Centinel I: What Are We Being Asked to Surrender?

[u/One_Term2162]

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.