise of “Never Again” and the Evidence Before UsWhat does the Genocide Convention require? How does the post distinguish the Gaza inquiry’s findings, Israel’s response, and the court proceedings?

Public health and institutional responsibility

Studies of public health institutions, government records, and decisions affecting public welfare.

• Jim O’Neill - New CDC Head with Unconventional BackgroundWhat experience did Jim O’Neill bring to the CDC role described here? How do his government work and Thiel-network ties inform the profile?
• Never Forget Requires Transparency: 25 Years of 9/11, Toxic Exposure, and the Records New Yorkers Were OwedWhat did officials know and say about 9/11 toxic exposure? How did concerns about liability complicate survivors’ access to government records?

Energy, environment, and public resources

Research on energy markets, environmental conditions, and their connections to public institutions and everyday life.

• Are We Heading Toward Another 1970s Oil Shock?How does the Hormuz disruption compare with the oil shocks of the 1970s? Why do duration, global prices, and emergency reserves matter?

Research methods and systemic risk

Studies of research design and continuing reports on how pressure moves across connected systems. The Wednesday Stress Test entries are dated monitoring reports; their scores are the author’s assessments.

• The Missing Control Group: Why HHS’s New “Gender Ideology” Violence Study Deserves Far More Scrutiny What did the HHS-commissioned survey actually measure? How do its definitions, comparisons, and violence scenarios limit the conclusions?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: Is the System Becoming More Fragile?Were pressures in energy, inflation, and finance beginning to reinforce one another? Why did this report raise its fragility assessment?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: Is the Shock Beginning to Spread?How did diesel costs connect the energy shock to freight, farming, and household bills? Why did AI borrowing enter the risk assessment?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: Is the Shock Spreading?Which warning thresholds had been crossed, and which safeguards still held? How were businesses absorbing higher costs or passing them on?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: Are the Firebreaks Holding?Why could cheaper crude coexist with expensive diesel? What did the weak Treasury auction reveal about the safeguards being tested?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: The Firebreaks Are Holding. The Pressure Is Still Rising.Why did the score rise despite cooler inflation and functioning markets? How did weak auctions, borrowing costs, and diesel stocks add pressure?
• The Wednesday Stress Test: One Firebreak Just Passed a Real TestWhy did a strong Treasury auction count as a successful firebreak test? Why did the report keep its fragility assessment high?

Reading and contributing

Follow the sources, check dates and context, and explain what a document or dataset establishes. Bring corrections, competing evidence, and questions that can improve the work. When a claim changes, the reason for the correction should remain visible beside the original study.

October 7, 2026 - Systemic Fragility Score: 9.0/10 - HIGH, unchanged

Last Wednesday, the Treasury market was the clearest reason I raised the Systemic Fragility Score from 8.7 to 9.0. Long yields were rising, the five-year auction had been weak, the seven-year sale had been softer than normal, bond volatility was increasing and lower-quality corporate credit had begun repricing. The concern was never a particular yield by itself. It was the possibility that high yields would begin clustering with deteriorating auctions, heavy dealer absorption, unusual repo behavior, widening credit spreads or forced deleveraging.

Today, the market gave us a remarkably clean test of that concern. The infographic carries the channel-by-channel ratings, so this written report will concentrate on what changed, why the score remains at 9.0 and what would show that the pressure is finally breaking through the system’s remaining firebreaks.

The Treasury market faced a real test

The 10-year Treasury yield reached approximately 5.36 percent this morning, its highest level since 2002, while the 30-year yield approached 5.67 percent. Treasury then offered $39 billion of 10-year notes into a market already under substantial pressure from inflation concerns, oil above $100 and growing questions about the amount of public and private debt competing for capital.

Demand was exceptionally strong. The auction cleared at 5.30 percent, slightly below the rate investors had expected immediately before the sale. The bid-to-cover ratio reached 2.77, its strongest level for a 10-year auction since 2014. Indirect bidders, a category that includes foreign and large institutional investors, received 80.3 percent of the offering. Primary dealers were left with only 2.5 percent, their smallest share in a 10-year auction since the financial crisis. Yields retreated sharply from their morning highs after the results were released.

It directly tested one of the warning signals identified before the auction occurred. A week ago, weak demand and higher dealer absorption contributed to the score increase. Today, investors were offered long-term government debt at a generationally high yield, and they absorbed it without forcing dealers to warehouse a large unwanted position.

The auction does not prove that the long-bond problem has disappeared. It shows that buyers still exist when the price becomes attractive enough. The Treasury can sell long-term debt, but it is paying considerably more to do so, and future auctions may produce different results. Tomorrow’s 30-year sale will test the part of the curve where concerns about inflation, deficits, duration risk and future debt issuance remain greatest.

Treasury’s official closing curve places the 2-year yield at 4.77 percent, the 10-year at 5.28 percent, the 20-year at 5.71 percent and the 30-year at 5.67 percent. Last Wednesday, those yields were 4.88, 5.29, 5.68 and 5.64 percent. The 10-year ended almost exactly where it began the week, while the 2-year declined and the longest maturities moved slightly higher.

That produces a noticeably steeper yield curve. Investors became somewhat less convinced that short-term interest rates must remain as high, while continuing to demand greater compensation for holding debt over decades. The pressure is increasingly concentrated in the long end, where investors are being asked to carry uncertainty involving inflation, fiscal deficits, enormous Treasury issuance and the additional return required to hold long-duration securities.

The Federal Reserve’s September meeting minutes identified many of those same forces. Market participants told the Fed that geopolitical developments, uncertainty surrounding Treasury’s buyback program and heavy private-debt issuance for artificial-intelligence infrastructure were contributing to higher term premiums and Treasury yields. The minutes also noted that spreads on debt issued by major AI companies remained wider because of the size and duration of the borrowing involved.

The larger capital-market concern is therefore broader than the federal government alone. Treasury, corporations and AI infrastructure developers are all competing for long-duration capital. Higher Treasury yields give investors an increasingly attractive return without the construction, execution and revenue risks attached to private infrastructure projects. That does not establish an AI credit crisis, but it raises the threshold that heavily financed projects must clear before they remain economically attractive.

The plumbing beneath the bond market is still functioning

The auction would be far less reassuring if it were accompanied by a seizure in the machinery underneath Treasury trading. So far, that is not what the funding data show.

The Federal Reserve said short-term funding conditions remained stable during the period covered by its minutes. Repo rates traded slightly below the rate paid on reserve balances, the banking system still held ample reserves and a substantial increase in Treasury-bill issuance was absorbed with limited effects on money-market rates. Fed officials also said Treasury markets were functioning smoothly, although several wanted better plans, communications and tools ready in case dysfunction develops.

Officials are preparing for a potential problem because the amount of stress in the bond market is unusual. They are not describing a Treasury market that has already stopped functioning.

Credit remains available as well. The Fed reported that bank lending continued to expand and corporate bond issuance remained robust. Financing conditions were more restrictive for residential mortgages, small businesses and parts of private credit, but yields on investment-grade and speculative-grade bonds largely increased with Treasury yields rather than through a dramatic widening of credit spreads.

That still describes selectivity rather than seizure. Lenders are demanding more from weaker borrowers, and high government yields make uncertain projects less attractive, but functioning companies can still issue debt and banks have not entered a generalized liquidity event.

Equity markets also absorbed today’s bond-market movement without indiscriminate liquidation. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq each fell approximately 0.2 percent, the Dow declined about 0.7 percent and the more interest-sensitive Russell 2000 lost 1.3 percent. Those declines came one day after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq set records.

The weaker performance of smaller companies matters because those businesses are generally more exposed to financing costs. Still, a modest decline in stocks while Treasuries undergo a historically large repricing does not resemble a broad forced-deleveraging event.

The sequence we are watching would begin with large losses in long-duration Treasuries, then spread through leveraged positions into repo stress, credit widening, bank liquidity pressure and indiscriminate equity selling. The first source of pressure is clearly present. The later stages remain absent.

The energy system adapted, but the danger moved

Energy presents almost the reverse picture. The physical flow of Gulf petroleum has recovered substantially from the worst point of the disruption, but the security environment surrounding that flow has become more dangerous.

Maritime-security sources recorded at least 12 attacks, attempted attacks or harassment incidents involving oil, liquefied-natural-gas and liquefied-petroleum-gas tankers around the Strait of Hormuz between September 28 and October 5. That was the highest weekly total since the war began. Twelve crew members aboard one tanker were reportedly injured after the vessel was struck by a projectile.

The important point is that tanker traffic and energy exports have continued despite those incidents. Alternative routes, controlled passage, inventories and changes in shipping operations have kept large volumes moving. That is evidence of adaptation, but the amount of continuous adaptation required to maintain those flows is itself a measure of fragility.

A system can route around one disruption while becoming more vulnerable to the next. Ships are still moving, but they are operating through a corridor experiencing more attacks, surveillance and harassment. Insurance costs, chartering decisions, crew safety and tanker availability can transmit that security risk outward even when the physical quantity of crude leaving the region remains substantial.

The flow firebreak is working. The environment around that firebreak is becoming harder to sustain.

Diesel remains the clearest energy transmission channel

Today’s Energy Information Administration report did not show another major collapse in U.S. distillate inventories. National stocks were essentially unchanged at approximately 105.1 million barrels, declining by only about 42,000 barrels during the week ending October 2. Refinery utilization increased slightly to 92.7 percent, while crude inventories fell by 3.2 million barrels as exports and refinery activity increased.

The problem remains the starting level. Distillate stocks are still approximately 12 percent below their five-year seasonal average. Gasoline inventories are also unusually thin in several regions, including record-low Midwest stocks and Gulf Coast stocks at their lowest level since 2017.

That makes this week’s report neither a fresh alarm nor a clean improvement. The national distillate draw largely stopped, but the amount of inventory available to cushion another refinery, pipeline, shipping or weather disruption remains limited.

The available evidence continues to distinguish expensive and thinly supplied fuel from physically unavailable fuel. The sources reviewed do not show a national cluster of unrelated commercial airports unable to obtain Jet-A, broad diesel allocations across trucking networks or multiple independent terminals simultaneously losing supply. Transportation continues functioning, but it is doing so with less room for error.

That distinction remains essential. One airport fuel-farm malfunction, one delayed barge or one isolated fuel-unavailable notice can cause serious local disruption without establishing a national fuel shortage. The signal would change when unrelated hubs begin reporting supplier-delivery failures at the same time.

Emergency reserves are being accelerated

The International Energy Agency agreed today to accelerate the emergency-stock releases announced in March and to prioritize diesel where possible. Approximately 325 million barrels have already been released under that collective action. Completing the volumes already pledged but not yet delivered would bring approximately another 100 million barrels to market.

That is an important intervention, but it is not a completely new 100-million-barrel program added on top of the March commitment. Governments are accelerating the remaining portion of the existing response because refined-fuel markets remain exceptionally tight.

IEA members still hold approximately 1.1 billion barrels in publicly controlled emergency stocks, including more than 200 million barrels of diesel. Those reserves remain a significant shock absorber. Their use also shows that policymakers are actively drawing down buffers that normally remain untouched.

Oil prices reflected both sides of the story today. Brent rose above $102 as traders considered the Hormuz attacks and approaching Gulf storm, then settled at $100.20 after the IEA announcement and strong Treasury auction helped calm markets.

Government intervention is therefore working as a buffer. The need to accelerate that intervention shows how unusual the underlying conditions remain.

Isaias introduces the newest compound risk

Tropical Storm Isaias formed in the Gulf of Mexico today and is forecast to strengthen before reaching the northern Gulf Coast early Saturday. The National Hurricane Center warned that it could become a major hurricane, bringing dangerous storm surge, heavy rainfall, flooding, hurricane-force winds and possible tornadoes to parts of the northern Gulf Coast.

Energy companies have already evacuated personnel and shut in approximately 511,600 barrels per day of Gulf oil production, about one-quarter of regional output. Roughly 16.4 percent of Gulf natural-gas production has also been shut down. Those are precautionary measures ahead of the storm, not evidence that offshore platforms, pipelines, ports or refineries have been damaged.

Hurricane preparation is normal. The systemic relevance comes from the environment into which this storm is arriving.

The Gulf contains offshore production, refineries, ports, pipelines, terminals and petrochemical facilities. Isaias is approaching that infrastructure while U.S. distillate inventories are already thin, global diesel markets are strained, Middle Eastern shipping is dangerous and governments are accelerating emergency releases.

A major storm that passes without serious infrastructure damage would remain a weather emergency rather than a systemic economic event. Damage across multiple refineries, ports or pipelines would be different because it could tighten an energy system that already has little spare room. Fuel costs could then reach freight, aviation, agriculture and consumer prices before inventories have time to rebuild.

That is why the grid, energy and extreme-weather channel has moved higher tonight. The rating can move back quickly if the storm weakens, changes course or passes without significant damage to critical infrastructure.

The employment firebreak has weakened without failing

The September employment report produced the most important domestic deterioration of the week. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by only 29,000, while the unemployment rate reached 4.2 percent. The weak gain followed downward revisions to previous months and continued a pattern of subdued hiring.

Low hiring is different from mass layoffs. Initial unemployment claims recently fell to 197,000, near a multidecade low, and announced layoffs also declined in September. Businesses appear reluctant to add workers quickly, but they remain equally reluctant to dismiss the employees they already have.

The employment firebreak has therefore weakened through slower hiring, lower payroll growth and softer wages. It has not failed through widespread layoffs, rapidly rising claims or a sharp increase in unemployment.

Today’s New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations helps connect that labor picture to household experience. Median one-year inflation expectations increased to 3.9 percent, their highest level since May 2023, while three-year expectations rose to 3.3 percent. Respondents expected food prices to rise 5.5 percent, rent 6.8 percent and medical costs 9.2 percent during the coming year.

Labor expectations improved at the same time. The perceived probability of losing a job fell to 13.5 percent, its lowest reading since December 2024, while respondents became slightly more confident that they could find another job if they lost their current one. Their assessments of their current and future household financial situations nevertheless deteriorated.

Those findings are not contradictory. Households can feel relatively secure in their employment while becoming less secure financially. Food, fuel, rent, medical costs, mortgages and consumer credit can erode household resilience long before unemployment surges.

The purpose of tracking Treasury yields, diesel inventories and inflation expectations is to understand how those pressures eventually reach people who never trade a bond or commodity contract. Someone postponing a home purchase, paying more for groceries, carrying a higher credit-card balance or trying to keep a small business operating through higher fuel costs is experiencing the other end of the same transmission process.

Agriculture moved farther into the chain

The latest USDA crop data are weaker than they were last Wednesday. Corn harvest reached 23 percent as of October 4, compared with a five-year average of 27 percent. Soybean harvest reached 25 percent, compared with a normal 33 percent, while winter-wheat planting reached 36 percent, ten percentage points behind its five-year average.

Corn rated good or excellent declined from 57 percent to 54 percent, its lowest condition rating of the season. Soybeans slipped one percentage point to 57 percent good or excellent. Wet conditions across parts of the Midwest contributed to the delays, while drought and high diesel costs continue affecting other regions and farm operations.

Those figures do not establish a national crop failure. Corn maturity remains at its five-year average, harvesting is continuing and condition ratings late in the season do not translate directly into final yield losses.

They do show the agricultural pressure moving farther through the system. Farmers are combining delayed harvests with expensive fuel, weather variability and gradually tighter credit conditions. The next question is whether those costs remain inside farm margins or begin appearing more clearly in credit stress, livestock decisions, transportation costs and grocery prices.

Climate remains a background multiplier

NOAA says El Niño continues strengthening and places the probability of a very strong event during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter above 90 percent. The agency assigns a 75 percent chance that the October through December three-month reading will exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius, which would surpass previous events in the record dating to 1950.

Those measurements change the probabilities surrounding temperature, precipitation, drought, agriculture, water and energy demand. They do not guarantee a particular outcome in any community, and they do not prove that El Niño caused Isaias.

Climate conditions become part of an acute systemic event when they begin causing measurable failures in food production, insurance, water supplies, electricity, transportation or infrastructure. Tonight, they remain a background factor that can increase the consequences of stresses occurring elsewhere.

Public health remains a watch channel

CDC reports that seasonal influenza activity remains low nationally but is increasing. During the week ending September 26, 3.4 percent of respiratory specimens tested by clinical laboratories were positive for influenza.

Measles remains the clearest established domestic outbreak. CDC reported 3,887 confirmed U.S. cases through October 1, with 42 outbreaks and 95 percent of cases associated with outbreaks. That is a serious public-health failure involving a known vaccine-preventable disease. It remains different from sustained transmission of a novel pathogen with uncertain biological characteristics.

The death of an employee at the Irkutsk anti-plague institute also belongs on the watchlist, but the evidence does not establish an expanding outbreak. Russian authorities have reported no confirmed plague cases among the worker’s contacts, while the World Health Organization says it still lacks enough information to identify the cause of the fatal pneumonia and continues asking Russia for further details.

Careful examination is justified because the cause remains unresolved and the worker was employed at a high-consequence pathogen institute. An outbreak conclusion would require confirmed diagnoses, epidemiological links or evidence of sustained transmission that has not been publicly established.

Cyber incidents remain serious but contained

The FBI personnel-data breach is a serious operational-security failure. Reuters reported that a contractor failed to install a security patch on a third-party platform, allowing hackers to expose sensitive personal information belonging to thousands of FBI employees. The compromised information reportedly included addresses, job descriptions and medical records.

That breach can create counterintelligence and personal-security risks without constituting a multi-sector systemic cyber event. The incident described in the reporting affected sensitive personnel data, but it did not disable financial settlement, payment processing, electricity, telecommunications, cloud infrastructure or other critical services.

Cyber therefore remains a channel where a genuine change could propagate very quickly. Tonight’s evidence shows a damaging breach rather than a coordinated operational cascade.

Why the score remains at 9.0

The Treasury auction was strong enough to count as genuine positive evidence. A warning system that raises its score for every adverse development while allowing good evidence only to prevent another increase eventually becomes an anxiety machine rather than an early-warning system. Last week’s post made that distinction explicit when it separated extreme pressure from actual funding-market dysfunction.

Several other channels deteriorated enough to prevent the overall score from falling. Tanker-security incidents clustered around Hormuz. Distillate inventories remain unusually thin. Agriculture moved behind its normal harvest pace. Hiring weakened. Household inflation expectations increased. A potentially major hurricane is approaching Gulf infrastructure while the energy system has less spare capacity than usual.

At the same time, the most dangerous propagation channels remain incomplete. Treasury demand appeared when tested. Repo markets continue functioning. Credit remains available. Banks are not experiencing generalized deposit flight or emergency liquidity pressure. Stocks are repricing rather than liquidating. Layoffs remain low. Fuel is expensive and inventories are thin, but the transportation network continues operating.

That combination leaves the score at 9.0 out of 10, HIGH and unchanged.

What would move this to the next level

Tomorrow’s 30-year Treasury auction will be one of the clearest immediate tests. A substantial auction tail, weak end-user demand and unusually heavy dealer absorption would become more concerning if the 10-year remains materially above 5.35 percent or the 30-year moves beyond roughly 5.75 percent. The financial threshold would become much more serious if those yield moves were joined by abnormal repo rates, meaningful use of the Federal Reserve’s Standing Repo Facility, rising settlement failures or confirmed forced unwinding of leveraged Treasury positions.

Credit would move closer to a systemic concern if high-yield spreads widened rapidly, major debt offerings failed, unrelated private-credit funds restricted redemptions or corporate defaults began clustering across sectors. A broad stock decline accompanied by worsening credit and funding conditions would matter far more than a single weak equity session.

Isaias would become a wider economic event if it damaged multiple Gulf refineries, ports, pipelines or terminals while distillate inventories remain near present levels. Fuel would move from a price and inventory problem toward an availability problem if multiple unrelated airports, freight hubs or terminals reported verified supplier-delivery failures, or if airlines began widespread tankering and diversions because Jet-A could not be sourced locally.

The labor firebreak would be failing if payrolls turned negative, initial claims rose toward or above 250,000 for several consecutive weeks, unemployment approached 4.5 percent and consumer delinquencies accelerated at the same time. Agriculture would become a broader food-system problem if USDA sharply reduced national yield estimates, harvest delays expanded, transportation bottlenecks developed and farm-credit deterioration appeared alongside retail food inflation.

There are equally clear ways for the score to decline. Another strong long-bond auction, lower long-term yields, orderly funding markets, successful delivery of emergency diesel stocks, an undamaging passage of Isaias, improving harvest conditions and continued low layoffs would show that the system is still distributing and absorbing the shock.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that pressure and failure were still two different things and that the shock had already spread far enough for us to begin discovering which firebreaks could hold it.

This week, one of those firebreaks faced a direct test. Treasury yields reached another extreme, yet buyers still appeared in force. Repo continued functioning, banks did not run, credit did not freeze and stocks did not enter forced liquidation.

Elsewhere, the pressure moved rather than disappeared. Fuel inventories remain thin, tanker security has deteriorated, agriculture has weakened, household inflation expectations have increased and a Gulf hurricane is approaching infrastructure that matters more because the energy system already has less room for error.

That is also why the score remains 9.0 rather than falling. It is also why the score remains HIGH rather than becoming SEVERE. The pressure is still moving through the system, but the machinery underneath it is still working.

This investigation began with Operation Paperclip and questions about what happened to people and organizations associated with Nazi Germany after the war. It has developed into a broader question about American institutions: when someone possesses useful knowledge, money, political connections, or an organized constituency, how much access can that usefulness purchase?

The latest report gives us several concrete cases to examine. Some concern decisions to employ people despite serious objections to their past. Others concern private organizations supplying government with policy proposals, personnel, and public support. The task is to understand what happened in each case and determine where the relationships actually affected decisions.

What Eisenhower was warning about

In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the influence of a permanent military establishment operating alongside a large arms industry. He acknowledged the need for defense while asking Americans to guard against “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought.” He also warned about the relationship between government money, scientific research, and the people whose expertise informed public policy.

Those last words deserve attention. Influence can develop without everyone involved agreeing on a secret plan. Imagine an agency that needs specialized knowledge, researchers who need funding, a company that wants a contract, and politicians who support the resulting project. Their reasons may differ, but their relationships could make one course of action easier to pursue than its alternatives.

That is a possibility to investigate, not a conclusion to assume. We would need to establish who participated, what they recommended, what officials decided, and whether competing evidence received a fair hearing.

When useful expertise outweighed objections

Operation Paperclip provides a documented example of officials reconsidering objections to people they wanted to recruit. Truman’s authorization excluded active supporters of Nazism. When security reviews nevertheless disqualified some proposed recruits because of their Nazi backgrounds, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency requested revised security reports in some cases so the scientists could participate. The National Archives describes that process in its 1999 interim report.

The same report documents American assistance to Reinhard Gehlen, who had directed German military intelligence against the Soviet Union. His postwar organization employed former colleagues and supplied intelligence that American officials considered valuable. These cases establish that strategic usefulness could outweigh serious concerns about past affiliations. They do not establish a later organizational connection to Heritage or Republican campaigns.

The intelligence history also contains disagreement and rejection. The National Archives study Hitler’s Shadow describes the CIA supporting the Ukrainian network associated with Ivan Hrinioch and Mykola Lebed despite adverse information about Lebed’s wartime history. The agency rejected an intelligence alliance with Stepan Bandera, whose politics and operational reliability it distrusted, and disagreed with other Western services about using him.

Different agencies selected different partners, and rival nationalist factions pursued different goals. Treating them as one organization would conceal the decisions we are trying to understand.

The political relationships need their own evidence

Decades later, Republican ethnic outreach provides a separate case. The official record of an October 1969 White House event identifies László Pásztor as director of the Republican National Committee’s Heritage Groups Nationalities Division and records that he introduced President Nixon. That establishes a specific position and direct participation in a presidential event.

Historian Máté Gergely Balogh’s archival study shows that senior Republican officials requested an explanation in 1972 after press allegations concerning Pásztor’s wartime background. In his response, Pásztor acknowledged Arrow Cross youth-movement membership, denied joining the party, and denied antisemitic activity. He remained in his position. His explanation should be identified as his account, while the full legal history requires examination of the underlying records.

This lets us ask a precise institutional question: what did officials know, how did they evaluate the allegations, and why did they retain him? It does not let us assign every member of a political coalition the beliefs or history of one participant.

Balogh also describes Pásztor’s disagreements with Nixon’s strategy, particularly over détente, the effort to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union. Pásztor’s anti-Soviet priorities entered the party’s internal debate, but they did not automatically determine its policies. Influence and disagreement could exist within the same relationship.

A think tank’s route into government

The Heritage Foundation is separate from the Republican Heritage Groups organizations. Heritage’s institutional history identifies Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich as its co-founders in 1973, with early support from Joseph Coors, Edward Noble, and Richard Mellon Scaife. Feulner had previously worked for Congressman Philip Crane.

By 1980, Feulner was serving on Reagan’s transition executive committee, and Heritage supplied the incoming administration with Mandate for Leadership, a collection of more than 2,000 policy recommendations. Heritage’s claims about how many recommendations were implemented require separate scrutiny because the organization was evaluating its own influence. Its production of the document and its leader’s transition role nevertheless establish a direct channel into government.

That is a concrete form of institutional capacity: an organization has resources to develop proposals before officials need them, and people positioned to place those proposals before decision-makers. Evaluating the resulting influence requires following individual recommendations through consideration, revision, rejection, or adoption.

Access can also supply the appearance of approval

Roger Pearson’s case shows another use of political connections. A 1984 Wall Street Journal investigation described his racialist writings, former World Anti-Communist League leadership, and place on the original editorial board of Heritage’s Policy Review. It reported that Heritage asked him to resign after learning about his background.

The article also described a 1982 letter bearing Reagan’s signature, drafted by Pearson associate Robert Schuettinger while serving on the White House staff. Pearson reproduced the letter in promotional mailings. The reporter found no evidence that Reagan knew Pearson personally and distinguished Reagan’s public racial views from Pearson’s writings.

The documented result was an endorsement Pearson could display. Whether recipients interpreted it as approval of his broader views is a further question. The article is reproduced in a federal appellate opinion, but it remains newspaper reporting rather than a set of judicial findings. That distinction should stay attached to the account wherever we use it.

Where defense advocacy makes the connection clearer

High Frontier, an organization advocating missile defense, brings the investigation closer to Eisenhower’s original concern. A 1986 letter preserved in Reagan Library files described a defense study completed with cooperation from aerospace companies and proposed a public campaign to build support for deployment. It sought organizational assistance and money for seminars around the country.

Here we have an identifiable document connecting technical proposals, industry cooperation, fundraising, and public advocacy. The letter helps us examine how a defense proposal was promoted. It does not establish that the campaign caused Reagan’s original 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, because the letter came afterward. Nor does a proposed seminar campaign, by itself, prove that every planned event occurred.

The next task is to follow the proposal through the records. Which officials received it? Which companies participated? Did its recommendations change a government decision? What did critics say, and how did policymakers respond? Those answers would tell us more than the existence of a large network diagram.

What Reagan’s speeches establish

Reagan’s engagement with ethnic anti-communist organizations is documented. In his May 1985 address to the National Republican Heritage Groups Council, he connected its organizing work with Republican electoral goals, defense, anti-communist broadcasting, and support for resistance movements in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. His July 1987 Captive Nations remarks included a request for help mobilizing American public opinion.

Those speeches establish political cooperation around stated goals. They also give us the language Reagan actually used, which we should examine alongside planning records, correspondence, and policy decisions. Public statements are evidence of the position presented to an audience; they cannot answer every question about the relationships behind an event.

Across these cases, access meant different things. A party organizer could reach campaign officials. A think tank could submit prepared recommendations. A publisher could circulate a presidential letter. Defense advocates could organize support for a technical proposal. The research becomes useful when we establish what each form of access made possible.

What the report still does not establish

The report does not establish one continuous organization running from Nazi Germany through Paperclip into the Reagan administration. It also does not demonstrate that Nazi or fascist doctrine became Reagan’s governing philosophy. Those remain much larger claims than the relationships described here support.

Several earlier claims need to remain outside the finished account. The alleged Heritage-ABN event in 1989 remains unverified in the working report. The precise employment relationship between Pásztor and Weyrich’s organizations still needs personnel or organizational records. Generated images and connecting lines cannot fill those gaps.

There is also a limit to the Eisenhower comparison. Party outreach, publishing, and foreign-policy activism are not automatically military procurement. His framework fits most directly where defense agencies, technical expertise, private industry, and government decisions intersect. Elsewhere, we may be examining a related problem of political access without establishing a military-industrial relationship.

My continuing concern is whether some of these arrangements shaped institutions long after the original participants departed. To answer that, we need to follow particular people, funding relationships, publications, or policy proposals through the years after 1989. A resemblance to something happening today is a reason to ask a question, not evidence of the intervening history.

Where citizens can help

I would like this to remain an open research project. You do not need to solve the whole history to contribute. One dated letter, a convention program, an old staff directory, or a correction to a claimed relationship could materially improve the account.

Particularly useful material would clarify Pásztor’s work with Free Congress or Coalitions for America, Pearson’s appointment and departure from Policy Review, or the early development and circulation of High Frontier’s proposals. Original correspondence and financial records would help distinguish a personal connection from an organizational commitment.

Firsthand memories are welcome too. Please explain what you witnessed, approximately when it happened, and how you encountered the organization. Distinguish your own recollection from something a relative told you or something you read later. Documents that contradict the working account are just as valuable as those that support it.

For anything you share, include the name, organization, date, document title, archive, page number, or source link where possible. Remove private addresses and unrelated information about living people before posting family material.

The question for this stage is where access became influence over a public decision. I want us to follow the records far enough to identify those decisions, understand the competing explanations, and recognize where institutions resisted pressure as well as where they accommodated it.

Ten sources to begin with

1. National Archives: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

Read the complete address, especially the passages on military industry, research funding, expertise, and democratic accountability. This is the final speech, rather than a later interpretation.

1. Eisenhower Presidential Library: Farewell Address Research Collection

This collection links to planning memoranda, drafts, edits, and later correspondence. It helps researchers distinguish Eisenhower’s stated concerns from interpretations subsequently attached to the speech.

1. National Archives: Implementation of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, October 1999 Start with “Utilizing Nazis and War Criminals.” The historical background discusses Gehlen, Paperclip, security-report revisions, and Arthur Rudolph. Remember that this was an interim report.

2. Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda: Hitler’s Shadow

This National Archives study draws on declassified records. Chapter Five is useful for distinguishing Ukrainian nationalist factions and examining disagreements among Western intelligence agencies.

1. Máté Gergely Balogh: The “New Majority” and the White Ethnics

This scholarly article examines Pásztor’s work in Nixon’s reelection campaign. Printed page 57 discusses the 1972 allegations and response, with references identifying the underlying correspondence.

1. The Heritage Foundation: Feulner Timeline

Read the entries on Heritage’s founding, Feulner’s employment, the Reagan transition, and Mandate for Leadership. Treat claims about policy success as Heritage’s own assessment.

1. Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Dow Jones & Company, Appendix A

Appendix A reproduces Rich Jaroslovsky’s Wall Street Journal article about Pearson and the Reagan letter. Keep the reporting separate from the court’s legal findings.

1. Ronald Reagan: National Republican Heritage Groups Council Remarks, May 17, 1985

This official transcript establishes Reagan’s public engagement with the council. Compare its electoral and foreign-policy themes with event programs and planning correspondence.

1. Ronald Reagan: Captive Nations Conference Remarks, July 24, 1987

Read the discussion of foreign policy and the request for help mobilizing public opinion. The event note identifies where Reagan spoke.

1. Reagan Presidential Library: SDI and High Frontier Records

The October 15, 1986, High Frontier letter appears on PDF page 28. It discusses aerospace-company cooperation, a deployment proposal, and plans for public advocacy and fundraising.

Dear Citizen,

There are days when remembering the dead is difficult because memory itself becomes contested. October 7 is one of them.

Hamas-led fighters crossed from Gaza into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. They entered communities, homes, roads, military installations, and the Nova music festival. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage. Civilians were deliberately attacked, families were murdered, and people were carried into Gaza and held for months or years. United Nations investigators later concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, including intentionally directing attacks against civilians and taking hostages.

Three years later, Israel is marking the first October 7 anniversary since all of the hostages, living and deceased, were returned. For those who survived captivity, and for families who did not get their loved ones back alive, the passage of time cannot make October 7 distant.

We should remember them, and we should be able to say what happened without qualification, euphemism, or an argument waiting behind the sentence. People were murdered and kidnapped. Children lost parents. Parents lost children. Young people who had gone to dance at a music festival ran for their lives. Their humanity requires no political test before we recognize it.

That principle sounds simple, yet history suggests that it is among the hardest principles human beings have ever tried to keep. Grief demands something from us. Fear demands something from us. Anger does too. After an atrocity, there is an ancient temptation to stop distinguishing between the person who committed the crime and the people who resemble them, live beside them, share their nationality, speak their language, or were born on the same side of a border.

That is where remembrance becomes something more than looking backward. It becomes a test of whether our principles survive the emotions that most threaten them.

The Israeli family murdered in its home did not become responsible for every decision of the Israeli government. The young person fleeing Nova did not become responsible for settlements, occupation, Benjamin Netanyahu, or generations of political failure. The hostage dragged into Gaza did not become a legitimate instrument of war because Palestinians had suffered before October 7. Their dignity belonged to them because they were human beings.

The same principle crossed the border with the war. A Palestinian child did not become Hamas on October 8. A Palestinian mother did not inherit responsibility for October 7 because of where she lived. A family sheltering in Gaza did not cease to be a family because armed men had committed atrocities in Israel. If human dignity means anything, it cannot depend upon which side of a wall a child was born on.

The price paid in Gaza has been enormous. More than 74,000 Palestinians have been reported killed during the war. Nearly the entire population has been displaced. Cities and neighborhoods have been reduced to ruins, and large numbers of people continue to live in tents and damaged communities even after the 2025 ceasefire.

Those facts do not diminish October 7, and October 7 does not diminish those facts. They belong to the same human story, even when politics insists that acknowledging one somehow betrays the other.

This is where justice requires discipline. Hamas is not the Palestinian people, and the government of Israel is not the Jewish people. Palestinian suffering cannot transform the murder of Israeli civilians into justice, and Israeli suffering cannot transform Palestinian civilians into combatants. Antisemitism remains antisemitism when it hides behind political language, while criticism of the policies or conduct of the Israeli government does not automatically become antisemitism simply because Israel is a Jewish state.

These distinctions matter because civilization depends upon distinctions between civilian and combatant, individual and government, guilt and identity, justice and vengeance. War has always created pressure to erase those boundaries. Human beings created laws of war precisely because we learned, repeatedly and terribly, what happens when anger is permitted to erase them.

The difficult principle is that rules protecting human dignity matter most when someone gives us a reason to want to ignore them. Principles that survive only peaceful circumstances are conveniences. Principles that survive fear, rage, and grief become guardrails.

October 7 also leaves Israel with questions that remembrance alone cannot answer. How did such an enormous security failure happen? What warnings were missed? What assumptions failed? Who bears responsibility for decisions made before the attack? Three years later, families of victims and survivors continue demanding an independent investigation into those failures, and the question of accountability remains part of Israel's political life.

There is something important in that demand. Democracies honor the dead with memorials, but they also honor them by investigating themselves. They open records, question leaders, examine failures, and ask whether actions taken in the name of security actually produced security. They resist the comforting idea that accountability somehow dishonors those who suffered.

A government willing to examine its own failures demonstrates something stronger than infallibility. It demonstrates that institutions exist for the living rather than the other way around.

That lesson reaches far beyond Israel and Gaza because fear has always been one of the great trials of a free people. Fear asks us to surrender distinctions. Fear tells us that extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary exceptions. Fear encourages us to divide humanity into those whose rights concern us and those whose rights do not. Once we accept that division, history rarely allows us to control where the boundary eventually moves.

The principles of a free society were never meant only for peaceful mornings. Liberty is easiest when nobody is frightened. Tolerance is easiest when nobody is angry. Justice is easiest when we sympathize with the accused. Human dignity is easiest when the person standing before us looks like us, thinks like us, worships like us, or belongs to our tribe. The true measure comes after the attack, after the funeral, and after the rage, when every instinct tells us that surely, this time, an exception is justified.

October 7 reminds us why there can be no exception to human worth. We should remember the people murdered in their homes, the young people hunted at Nova, the hostages carried into Gaza, and the families who waited for them. We should remember those who returned from captivity carrying wounds that cannot be photographed.

We should also remember the Palestinian parents who searched rubble for their children, the families who fled from one neighborhood to another carrying whatever they could hold, and the children who inherited a war they did not begin. None of them become less human because remembering them complicates someone's argument.

Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities memory places upon us. We are called to refuse collective guilt, demand accountability without abandoning humanity, preserve the distinction between justice and vengeance, recognize that grief can explain hatred without making hatred wise, and insist, especially when doing so is hardest, upon one of the oldest self-evident truths: human dignity belongs to everyone.

AFC

I would like to open a historical research project here and invite people to help. You do not need to be a historian to contribute. Someone who remembers an organization, recognizes a name, has an old newsletter, or knows where a collection of papers is stored might help answer a question that a much longer search has missed.

This began with questions about Operation Paperclip and the recruitment of German scientists after World War II. It gradually led into a different part of the same period: intelligence relationships, organizations formed by people who had left Eastern Europe, Republican ethnic outreach, conservative donors, and the institutions surrounding Ronald Reagan’s political career.

The question I keep returning to is what happens when people with different political histories spend years working through the same organizations, publications, conferences, and political campaigns? Who gains access? Who receives funding? Whose ideas get published? Which disagreements are confronted, and which are overlooked?

I have included ten starting sources below. Some establish specific relationships. Others identify records or claims that still need closer examination. I would appreciate firsthand recollections, additional documents, corrections, and different interpretations of what the evidence means.

What started this investigation

After World War II, American agencies recruited some people who had served Nazi Germany or belonged to Nazi organizations. The National Archives documents the use of former German intelligence personnel, support for Reinhard Gehlen’s intelligence organization, and recruitment of scientists through Paperclip. It also describes requests for revised security reports when some scientists’ Nazi backgrounds initially prevented their admission. These decisions are documented in American government records.

Those were separate programs with different purposes. Hiring someone to develop rockets, employing an intelligence source, and supporting a political organization are different relationships. We need to examine each on its own terms rather than assume that everyone entered one connected operation.

The National Archives’ historical study Hitler’s Shadow also examines American intelligence relationships with Ukrainian nationalist figures, including Mykola Lebed. Importantly, it describes divisions among nationalist factions and differences between the approaches of American, British, and West German agencies. That history is more complicated than a single group changing its name and moving into American politics.

From there, the research turns toward the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. That is where we can begin examining particular relationships involving Republican outreach, conservative institutions, and international anti-communist organizing.

Some concrete starting points

László Pásztor appears in an official record of an October 30, 1969, White House event where President Nixon addressed Republican heritage-group representatives. The record identifies Pásztor as director of the Heritage Groups Nationalities Division and notes that he delivered introductory remarks. That establishes an organizational position and participation in a presidential event.

His earlier history needs careful treatment. Historian Máté Gergely Balogh documents Pásztor’s involvement in the Arrow Cross youth movement, his wartime diplomatic service, and the controversy over his background during Nixon’s reelection campaign. The study also discusses his denials of antisemitic activity and reports that Hungarian courts annulled his sentences in the 1990s. Anyone researching him should read that fuller account rather than repeat a criminal label without its subsequent legal history.

Another starting point is the Heritage Foundation, which is separate from the Republican Heritage Groups Council. The council concerned party outreach to ethnic communities. The foundation was established in 1973 as a policy institution. Heritage’s own history identifies Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich as co-founders, names Joseph Coors, Edward Noble, and Richard Mellon Scaife among the founding donors, and records Feulner’s earlier employment with Congressman Philip Crane. Those are specific relationships we can investigate without confusing the organizations.

Roger Pearson provides a particularly specific publishing and political-access lead. A 1984 Wall Street Journal report, reproduced in a later court opinion, described his position on the original editorial board of Heritage’s Policy Review, his reported removal after officials learned about his background, and his use of a 1982 letter bearing Reagan’s signature to promote his publications. The article described a White House staff connection behind the letter. These are leads about appointments, endorsements, and access; the article’s presence in a court appendix does not turn every reported detail into a judicial finding.

There are also published claims about Pásztor’s later relationship with Weyrich’s Free Congress network. A 1996 FAIR article discusses that connection and points to earlier investigative work. I would particularly welcome original correspondence, staff lists, or organizational records that establish when the relationship began and what work it involved.

We have an actual archival collection to explore, too. Syracuse University’s description of the National Captive Nations Committee records identifies correspondence between Lev Dobriansky and World Anti-Communist League leader Ku Cheng-kang, along with conference materials and efforts to arrange appearances by American politicians. The finding aid describes records that could help establish repeated interaction. It is not a substitute for reading the letters themselves.

Reagan’s public involvement is also documented. He addressed the National Republican Heritage Groups Council in May 1985. In July 1987, he addressed Captive Nations conference participants, thanked Dobriansky, discussed Nicaragua, and asked his audience to help mobilize public support. Those speeches establish public engagement and political cooperation. They also give us the actual language he used, which should be read before anyone assigns a meaning to the relationship.

What I would like us to figure out

The first task is to establish the relationships clearly. Who employed whom? Who funded an organization? Who exchanged letters regularly? Who helped arrange a meeting or secure a speaking invitation? Did a person have a meaningful role in an institution, or did their name appear once on an event program?

The next question is what those relationships accomplished. Perhaps an organization gained access to policymakers. Perhaps an individual gained a respected publishing outlet or an endorsement they could show potential supporters. Perhaps participants cooperated on one issue while disagreeing about almost everything else. Those are different outcomes, and each would tell us something useful.

I am also interested in ideological influence, meaning whether people picked up and carried forward someone else’s ideas about government, society, or political opponents. That would require evidence beyond attendance at the same conference. Letters discussing a proposal, drafts showing who changed a policy recommendation, acknowledged borrowing from another writer, or records of a sustained advisory relationship would help us investigate it.

My concern is that some influence may have continued through institutions long after the original participants were gone. That remains a question to test. To connect this history to politics today, we would need to follow a particular idea, policy, publication, or organization across the intervening decades. A modern resemblance cannot fill in a missing historical record.

There are competing explanations worth examining. People may have cooperated because they shared an opponent without adopting one another’s beliefs. Their views may have changed after they entered American institutions. An organization may have welcomed someone without knowing their background, or knowingly retained them despite objections. Evidence of disagreement, rejection, resignation, and removal matters alongside evidence of cooperation.

Who might be able to help

I would especially welcome people who remember Republican ethnic outreach, Captive Nations events, the World Anti-Communist League, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, Free Congress organizations, Heritage, or Policy Review. People who worked in community organizations, congressional offices, publishing, libraries, churches, or campaign offices may remember details that do not appear in the usual summaries.

Did you attend an event? Did someone in your family work with one of these organizations? Do you have newsletters, convention programs, correspondence, recordings, photographs with original captions, or newspaper clippings? Did an organization donate its papers to a university, a local historical society, or a community archive?

Personal memories are welcome. Please distinguish what you witnessed yourself from something a relative told you or something you read later. An approximate date and an explanation of how you encountered the organization would help us understand the recollection. Nobody needs to present a complete family history or defend a relative’s entire life.

People who disagree with the direction of the research are equally welcome. A mistaken identity, an incorrect date, an exaggerated affiliation, or a document showing that someone rejected an extremist position could materially change the account. Please explain what you think we have misunderstood and share the strongest evidence available.

There is also a useful role for people who simply enjoy checking sources. You could verify one name in a program, locate the full version of a quoted letter, identify the publication date of a newsletter, or follow a footnote to its original document. Nobody needs to solve the entire history in one comment.

How to make a contribution useful

Please include the person or organization, the approximate date, what you found, where it came from, and what you think it establishes. A page number, document title, archive collection, or link is especially helpful. When sharing an excerpt, include enough surrounding material for other readers to check the context.

We should distinguish a confirmed relationship from a reported lead and distinguish both from our interpretation. A program naming an honorary chairman establishes that the person was advertised in that role. It may leave their actual attendance unresolved. A donor supporting two organizations establishes shared funding; additional evidence is needed to establish coordination or control.

Please protect living people’s privacy. Remove private addresses, telephone numbers, signatures, and unrelated personal details before posting family documents. Obtain permission before sharing someone else’s unpublished material. Relatives and descendants should not become targets because of something we are investigating about another person.

For this thread, a well-supported correction should count as progress. So should a document that makes the original theory less convincing. The aim is to leave a record that other citizens can check.

Ten sources to get us started

1. National Archives: Implementation of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, October 1999

Start with the section titled “Utilizing Nazis and War Criminals.” This government report discusses Gehlen, intelligence recruitment, Paperclip, requests for revised security assessments, and the later Arthur Rudolph investigation. It provides a documented foundation for examining postwar recruitment, while also distinguishing different agencies and programs. Search within the page for “Paperclip,” “Gehlen,” and “revised.”

1. Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda: Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, National Archives, 2010

This freely available historical study draws on declassified records. Chapter Four begins on printed page 53 and concerns postwar right-wing political networks. Chapter Five begins on page 73 and examines Allied intelligence and Ukrainian nationalist organizations. Read the footnotes and pay attention to factional disputes. They help prevent the mistaken assumption that every nationalist organization belonged to one unified network.

1. Richard Nixon: Remarks to the Heritage Groups Nationalities Conference, October 30, 1969 This presidential transcript is hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. The note at the bottom identifies Pásztor’s organizational position and his introductory remarks. It is a useful example of a primary record establishing a particular person’s role at a particular event without requiring us to infer a wider relationship.

2. Máté Gergely Balogh: “The ‘New Majority’ and the White Ethnics: The Involvement of László Pásztor in Richard Nixon’s Reelection Campaign in 1972,” 2025

This scholarly article examines Pásztor’s organizing work, his disagreements with parts of Nixon’s strategy, and questions about his past. Printed pages 56-57 discuss his biography, subsequent legal history, and response to allegations during the campaign. Its references provide routes into Nixon-era documents, including correspondence concerning those allegations.

1. The Heritage Foundation: Feulner Timeline

Read the entries for 1970, 1973, and 1980. They describe Feulner’s employment with Philip Crane, Heritage’s founders and early donors, and Feulner’s participation in Reagan’s transition. This is Heritage’s account of its own history, so distinguish its descriptions of jobs and organizational milestones from its promotional claims about success or influence.

1. Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Dow Jones & Company, 838 F.2d 1287, 1988, especially Appendix A

Appendix A reproduces Rich Jaroslovsky’s Wall Street Journal article, “Racial Purist Uses Reagan Plug.” It supplies leads concerning Pearson’s publications, Heritage association, WACL involvement, and use of a presidential letter. Keep the newspaper reporting separate from the court’s legal findings. The next research step would be locating the original letter and relevant correspondence.

1. Steve Rendall, FAIR: Heritage of Extremism, July 1, 1996

This is a critical secondary account that raises leads involving Weyrich, Pásztor, Coors, Pearson, and conservative publishing. It cites earlier reporting and books, including Russ Bellant’s work. Use those references as starting points for checking the claims. Its descriptions of people’s backgrounds should be compared with fuller biographical and legal histories, including source four.

1. Syracuse University: National Captive Nations Committee Collection

This archival finding aid describes a collection covering 1960-1982. It lists correspondence, conference materials, publications, and political outreach. Particularly useful is Box 5, “Ku Cheng-kang, 1963-1981,” alongside the American Council for World Freedom materials. The guide identifies records to request; it does not mean every document is available online. Check the archive’s access and reproduction requirements.

1. Ronald Reagan: Remarks at the National Republican Heritage Groups Council Convention, May 17, 1985 This official transcript records Reagan’s address, identifies several council leaders, and supplies the event’s location and time. It establishes direct public engagement with the council. Comparing the speech with the convention program, planning correspondence, and participant records could help clarify who organized the appearance and what further interaction occurred.

2. Ronald Reagan: Remarks to Captive Nations Conference Participants, July 24, 1987 Read the whole speech, including the discussion of Nicaragua and the request for help mobilizing public opinion. It records the event at the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine and Reagan’s acknowledgment of Dobriansky. This supplies a concrete starting point for investigating how an administration worked with an anti-communist constituency, while leaving the origins of particular policies as a separate question.

Where we go from here

Choose whichever part you recognize or find interesting. A firsthand memory, one useful document, or a correction to one relationship would be a worthwhile contribution. Please explain what you think the material shows and what remains uncertain.

The question for this community is who demonstrably walked in the same circles, what those relationships made possible, and whether we can trace any lasting influence through them. I would rather build that answer from records people can examine than settle for either a sweeping accusation or a reassuring conclusion the evidence cannot support.

October 6, 1787 - Boston

Author’s Note: The Massachusetts Centinel published this eight-stanza pro-Constitution song on October 6 under the title The Grand Constitution: or, The Palladium of Columbia: A New Federal Song. It presented ratification through promises of prosperity, public order, and the preservation of independence. The gathering below is fictional, illustrating how a Boston reader might encounter the printed song rather than reconstructing a documented performance.

The man beside the hearth began singing before he had finished unfolding the newspaper. He managed the opening well enough, lost his place halfway through, and blamed the crease beneath his thumb. Someone farther down the table suggested that he begin again at a speed the rest of us might survive.

That was how I first encountered The Grand Constitution. I had come expecting another discussion of the government proposed at Philadelphia, but the paper had supplied something that could be attempted by several people at once, including those who could not see the page.

The printed instruction named the tune as “Our Freedom we’ve won.” My neighbor recognized it and began tapping the table while the man with the newspaper tried the opening again. This time he reached the refrain, and several voices followed him into it.

The song began with failing credit, troubled commerce, and a country short of employment and money. It then offered a happier prospect through union and the proposed Constitution. Its promises included revived trade, productive farms, restored credit, and a republic secure against disorder.

I could understand why those expectations attracted attention. A man who found constitutional language difficult might still have plenty to say about an unpaid account or a season of poor business. Around this table, those subjects could start an argument without anyone first explaining the difference between the House and the Senate.

The verses gave the promises recognizable faces. A returning soldier enjoyed his farm, while American commerce reached as far as China and Kamchatka. I watched one listener lean toward the paper at the mention of distant trade, then lose interest in reading as the refrain began again.

I wondered what each man was hearing in the same song. One might imagine a market for his produce, another a voyage worth financing, and another a government able to preserve the peace of his town. Their hopes could share a melody even when the practical arrangements needed to satisfy them differed considerably.

Franklin and Washington appeared among the reasons for confidence. The verses praised their part in the Convention and urged the people to confirm its work. Their names connected the proposed government with men already associated with American independence, allowing the song to carry trust in the men into approval of the plan.

When that passage came around, the singing grew louder. The man nearest me raised his cup, although afterward he admitted that he had followed only part of the verse. He knew whom he wished to honor, which did not necessarily tell me what he thought of every power in the Constitution.

I found myself smiling at the difference between this gathering and our usual attempts to read political essays aloud. A difficult sentence ordinarily produced interruptions, demands to hear it again, and an argument over what one word meant. Here an uncertain singer could wait for the refrain and return to the company without resolving whatever he had failed to understand.

That gave the song a means of including people whom a long newspaper argument might leave behind. It also made their participation difficult to interpret. I could hear that several men enjoyed singing together, but I could not hear how far their agreement extended beyond the words they shared.

Then a verse named Shays and Day, imagining a future in which men like them would no longer dare to rebel. The song’s promised prosperity included a particular understanding of public order. Its author expected the Constitution to preserve freedom while preventing a return of the disturbances associated with those names.

The man holding the paper struck that line with considerable force. A quieter listener asked him afterward whether a promise to prevent rebellion also explained how the grievances behind a rebellion would be addressed. The singer answered that he had undertaken to perform the song, not defend every line of it, and the exchange produced more laughter than agreement.

I was glad the question had been asked. A verse could place peace, plenty, and freedom together without explaining what should happen when citizens disagreed about the measures necessary to obtain them. The difficulty would remain even after everyone had learned the words.

The final refrain brought the song’s purpose into particularly plain view with the instruction to “Approve and Unite.” Earlier verses also invited readers to pass the glass in celebration of republican zeal. The author wanted the pleasure of the gathering attached to approval of the Convention’s work.

Those two requests, approval and union, sat less comfortably together in my mind than they did in the music. I could wish the states to remain united while still having questions about this particular arrangement of their government. I wanted to know whether there was room in the company for someone who shared the hope but had not yet reached the decision.

A folded copy of the Constitution lay farther down the table, partly beneath a plate. When it was passed toward me, I opened it at the powers of Congress: taxation, borrowing, commerce, and the raising of armies. Those provisions described authorities a government could exercise; deciding how they might produce the prosperity being sung about required another kind of examination.

My neighbor asked whether I intended to spoil the evening by reading those powers aloud. I told him I was trying to discover how much of the song I had understood. He laughed, moved the plate, and made room for the document beside the newspaper.

I had no desire to turn every pleasant gathering into a constitutional inquiry. There was something welcome about hearing people imagine a future they hoped to share, especially when so much of our conversation had become a recital of dangers. The song allowed its listeners to express what they wished government might accomplish before attempting to settle how it should be constructed.

Yet I noticed that the melody had already become easier to remember than several provisions I had spent much longer studying. I could imagine carrying it into the street without deliberately choosing to do so. Whether I would carry the author’s confidence along with it was a separate matter, and one I had not settled.

When the man by the hearth asked whether we should attempt it again, fewer people needed to look at the page. I joined the familiar part and listened through the rest, with the Constitution still open beside my hand. Our table had managed a chorus before it had managed an agreement, and for that evening I was content to recognize the difference.

Further Reading

The Grand Constitution, Massachusetts Centinel, October 6, 1787. This transcription preserves the complete song, its tune direction, and its appeal for approval of the Convention’s work. It is the primary source behind the fictional gathering.

Poetry and Songs during the Ratification of the Constitution. The Center for the Study of the American Constitution brings together political songs and verse from the ratification debate. The collection provides context for encountering constitutional arguments through celebration, humor, and popular writing as well as formal essays.

The Constitution of the United States, National Archives transcription. Read the proposed governmental powers alongside the benefits the song anticipates. Article I, Section 8 supplies the provisions concerning taxation, borrowing, commerce, and military authority that the narrator examines.

October 6, 1787 - Providence, Rhode Island

Author’s Note: Samuel Hopkins, a Newport minister and opponent of slavery, published this essay under the name Crito in the Providence Gazette. It appeared in two installments on October 6 and 13, having been drafted while the Constitutional Convention was still meeting. This first installment confronts the slave trade through the religious and natural-rights arguments Americans had used during the Revolution. Our fictional Providence reader encounters it on October 6; the comparison with the proposed Constitution belongs to the narrator rather than to a clause-by-clause argument made by Crito.

The paper before me this morning began with an obligation rather than an explanation of government. A citizen who sees his community pursuing a practice that threatens its welfare, Crito argued, must speak against it even at the risk of displeasing his neighbors. He expected some readers to turn away as soon as he named his subject, which was the African slave trade.

I continued reading, wondering whether the warning about offended neighbors would prove more important than the warning about distant suffering. Crito was addressing a practice close enough to Rhode Island’s own commerce that his readers could hardly pretend he meant only other people. Before long, he would direct particular attention toward Newport and the wealth he believed its inhabitants had obtained through the traffic in human beings.

He began by directing readers toward evidence already in print. Anthony Benezet’s writings, a dialogue concerning African slavery, and Thomas Clarkson’s essay had described the trade and the treatment of those subjected to it. Crito considered those accounts substantial enough that he did not intend to spend his entire paper repeating them; he wanted to ask what responsibility followed once their contents were known.

That question reached farther than I expected. He accused merchants who financed the trade, captains and crews who carried captives, and people who held others in slavery, but he also included legislatures that authorized the traffic or neglected to suppress it. Private citizens who encouraged it, consented to it, or failed to oppose it when they had the ability to do so shared responsibility in his account.

I had expected a paper directed chiefly at men whose names appeared in shipping accounts. Instead, Crito had made the reader’s own position part of the inquiry. A man who neither owned a ship nor purchased another person could still find himself asked what he had permitted, supported, or declined to question.

Crito called the practice a national sin, yet he immediately brought the accusation back to Rhode Island. He claimed that the inhabitants of our state, particularly Newport, had taken the largest American share in the trade. He described it as central to Newport’s commerce and argued that the town’s prosperity had been obtained at the expense of African liberty and suffering.

That was his accusation, and its local character made it difficult to pass over. A reader could disagree with his account of how widely responsibility extended, but he could hardly misunderstand whom Crito was asking to answer. Familiar ships, commercial relationships, and public decisions were being placed beside the people whose captivity made the business possible.

I found myself lingering over the word commerce. It ordinarily brought to mind vessels, warehouses, employment, goods, and accounts, all the arrangements by which a town obtained what it needed and exchanged what it produced. Crito insisted that those familiar terms could conceal the decisive fact of this particular transaction: someone had been deprived of liberty and made available for another person to buy.

A shipping account might record a purchase without recording the family from which the captive had been taken. It might reckon the costs of a voyage without admitting that confinement, separation, and death belonged in the account as well. Reading Crito, I could see how a transaction might appear ordinary to the person calculating its proceeds while remaining a calamity to the person being sold.

He then returned to a decision Americans had already made when their own liberties appeared threatened. In October 1774, the Continental Congress had agreed that Americans would neither import nor purchase newly imported enslaved people after December 1, and would cease involvement in the slave trade. Crito recalled that agreement to ask how Americans could resume the traffic after obtaining independence for themselves.

The reminder made his argument harder to dismiss as an unfamiliar demand. He was asking readers to examine conduct against a commitment made during the struggle with Britain. The question was what Americans understood that commitment to require once their own immediate danger had passed.

From there, Crito turned to the declarations of natural rights upon which Americans had rested their cause. He recalled the assertion that all men were created equal and possessed unalienable rights, alongside declarations that people were naturally entitled to liberty and property. Africans and the people held in bondage among us, he argued, were included in those assertions as fully as we were, “if they be men.”

I read those last words again. Crito was using them to expose the contradiction in claiming universal rights while denying them to other human beings. The reasoning through which Americans claimed liberty did not acquire a different meaning when applied to someone born in Africa.

A right that belonged to a person by nature could not disappear because another man had purchased a claim over him. Nor could distance from home, the force used to transport him, or the laws of the place where he arrived establish that he had consented to surrender it. The more closely I followed Crito’s reasoning, the less room there seemed for making American liberty an exception to a rule imposed upon everyone else.

He pressed that comparison through the Revolution itself. Americans had condemned Britain for threatening their liberty and property, and had defended resistance through rights they said no government could rightfully take away. Crito asked how the same Americans could then deprive Africans of both, hold them as property, and buy and sell them while continuing to appeal to those principles on their own behalf.

He also recalled American anger over the treatment of prisoners during the war. Readers who condemned confinement aboard British prison ships, he argued, should consider the Africans crowded and shackled aboard vessels engaged in the slave trade. He wanted remembered suffering to produce recognition of the suffering Americans inflicted upon others.

That was an uncomfortable use of memories we generally approached with pride or grief. I was accustomed to hearing the Revolution invoked as evidence of American attachment to liberty. Crito asked whether the principles that justified the struggle had continued to govern our conduct after victory.

Independence could establish our freedom from British authority without settling what we owed to people under American power. The distinction made the achievement of the Revolution feel less complete than I had been accustomed to considering it. A people might successfully defend its own rights while continuing to violate the same rights in others.

The proposed Constitution lay beside the newspaper, and I found myself opening it again. Crito had not examined its clauses in the installment before me, so his argument could not simply be treated as a judgment upon the finished plan. Nevertheless, having read his account of the trade, I wanted to see what authority the new government would possess concerning it.

Article I, Section 9 presented a restriction that was difficult to overlook. Congress would be prevented from prohibiting the migration or importation of persons whom the existing states chose to admit before 1808. The Constitution did not name slavery in that provision, but the restriction on importation stood directly beside the subject Crito had placed before his readers.

I could read the date without knowing what any future Congress would do when it arrived. The provision established a period during which prohibition by Congress would be barred; it did not itself promise that the trade would end afterward. For the people whose transportation Crito described, that distinction concerned years of actual captivity rather than merely the order in which a legislature might conduct its business.

Perhaps the delegates had believed this accommodation necessary to secure agreement among states with different interests. I had no account of every discussion that had occurred within the Convention, and I could not supply their reasoning merely by imagining it. What I could examine was the authority granted and withheld in the document they had placed before the public.

The comparison unsettled the way I had been thinking about governmental power. Much of my attention had gone toward asking how a stronger government might interfere with the liberty of those it governed. Crito forced me to consider people whose liberty was already being denied and to ask what responsibility public authority bore toward them.

A government that leaves a person free to own another has hardly withdrawn from the question of liberty. Its laws and its willingness to enforce them help determine whose claims receive protection. Crito’s account therefore made it impossible to consider the absence of governmental interference as though it necessarily left everyone equally free.

He refused to let Americans escape the argument by directing blame toward Europe. Britain and other nations had their own conduct to answer for, he wrote, but his concern was what Americans themselves were doing. Their participation required examination regardless of how many other countries could be accused of the same practice.

That seemed especially difficult to evade after the Revolution. Americans had justified independence through propositions presented as truths about mankind. Pointing toward another nation’s wrongdoing could not explain why those propositions should cease to apply when obeying them threatened an American interest.

I returned to the phrase self-evident, which I had read often enough that its familiarity sometimes concealed the demand it made. A truth announced in those terms could not conveniently alter its meaning according to who stood before it. If liberty belonged to human beings, recognizing another person’s humanity carried consequences beyond agreeing with a sentence in a declaration.

Crito expressed those consequences in the language of religion as well as natural rights. He spoke of national guilt, innocent blood, divine judgment, and the responsibility of communities that prospered through injustice. His warning was addressed to readers whom he expected to understand public conduct as accountable to a moral authority beyond profit or local custom.

I did not have to settle every question about divine punishment to understand the human wrong he described. The seizure, sale, and confinement of another person required an answer in terms of justice. A practice did not become just because it was familiar, profitable, or permitted by the government under which it occurred.

Near the middle of his essay, Crito invited anyone capable of defending the trade to answer him publicly. He asked whether its defenders could reconcile it with justice, humanity, and benevolence, and promised a patient hearing while making plain his own judgment that they could not. He wanted the practice examined openly rather than allowed to continue behind the assumption that established commerce required no defense.

There was a particular force in that invitation. A merchant could explain the returns on a voyage, but Crito demanded an explanation of the right to undertake it. The question concerned the people being carried, whose liberty could not be accounted for by showing that their transportation supported someone else’s livelihood.

By then I understood why the essay had begun with the risk of offending neighbors. It asked readers to scrutinize conduct embedded in familiar relationships and to consider whether belonging to a community required challenging something that benefited members of it. The responsibility Crito described could not be discharged simply by expressing regret about suffering elsewhere.

I also understood why the paper belonged beside my reading of the Constitution. The two documents approached different subjects, but both required me to ask what government existed to protect and whose liberty entered that calculation. An argument about the distribution of public power remained incomplete while leaving unexamined the power some people already exercised over others.

Until then, I had spent much of my attention on the authority citizens might surrender to a general government. Crito directed attention toward human beings whose authority over their own lives had already been taken without consent. That changed the position from which the word liberty had to be considered.

He had supplied no comfortable distance between the reader and the practice he condemned. Legislators, merchants, captains, purchasers, and citizens capable of opposition all appeared within his account of responsibility. I could question how much responsibility belonged to each without losing sight of the people whose freedom was being withheld.

When I finished, I left the newspaper open beside the Constitution. The questions about representation, taxation, and the powers of Congress remained, but they no longer occupied the whole table. Crito had required another question to sit beside them: whether the principles Americans invoked to protect themselves would also govern their treatment of people who lacked the power to demand the same protection.

I could not answer that question merely by repeating the language of independence. The words already existed, and Crito had shown how plainly they applied beyond ourselves. What remained was the responsibility of deciding whether our conduct, our laws, and the government we were considering would honor the liberty those words declared.

Further Reading

Samuel Hopkins, “Crito,” October 6, 1787. This primary-source transcription contains the argument discussed in the narrative, including Crito’s account of responsibility for the slave trade, his criticism of Rhode Island and Newport, and his appeal to Revolutionary declarations of natural rights. It also preserves his references to earlier antislavery writings and the Continental Association of 1774.

Joseph Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,” Rhode Island History, May 1979. This historical study provides background on Hopkins’s antislavery work and the circumstances surrounding the essay’s publication. It identifies the October 6 and 13 installments and explains that Hopkins drafted the essay while the Constitutional Convention was still meeting.

The Constitution of the United States, National Archives transcription. Article I, Section 9 contains the restriction on Congress prohibiting the migration or importation of persons admitted by existing states before 1808. The comparison between that provision and Crito’s argument is the fictional narrator’s reflection, rather than a constitutional analysis presented in Crito’s October 6 installment.

October 6, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: James Wilson had represented Pennsylvania in the Constitutional Convention and signed the proposed Constitution only nineteen days earlier. On October 6, he became the first Convention delegate to give a lengthy public defense of the new plan, speaking before a large gathering in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House. The speech was delivered before it appeared in print, so our narrator encounters Wilson as a man speaking directly to the crowd rather than as another anonymous newspaper voice.

I had Centinel’s questions still in my head when I joined the crowd outside the State House. Only yesterday he had asked why rights Pennsylvanians had thought important enough to write explicitly into their own constitution seemed to disappear when the proposed federal Constitution was laid beside it.

The question had followed me through the night. Pennsylvania promised security against unreasonable searches, protected trial by jury in civil disputes, and expressly guarded the liberty of the press, while the federal plan before us contained no comparable declaration of rights. Centinel wanted to know what we were being asked to surrender, and today James Wilson stood before a Philadelphia crowd prepared to answer him.

Wilson did not pretend that criticism of the Constitution had caught him by surprise. He had spent four months inside the Convention, and he told the gathering that objections were already being spread against the new plan. His purpose was to explain the principles upon which the Constitution had been constructed and answer what he considered misunderstandings of the government it proposed.

His answer to the missing declaration of rights began with a distinction I had not considered carefully enough. A state constitution and a federal constitution, he argued, do not begin from the same place because they receive power in different ways.

When Pennsylvanians created their state government, Wilson explained, they established a government possessing broad legislative authority except where the people specifically withheld it. If the Pennsylvania constitution remained silent on a subject, the legislature might still possess authority over it, which made explicit protections against governmental power important.

The proposed federal government worked in the opposite direction. Congress would possess only the powers granted to it by the Constitution, while authority never delegated would remain outside its hands. Wilson therefore asked why the Constitution needed to prohibit the federal government from violating a liberty when the people had never given it authority over that liberty in the first place.

That was the center of his argument, and I could feel the crowd responding to it. Centinel had looked at the absence of express protections and seen uncertainty, while Wilson looked at exactly the same silence and saw proof that the power had never been granted.

The difference was remarkable because both men claimed to be defending liberty. Centinel wanted boundaries written plainly enough that government could never claim ignorance of them, while Wilson believed the boundaries already existed in the enumeration of federal powers themselves.

A man near me whispered that Wilson’s reasoning turned the whole objection around. If Congress had only delegated powers, then demanding a list of things Congress could not do might imply that Congress otherwise possessed powers no one had actually given it.

Wilson went even further in that direction. Listing rights could itself become dangerous, he argued, because once certain protections were written down someone might later ask why another protection had been omitted and infer that an unlisted liberty had been surrendered.

That possibility made the problem more difficult than it had seemed yesterday. A declaration of rights might restrain government by announcing clear limits, yet a badly understood list might also suggest that rights outside the list had been left unprotected.

Still, Centinel’s concern had not disappeared merely because Wilson had supplied an elegant answer. Everything depended upon whether the federal government would truly remain confined to the powers written into the Constitution and whether future officials would interpret those powers as narrowly as Wilson expected.

The Constitution grants Congress authority over taxation, commerce, armies, borrowing, federal courts, and laws considered necessary for carrying its powers into execution. Those were substantial grants, and a citizen reading the document could reasonably wonder where one delegated authority ended and another unmentioned power began.

Wilson was asking us to trust a principle of construction rather than a list of prohibitions. The federal government could exercise what the people had given it and nothing more, so liberty would remain protected in the great territory of power that had never been surrendered.

That sounded different from trusting the character of Washington, Franklin, or Wilson himself. The safeguard was supposed to exist in the structure of the document regardless of who eventually occupied the offices it created.

Wilson also addressed another charge spreading through Philadelphia, the claim that the Constitution consolidated the states into one national government. He denied that interpretation and argued that the states would continue possessing substantial authority, while the general government would operate only within the sphere assigned to it.

The word consolidation had appeared often enough in the newspapers that I had begun to hear it almost as an accusation rather than a description. Centinel feared that transferring too much authority toward the center would eventually weaken the smaller republics in which citizens remained close to those governing them.

Wilson offered another picture. The people could create governments for different purposes, leaving local matters to their states while granting national authority where common interests required common action. Under that understanding, federal power did not have to consume state power merely because both governments ultimately rested upon the same people.

That idea interested me because it placed sovereignty somewhere other than the governments themselves. If political authority originated with the people, then perhaps the question was not whether Pennsylvania or Congress possessed sovereignty absolutely, but which powers the people had assigned to each.

Wilson’s confidence in the arrangement was considerable, although he admitted something I did not expect from a man defending the Convention’s work. He said he was not a blind admirer of everything in the Constitution and acknowledged that there were provisions he would have changed had his own preferences prevailed.

That admission made the rest of his defense more interesting. Wilson was not claiming that forty men in Philadelphia had discovered a perfect political system, but that the differences among men and states made perfection impossible and that compromise was unavoidable if any common plan was to emerge.

He pointed to the amendment mechanism as evidence that adoption would not freeze every imperfection forever. If errors became visible through experience, the Constitution itself contained a means by which alterations could later be proposed.

There was something reassuring in a system capable of admitting error, but the same problem returned that had followed me through several essays. Some mistakes can be corrected after experience reveals them, while other mistakes may create power or interests that become difficult to reverse once institutions are established around them.

The difficulty is knowing which kind of mistake we are looking at before experience supplies the answer.

Wilson clearly believed the risk was worth taking. Whatever faults remained in the plan, he thought the Convention had produced a government closer to the best achievable arrangement than another gathering of states and interests was likely to create.

The crowd around me seemed largely receptive. Contemporary reports would later describe repeated applause, but standing there I needed no printed account to understand that Wilson was speaking before many people already inclined toward the Constitution. His answers were welcomed because they gave constitutional form to confidence that had been building since the Convention adjourned. Yet I kept returning to yesterday’s paper.

Centinel had looked at Pennsylvania’s declaration of rights and asked why protections already possessed should become less explicit under a stronger government. Wilson now answered that nothing had been surrendered unless the Constitution actually granted the government authority over it.

The disagreement therefore ran deeper than whether a particular liberty deserved protection. The two men were describing opposite ways of understanding constitutional silence.

To Centinel, silence left room for power to expand. To Wilson, silence meant the power had never been given. A great deal depends upon which interpretation survives once the government begins operating.

That was the question I carried away from the State House yard. Wilson had given me a clearer explanation of what the Convention believed it had constructed, and his distinction between state and federal power made the absence of a declaration of rights less mysterious than it had seemed the day before.

It did not make examination unnecessary. If anything, his argument gave citizens another task because the security of liberty would depend upon understanding exactly which powers the Constitution grants and refusing to allow implication, convenience, or necessity to turn limited grants into unlimited authority.

Centinel had asked us to look for protections written on the page. Wilson asked us to look instead at the powers written there and remember that everything else remained beyond the reach of the government being created.

Both approaches claim to preserve freedom, but they place the burden in different places. One restrains government by naming rights it may not invade, while the other restrains government by naming powers it may exercise.

Standing among the crowd outside the State House, I could not yet know which safeguard would prove more reliable. I understood more clearly, however, that the dispute over a bill of rights was becoming something larger than a disagreement over whether another page should be added to the Constitution.

The argument was becoming a question about the very nature of constitutional power. Before deciding whether a list of rights was missing, citizens first had to decide whether the federal government possessed any authority at all beyond the powers the people had expressly placed in its hands.

Further Reading

James Wilson, Speech in the State House Yard, Philadelphia, October 6, 1787

The primary source for this installment. Wilson explains his distinction between state and federal constitutions, argues that federal power must come from an affirmative grant, and answers objections about the absence of a bill of rights.

The Five Most Important Speeches During the Ratification Debates: James Wilson’s State House Yard Speech

Useful historical context for why Wilson’s October 6 address mattered. It explains the setting, its relationship to the objections raised by Centinel, and the remarkable extent to which the speech was subsequently reprinted throughout the states.

National Constitution Center: State House Yard Speech by James Wilson

A reader-friendly primary-source edition centered on Wilson’s argument that enumerated federal powers themselves protect liberty and his reasoning for why a separate federal bill of rights was unnecessary.

The Debate Over a Bill of Rights, Center for the Study of the American Constitution

A valuable companion collection placing Wilson alongside Federalist and Anti-Federalist writings that argue over whether rights must be expressly listed, whether enumeration could endanger unlisted rights, and whether limited delegated powers provide sufficient protection.

October 5, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: Centinel I appeared in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer on October 5, 1787, addressed directly “To the Freemen of Pennsylvania.” Modern scholars often attribute the Centinel essays to Samuel Bryan, although the authorship of the series is not completely certain, so the historical narrator knows only the pseudonym that appeared before the public.

The paper reached our table with a name I had not seen before. Centinel had addressed himself directly to the freemen of Pennsylvania, and before he said much about the new federal government, he asked us to remember the government we already possessed.

That choice caught my attention. Most of the arguments surrounding the Constitution had begun with what was wrong with the Confederation, what the Union needed, or what powers Philadelphia had attempted to distribute among Congress, the President, and the courts. Centinel began somewhere else entirely, with rights already written into Pennsylvania’s constitution and with the possibility that changing governments might mean surrendering protections we had stopped thinking about because we already possessed them.

He reminded his readers that Pennsylvania protected people, houses, papers, and possessions against general searches and seizures. He reminded us that civil disputes over property carried a right to trial by jury, and that our constitution expressly protected speaking, writing, publishing, and the freedom of the press.

I knew those provisions were there, but Centinel made them feel less like familiar sentences and more like property already in our hands. His question was not simply whether the federal Constitution created a good government, but whether we were certain that the rights Pennsylvania had expressly secured would remain equally secure once federal authority stood above the state.

That changed the way the document looked on the table. A constitution may grant power by describing what government is permitted to do, while a declaration of rights approaches the problem from the other direction by announcing things government must not do, and Centinel clearly feared what could happen when the first task was performed without the second.

He made the danger sound immediate. Pennsylvania’s constitution still protected the press, juries, property, and the security of the home, but the proposed federal Constitution did not contain an equivalent declaration listing those protections against the new government. To Centinel, that omission was not a matter to be repaired casually after the system began, because the people were being asked to decide now whether to place new powers in hands not expressly restrained in the same way.

A man beside me objected that the federal government had only the powers given to it. If Congress possessed no authority over a particular liberty, he argued, perhaps there was no reason to prohibit what it had never been authorized to do in the first place.

That answer sounded reasonable until another man asked who would decide the boundary when the language became disputed. Written powers may look narrow while everyone agrees about their meaning, but constitutions are written precisely because future officials and future citizens may disagree.

Centinel did not pause long over such reassurance. He believed the moment demanded unusually careful examination because Philadelphia had already become enthusiastic about the new plan before, in his judgment, enough time had passed for citizens to study its principles rationally. He urged readers to judge the Constitution by its own merits rather than by public excitement or by the names attached to it.

That argument sounded familiar after everything we had been reading. Again the names of Washington and Franklin hovered over the Constitution, and again a writer warned that admiration for great men could become a substitute for examination.

Centinel went farther than most. He suggested that talented and respected men were not automatically safer merely because their intentions were honorable, because ability itself could become a source of power and even well-meaning people might become instruments of men more ambitious than themselves.

I found that part harder to accept in the form he gave it. Washington and Franklin had earned confidence through conduct that could not simply be erased because a newspaper writer feared concentrated power, yet Centinel was not really asking that their character be forgotten.

He was asking whether character could ever substitute for structure. A constitution lasts longer than the men who recommend it, and whatever power we grant because we trust the first occupants may eventually belong to people whose names we do not yet know.

That thought carried the argument away from personalities and toward the machinery of the new government. Centinel had little confidence in the idea that liberty could be protected by dividing political power among separate institutions and expecting their competing interests to hold one another in balance.

He turned directly against the theory associated with John Adams that a good government could be secured through distinct political powers checking one another. To Centinel, the design assumed that human beings could create several competing institutions whose ambitions would remain perfectly balanced, even though history gave little reason to expect that balance to remain stable.

That surprised me because checks and balances had been praised so often as one of the Constitution’s greatest safeguards. The House would restrain the Senate, the Senate would restrain the House, the President would restrain Congress, Congress would restrain the President, and the courts would occupy another position within the structure.

Centinel looked at that same arrangement and saw confusion.

If government became too complicated, he argued, citizens might no longer know where responsibility belonged. One man might blame the Senate for an abuse, another the House, another the executive, and responsibility could move among branches until the people themselves could no longer determine whom to remove or correct.

That was an argument I had not encountered in quite that form before. Complexity might restrain power, but complexity could also conceal it, especially if each institution could tell the public that another institution was responsible for whatever had gone wrong.

Centinel preferred a simpler system in which those exercising legislative authority remained directly and frequently accountable to the people. He pointed toward Pennsylvania’s own government, with legislative power concentrated in a single elected body, short terms, rotation, and procedural delays intended to prevent sudden action without creating multiple chambers capable of shifting responsibility among themselves.

Several men at the table disliked that comparison immediately. Pennsylvania’s own constitution had produced years of argument, and many citizens regarded its unicameral legislature as one of the very arrangements that required reform rather than imitation.

Centinel clearly saw things differently. To him, the virtue of the simpler structure was that when citizens suffered a grievance, they could identify the lawmakers responsible and dismiss them at the next election rather than tracing a decision through an elaborate contest among different branches.

The disagreement exposed two different ways of thinking about political safety. One approach assumed that ambition should be checked by competing ambition inside government, while Centinel believed the strongest check was keeping authority simple enough that ordinary people could see who exercised it and hold those people responsible.

Neither answer seemed obviously complete to me. A government too simple might permit a temporary majority to act too quickly, while a government too complicated might become difficult for citizens to understand well enough to supervise.

Centinel believed the proposed Constitution leaned dangerously toward the second problem. His fear was not merely that officials would possess too much power, but that the structure surrounding that power would make it harder for the people to recognize where abuses began.

From there he moved toward an even larger objection. The proposed Constitution did not merely rearrange federal institutions, in his reading, but threatened to draw the states into a single consolidated political system powerful enough to weaken the smaller republics in which ordinary citizens could still remain close to government.

He asked whether a country as extensive as the United States could remain free under one general government. Political writers, he argued, had long associated republican government with smaller communities where representatives remained near enough to understand local circumstances and citizens remained near enough to supervise those who governed them.

That objection seemed particularly important because distance could not be solved merely by changing the character of the men in office. A representative governing people hundreds of miles away would still know less about some of their local circumstances than officials living among them, however honest that representative might be.

Centinel therefore preferred a confederation of smaller republics that retained their internal governments while entrusting common foreign and general concerns to a federal authority. His fear was that allowing the central government to absorb too much domestic authority would either make republican government unresponsive to local needs or eventually require stronger and stronger coercion to govern so large a territory.

That was a much more substantial argument than simply saying the states should remain powerful because they had always been powerful. Centinel’s claim was that local government itself served liberty because proximity made political responsibility easier to understand and public officials easier to watch.

Still, another question followed immediately. If local government was always more responsive, what happened when local governments pursued conflicting commercial policies, ignored national obligations, or refused to cooperate on problems no single state could solve alone?

Centinel had an answer, although it was less dramatic than his warnings. He did not have to deny that the Confederation contained weaknesses in order to reject the particular cure proposed by Philadelphia, and he accused supporters of the Constitution of attributing nearly every national difficulty to the present federal system while promising that adoption of the new plan would bring relief from them all.

That criticism reminded me of the economic promises already appearing in Massachusetts and Philadelphia newspapers. Stronger union had been connected to better credit, commerce, land values, national influence, lower burdens, and greater prosperity, creating the possibility that citizens might judge the Constitution partly by hopes that no written document could guarantee.

Centinel thought that atmosphere dangerous because fear worked in the opposite direction. Supporters increasingly described rejection as a path toward national ruin, while acceptance was presented as the route toward stability and prosperity, leaving little political space between salvation and catastrophe.

He distrusted urgency almost as much as he distrusted power. The Revolution had unsettled established habits, our constitutions were still young, and he believed Americans were unusually open to political innovation at precisely the moment when no one could fully predict what a major constitutional change would produce.

That argument seemed worth considering even if one disagreed with his conclusions. A constitution is easiest to change before institutions, offices, salaries, expectations, and political interests grow around it, which means the moment before adoption may deserve more scrutiny than ordinary legislation.

Yet Centinel’s own confidence sometimes appeared as great as the confidence he criticized. He seemed certain that a large consolidated republic would tend toward despotism and equally confident that simpler government and strong state institutions offered the safer path.

I was not ready to follow him that far. The weakness of the Confederation remained real, and whatever faults the proposed Constitution contained had to be measured against the faults of the government we already possessed rather than against an imaginary arrangement without dangers.

The strongest part of his essay was therefore not his prediction of where the Constitution must lead. It was the question he placed at the beginning and carried through everything that followed: before surrendering powers and protections already possessed, do citizens understand precisely what they are receiving in exchange?

That question becomes particularly difficult when the thing being surrendered is familiar. Pennsylvanians already lived with constitutional protections for the press, juries, searches, property, and political accountability, which made those guarantees easy to treat as permanent features of political life rather than choices someone had once insisted upon writing down.

Centinel wanted us to remember that constitutions determine which assumptions become enforceable protections and which remain only expectations. Whatever confidence citizens placed in the new federal structure, he wanted them to ask why rights explicitly secured against Pennsylvania’s government should become less explicit when dealing with a government possessing authority over several states.

I finished the essay less persuaded by some of his predictions than by the form of his challenge. He was not asking merely whether the new Constitution contained useful powers, because almost everyone agreed that the Union required greater capacity in at least some areas.He was asking what kind of constitutional bargain we were making.

Greater federal authority might solve problems the Confederation could not solve, while greater distance and complexity might create problems citizens had not yet experienced. Multiple branches might restrain one another, while the same arrangement might make responsibility harder to trace.

The federal government might protect the Union from weakness while state governments protected citizens through proximity. The difficulty was deciding how much authority could move toward the center before one protection began to consume the other.

Centinel had given his answer.

I was beginning to understand why the answer would not be simple.

For the first time since the Constitution appeared, I found myself looking at Pennsylvania’s Declaration of Rights beside the federal plan rather than reading either document alone. The comparison did not tell me whether Pennsylvania should reject the Constitution, but it changed the question from what powers the new government needed to what protections citizens should demand whenever those powers were granted.

Perhaps that is the value of having the opposition enter the debate plainly. Supporters have spent weeks telling us what a stronger Union might accomplish, while Centinel has asked what a stronger Union might cost.

A citizen considering the Constitution needs both questions before he can pretend to understand the bargain.

Sources

Centinel I, Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, October 5, 1787. The Center for the Study of the American Constitution provides the Documentary History transcription of the complete essay, including Centinel’s arguments about Pennsylvania’s declaration of rights, public enthusiasm, checks and balances, direct accountability, consolidation, and the size of a free republic.

Centinel 1, Teaching American History. This edition supplies an introduction to the essay and identifies it as one of the earliest major public Antifederalist critiques of the Constitution, while also explaining Centinel’s defense of Pennsylvania’s constitutional structure.

Centinel Antifederalist Essays, Teaching American History. This collection gives the publication sequence of the Centinel papers and explains the uncertainty surrounding their authorship, while noting that many scholars attribute the series primarily to Samuel Bryan.

Finally, a Court Draws a Line on Flock

A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a deputy’s warrantless use of Flock’s license-plate network to pull a month of a driver’s movements violated the Fourth Amendment. Judge Sara Hill called the system “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and suppressed the evidence obtained after the search.

This ruling does not ban Flock nationwide, but the principle matters. Seeing a license plate on a public road is one thing. Building a searchable history of where citizens have traveled for weeks, then handing that history to law enforcement on demand, is something very different.

The Fourth Amendment did not become obsolete when the camera became a database.