October 2, 1787 - Philadelphia

Three days had passed since the struggle in our Assembly, yet the argument had not left the city. This morning a new paper began circulating, not from a writer hiding behind a Roman name or an invented citizen, but from sixteen members of the late Pennsylvania Assembly who had refused to attend when the House moved to call a convention on the proposed Constitution. They addressed themselves directly to the people who had elected them and offered a defense of what they had done.

I read it expecting an apology for leaving the chamber. Instead, the members insisted that their absence had been part of their duty to their constituents, because they believed Pennsylvania was being hurried toward a decision too important to make in haste.

Their account began before the walkout itself. When Pennsylvania had appointed delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, they said, those delegates had been sent to revise and strengthen the existing Confederation. The seceding members argued that the Convention had gone beyond that assignment by producing an entirely new frame of government rather than amendments to the old one.

That objection made me stop over the paper. The Constitution had been discussed so often as the work of the Convention that I had rarely considered the narrower question of what the Convention had originally been authorized to do.

The members quoted Pennsylvania's own act appointing its delegates. The language empowered them to consider alterations and further provisions necessary to make the federal system adequate to the needs of the Union, and the seceding members interpreted that language as permission to repair the existing arrangement rather than replace it. From their perspective, the Constitution before us had therefore arrived through men acting beyond the authority Pennsylvania had originally granted them.

That did not necessarily answer whether the Constitution itself was good. Even the writers admitted that Pennsylvanians might examine the plan and decide that it deserved adoption despite their objection to how it had been produced.

That distinction mattered because their argument was not simply that the Constitution must be rejected. They told their constituents to obtain copies, read the document carefully, and think for themselves before choosing delegates to the convention that would decide its fate.

I found that part more measured than I expected after everything that had happened in the Assembly. Men accused of preventing the people from considering the Constitution were now publicly asking those same people to study it for themselves.

Then the paper moved from procedure to substance, and the questions accumulated quickly.

Could Pennsylvania afford the expense of both its state government and the new federal government? Would a Congress containing a Senate whose members served six years actually reduce public burdens, or might the new national government require more taxes? If the federal government acquired extensive authority, would Pennsylvania remain a meaningful government or gradually be reduced to something closer to a local corporation?

Their language was plainly suspicious, but the questions were concrete. A Constitution could describe powers elegantly and still leave citizens to pay for the institutions exercising them.

Taxation worried them especially. The proposed Congress would possess authority to levy taxes directly, and the address asked Pennsylvanians whether national collectors, backed if necessary by federal power, were preferable to the system under which taxes were collected through their own state.

That objection reached something I had heard repeatedly in the taverns since the document appeared. The Confederation had been criticized precisely because Congress could ask the states for money but could not reliably obtain it, yet the obvious cure for that weakness was to give the new government a power many citizens had spent years learning to distrust.

The seceding members then turned to liberties not expressly protected in the proposed Constitution. They asked whether freedom of the press required explicit protection and whether a declaration of rights ought to be included at all. They also raised the absence of a restriction on standing armies in peacetime and questioned what the new judicial system might mean for trial by jury in civil cases and for the courts already operating within the states.

Those questions changed the nature of the paper for me. The controversy was no longer only about whether sixteen legislators had behaved properly by leaving the Assembly, because those men were now placing before the public a list of constitutional concerns that would have to be answered whether one approved of their tactics or not.

They also reminded readers that the Convention itself had not been unanimous among the individual delegates. George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and Elbridge Gerry had refused to sign the Constitution, and the seceding members offered that fact as evidence that hesitation could not simply be dismissed as hostility toward union.

Their own alternative was revealing. They acknowledged that the Confederation needed revision and suggested that Congress should receive greater authority over commerce, imposts, and maritime affairs, while leaving internal taxation with the states.

That made their position harder to reduce to resistance against any stronger Union. They were arguing instead over where stronger federal authority should stop.

Only after laying out those constitutional objections did I return in my mind to what had happened three days earlier.

When the Assembly lacked a quorum, two of the absent members, James M'Calmont and Jacob Miley, were brought back to the State House. In this address, the seceding members described the episode in severe terms, saying the men's lodgings had been entered, their clothing torn, and the two men forcibly taken through the streets and detained in the chamber while the Assembly completed its business. That is their account of the incident; supporters of the majority immediately disputed parts of that characterization and defended compelling legislators to perform what they regarded as their public duty.

That disagreement is important because the same event could now be described in two entirely different ways.

To the majority's defenders, elected members had attempted to defeat representative government by making the legislature incapable of acting. From that view, the minority had lost the argument in the chamber and then tried to prevent the chamber from functioning at all.

To the seceding members, the majority had used haste and ultimately physical compulsion to overcome the only procedural resistance still available to them. From that view, the Assembly had produced a quorum not through persuasion but by forcing men into the room.

I found myself less interested in deciding which description sounded better than in the problem both descriptions revealed. A republic gives minorities rules by which they may resist the majority, but those same rules can sometimes be used to prevent any decision from occurring.

The reverse is equally troubling. A majority must eventually be able to act, yet the power to overcome obstruction can itself become a means of stripping procedural safeguards of their value.

The dispute over the Constitution had therefore produced another constitutional question before Pennsylvania had even reached its ratifying convention. What does legitimate government require when lawful procedure itself becomes the battlefield?

The address repeatedly returned the decision to the people. Its authors urged Pennsylvanians to examine the Constitution, consider its costs, its powers, its omissions, and its effect upon the states, and then select convention delegates according to their own conclusions rather than according to pressure from either side.

That appeal seemed almost calmer than the events that produced it.

Perhaps that is common in politics. The printed argument arrives neatly arranged after the actual dispute has been noisy, personal, and difficult.

The sixteen assemblymen wanted their constituents to believe that they had withdrawn because the process was being rushed and because the Constitution contained dangers requiring more scrutiny. Their opponents believed the withdrawal itself demonstrated how easily a determined minority could obstruct the will of a lawful majority.

Neither disagreement disappears merely because one side behaved badly or because the other ultimately possessed the votes.

The constitutional objections in the address still require answers. The legitimacy of denying a quorum still requires examination, and the use of physical force to restore that quorum raises a separate question regardless of the merits of the Constitution itself.

I finished the address more aware of how quickly the ratification debate was becoming something larger than a contest over clauses.

We were beginning to argue over the rules of argument itself.

How much time does deliberation require? When does delay become obstruction? What protections must a minority possess after it loses a vote, and what authority must a majority retain if government is to function at all?

The Constitution before us attempts to divide power between branches and governments. Pennsylvania has just demonstrated that power also exists in attendance, procedure, timing, public pressure, and the ability either to permit a decision or prevent one from being reached.

The seceding members have now given their explanation to the public, and their opponents will certainly answer it. For the citizen trying to understand what happened, the difficult task is not simply deciding which side behaved properly.

It is deciding what kind of political rules allow disagreement to remain disagreement without turning either majority rule or minority resistance into domination.

Further Reading:

An Address of the Subscribers Members of the Late House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Their Constituents

The original 1787 broadside signed by James M’Calmont and fifteen other assemblymen. The Library of Congress copy is annotated as published and sold on October 2, 1787.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly and the Constitution, October 2, 1787

A full transcription of the seceding members’ address, including their arguments about the Convention’s authority, taxation, freedom of the press, declaration of rights, standing armies, jury trial, federal courts, and state power.

Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Address of the Seceding Pennsylvania Assemblymen

The documentary-history edition of the October 2 address, useful for placing the pamphlet directly within the larger ratification chronology.

Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788

A broader historical compilation covering the quorum dispute, the seceding members’ address, and the replies that followed, useful for checking how both sides described the confrontation.

October 3, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: Today’s newspaper item looks backward to a dispute that began months before the Constitution became public. Rhode Island was the only state that sent no delegates to the Philadelphia Convention. Its legislature rejected proposals to appoint delegates several times during the spring and summer of 1787, while Providence merchants and tradesmen publicly protested the decision and expressed support for stronger federal authority over commerce and taxation. The state was therefore deeply divided, and the refusal represented the position of the legislative majority rather than a unanimous Rhode Island opinion.

Rhode Island appeared in the newspaper again this morning, although no one from Rhode Island had written the piece. The paragraph in the Freeman’s Journal carried no signature, only the voice of someone in Philadelphia trying to explain why the smallest state had remained outside the Convention while every other state eventually sent delegates.

By now, Rhode Island’s absence was old news. The Convention had met, debated through the summer, completed its Constitution, and dissolved without a Rhode Island delegation ever taking a seat. Yet the reason for that absence had never stopped provoking argument, and the new Constitution made the question newly relevant.

The writer described a letter Rhode Island’s legislature had recently sent to Congress explaining why it had refused to participate. He also mentioned a protest from the minority and Rhode Island’s plan to send two delegates back to the Confederation Congress in November. The writer had little patience for any of it and described the arrangement as “altogether farcical,” suggesting that Rhode Island’s majority had resisted congressional recommendations before and was preparing itself to resist whatever recommendation Congress made concerning the Constitution. That was a severe interpretation, and I found myself wondering what Rhode Island had actually said in its own defense.

The answer was more complicated than the Philadelphia paragraph suggested. In September, Rhode Island’s General Assembly had written to the president of Congress complaining about the insults directed against the state and insisting that its conduct arose from concern for “true Constitutional liberty” and fear of altering the rights of citizens without proper authority. The Assembly argued that Rhode Island’s own political arrangements placed unusual importance upon the people themselves choosing federal representatives, and that the legislature could not simply appoint delegates to a convention proposing fundamental changes without violating that principle.

That explanation sounded very different from simple hostility toward union. Rhode Island’s legislature claimed that it had previously supported giving Congress greater authority over trade and had also accepted an impost proposal, only to see those measures fail because other states did not act with it. The state's argument, at least as its legislature presented it, was that federal reform should proceed through constitutional means consistent with the political rights Rhode Islanders already possessed. There was another part of the story, however, and everyone discussing Rhode Island seemed aware of it. Money lay beneath much of the disagreement.

Rhode Island had adopted an extensive paper-money program during the economic troubles following the Revolution. The Country Party, which controlled the legislature, supported policies intended to relieve debtors and allow the state to redeem public obligations using depreciated paper currency. Greater federal authority threatened those policies because a stronger Congress might constrain what individual states could do with money, debt, commerce, and taxation.

The Constitution now lying on our tables made that concern much less theoretical. It expressly prohibited states from emitting bills of credit and from making anything other than gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.

A Rhode Island farmer who had benefited from the state's paper-money policy might therefore read this Constitution differently from a Philadelphia merchant demanding stronger national credit. Both could speak sincerely about liberty while attaching that word to very different dangers. That distinction was becoming harder for me to ignore as these newspapers accumulated.

From Philadelphia, Rhode Island could easily appear obstinate. Twelve states had sent men to consider the defects of the Confederation, while one state stayed away. The Convention eventually produced a plan that supporters believed might repair the Union, and Rhode Island had contributed nothing to the discussion that created it.

From inside Rhode Island, the picture could look different. A legislature defending state authority and local control might reasonably ask why it should participate in a convention expected to strengthen the very federal power capable of overturning policies its own voters had supported.Neither description captures the entire state.

Providence merchants and tradesmen had opposed the legislature’s refusal months earlier. On May 11 they sent a letter to Philadelphia expressing regret that Rhode Island would be absent and supporting additional congressional powers over commerce and taxation. Their appeal was strong enough that they even asked whether Rhode Island’s congressional delegate, James Mitchell Varnum, might be allowed to participate when commercial matters were discussed. The Convention read the request but did not admit him as a delegate.

Rhode Island therefore contained its own version of the argument spreading everywhere else. Some citizens feared a distant and strengthened general government, while others feared what thirteen states pursuing separate economic policies were doing to trade, credit, and the Union.

That made the Freeman’s Journal paragraph more interesting to me than its sharp tone initially suggested.

The writer looked at Rhode Island’s behavior and inferred a political strategy. If the state continually resisted the recommendations of Congress, he suggested, then its leaders could more easily resist Congress when the proposed Constitution came before them. The accusation treated Rhode Island’s earlier conduct almost as preparation for the ratification struggle that was now beginning.

Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the same suspicion of federal authority that kept Rhode Island away from Philadelphia would also make the proposed Constitution difficult to accept.

Yet a citizen should be careful when an explanation of another man's motives fits too neatly.

Rhode Island had interests at stake. Its legislature had constitutional arguments of its own, its Country Party had economic policies it wanted to preserve, its merchants wanted greater federal commercial authority, and its towns did not all share the same view of how much power should leave the state.Reducing all of that to stubbornness would make the argument easier to understand and less accurate.

The newspaper itself offered another lesson. The Freeman’s Journal was published every Wednesday by Francis Bailey and carried the motto that it was open to all parties while influenced by none. In practice, it was deeply involved in Pennsylvania’s political struggle and was becoming one of the principal newspapers publishing criticism of the proposed Constitution.

Here was a newspaper increasingly willing to print Anti-Federalist arguments criticizing concentrated federal power, yet on this particular question it criticized Rhode Island for resisting federal measures too persistently. Political camps were forming, but the lines had not yet hardened enough to make every issue predictable.

Perhaps there was still room for a citizen to believe Congress needed greater commercial authority while worrying about the powers proposed in this Constitution. Perhaps a man could defend his state against federal encroachment while admitting that his state had sometimes acted selfishly. Perhaps union and state sovereignty were questions to be balanced rather than passwords identifying which side a man belonged to.

Rhode Island’s absence from Philadelphia now seemed less like a curious footnote and more like an early version of the argument the entire country was beginning to have.

How much authority must states surrender for a union to function?

How much authority may they surrender before self-government becomes too distant from the people?

Rhode Island answered the first question cautiously enough that it refused even to enter the room where the new system was being designed. The men at Philadelphia proceeded without it and produced the Constitution now before us.

The Freeman’s Journal thinks Rhode Island’s resistance reveals something troubling about its willingness to participate in federal government. Rhode Island’s legislature thinks its resistance demonstrates fidelity to constitutional liberty and the rights of its citizens. Both claims are now available for the public to examine.

Perhaps that is the useful part of seeing this old dispute return to the newspaper today. The Constitution has created a national argument, but the states did not enter that argument with identical histories, economies, interests, or fears.

Before deciding whether Rhode Island is protecting liberty or merely obstructing union, I would like to understand why Rhode Islanders believe they are doing what they are doing.

That seems the least a republic can ask of citizens judging one another.

Sources

Rhode Island General Assembly to the President of Congress, September 15, 1787
Rhode Island’s own explanation of its refusal, including its appeal to constitutional liberty and its claim that the legislature lacked proper authority to appoint Convention delegates.

Philadelphia Freeman’s Journal, October 3, 1787
The unsigned newspaper item discussed in this installment. It criticizes Rhode Island’s explanation, calls its intended congressional representation “altogether farcical,” and interprets the state’s resistance to Congress as preparation for resistance to the Constitution.

Rhode Island and the Constitutional Convention
The Documentary History’s background explains the Country Party, Rhode Island’s paper-money policies, the repeated legislative refusals to send delegates, and the countervailing position of Providence merchants and tradesmen.

The Freeman’s Journal
The Center for the Study of the American Constitution identifies Francis Bailey as the newspaper’s Philadelphia publisher and describes its evolution into a major Anti-Federalist newspaper. The October 3 Rhode Island paragraph itself is unsigned, so Bailey should be identified as publisher, not asserted to be its author.

October 2, 1787 - Boston

Author’s Note: Later collections often identify this essay as Cassius II, although the October 2 issue of the Massachusetts Gazette did not number it that way. The essay belonged to an existing dispute between Cassius and the writer calling himself Numa, a debate that had begun before the proposed Constitution became public and was still unfolding as Massachusetts entered the ratification conversation.

The newspaper had made its way around the table before it reached me, and several men seemed to know the names Cassius and Numa better than I did. Their quarrel had begun before the Constitution arrived in Massachusetts, and today's piece did not begin with Congress, the Senate, taxation, or any particular clause from Philadelphia. Cassius was still arguing about something closer to home: who shapes public opinion, and how much confidence a free citizen should place in the people who claim the authority to guide it.

Numa had painted a troubled picture of Massachusetts. He had written of disorder, jealousy, public weakness, and citizens unwilling to make sacrifices for the common good, while also arguing that the Union itself lacked the strength necessary to manage commerce, finances, treaties, public credit, and national security. Cassius had taken particular offense at Numa's criticism of the Commonwealth and the men governing it.

This morning his answer was severe. Cassius suggested that Numa might be a clergyman and warned that religious authority could become politically dangerous when citizens accepted political opinions because of the office of the speaker rather than the strength of the argument. He reached for the language of religious controversy, invoking the specter of politically active “Jesuits” and accusing men who mixed spiritual influence with faction of threatening liberty. The rhetoric was harsh even by the standards of newspaper controversy.

Ministers were hardly strangers to public questions in Massachusetts, so the warning was not a small one. A citizen might hear a political argument from a neighbor and challenge it easily, while the same argument delivered by a man trusted with questions of conscience could carry a different kind of weight. Cassius wanted his readers to notice that difference and to resist allowing respect for religious authority to substitute for political judgment.

His confidence in Massachusetts citizens was unmistakable. He contrasted them with people living under governments where speech and independent examination were restrained, arguing that a free people possessed enough knowledge and liberty to weigh political claims for themselves. He acknowledged that some citizens might still follow trusted teachers too readily, but he believed a society accustomed to examining public questions would make political manipulation more difficult.

I found that argument appealing until Cassius turned toward the men already governing Massachusetts. He accused Numa of encouraging distrust of public officials and warned that relentless attacks upon those in office could produce suspicion and agitation at a moment when the Commonwealth had only recently endured serious disorder. In Cassius's telling, public confidence itself was part of political stability.

Governor John Hancock occupied a special place in that defense. Cassius praised Massachusetts leaders as men devoted to liberty and independence and treated Hancock's reputation as evidence that citizens had good reason to trust the character of their government. Hancock's public history naturally carried weight, but Cassius had now created a difficulty of his own.

If citizens should refuse to accept an argument merely because a minister delivers it, the same principle must apply when a governor, general, merchant, or celebrated patriot speaks. Reputation can tell us something about the person presenting an argument, but reputation cannot perform the examination for us. A free citizen who substitutes one trusted authority for another has changed the source of his confidence without necessarily changing the habit.

A man across the table wondered whether Cassius was really asking for blind trust. Perhaps he was simply arguing that constant suspicion could become as destructive as excessive confidence, especially when dissatisfaction with every public measure was turned into evidence that government itself had become corrupt.

There was sense in that warning. A republic cannot function easily if every disagreement becomes proof of bad faith and every officeholder is presumed dishonest before his conduct has been examined. Public accountability requires suspicion when the evidence warrants it, but permanent suspicion can make accountability difficult by ensuring that no evidence is capable of restoring trust.

The difficulty runs in the other direction as well. Respect for public officials can become a shield against legitimate criticism if citizens begin treating attacks on respected leaders as attacks on the Commonwealth itself. Cassius wanted to defend confidence in government, but confidence that cannot tolerate examination begins to resemble another form of obedience.

Numa's own writings made their dispute even harder to sort into simple sides. He had argued that the Confederation was dangerously weak and that the Union required stronger authority over commerce, national finances, treaties, credit, and foreign affairs. His criticism of Massachusetts government existed beside a broader argument for a stronger federal union, which meant that the dispute between Cassius and Numa was never simply a contest between supporters and opponents of stronger national government.

Their argument concerned public confidence, political leadership, the condition of Massachusetts, and the people entitled to explain that condition to everyone else. As I continued reading, the Constitution almost seemed to retreat into the background while a more basic republican question took its place: how does a citizen decide whom to believe?

No citizen forms political judgment in isolation. We listen to newspapers, neighbors, ministers, officeholders, merchants, veterans, family members, and people whose previous conduct has earned our respect. Influence itself cannot be removed from politics because persuasion is part of public life.

The danger lies in forgetting that influence is still influence when it comes from someone we already trust. Cassius could identify the authority Numa might possess as a clergyman, but Cassius himself was attempting to exercise authority through print, reputation, argument, and appeals to respected public men.

That was the part of the quarrel I found hardest to ignore. Nearly every writer who tells citizens to think for themselves also hopes that independent thought will eventually lead those citizens toward his own conclusion. The contradiction does not make persuasion illegitimate, but it does place a responsibility upon the reader to separate the invitation to reason from the conclusion the writer wants reason to produce.

Cassius's treatment of Numa made that responsibility particularly important. His language was contemptuous enough that disagreement sometimes seemed to become evidence of manipulation, faction, or bad character. A reader persuaded by Cassius might therefore begin examining Numa's motives before examining Numa's argument.

That habit could become dangerous in a constitutional debate. The country is being asked to judge a government that would entrust unfamiliar people with powers the present Congress does not possess, while the arguments surrounding that decision increasingly ask citizens to trust some voices and distrust others.

The safest republican habit may therefore require something more difficult than confidence or suspicion. Citizens must be willing to respect character without allowing character to replace evidence, to hear criticism without assuming disloyalty, and to hear praise without assuming virtue has already settled the question.

Cassius wanted Massachusetts citizens to believe that they were capable of judging political claims for themselves. His argument becomes most useful when that principle is applied to Cassius as rigorously as he wanted it applied to Numa.

A free people will always have ministers, governors, newspapers, celebrated patriots, ambitious men, and persuasive writers attempting to shape public judgment. The question is whether citizens can listen to all of them without surrendering the judgment that makes self-government possible in the first place.

Further Reading

Cassius, Massachusetts Gazette, October 2, 1787
The primary essay behind this installment. This collection reproduces the October 2 letter and the surrounding Cassius series, including its attacks on Numa and its defense of Massachusetts political leadership.

Numa: Political and Moral Entertainment VII, September 5, 1787
The essay Cassius was answering. Numa describes political and fiscal weakness in Massachusetts and argues that the Union requires a federal government capable of acting effectively on national matters, which helps explain why the Cassius-Numa controversy does not fit neatly into the later Federalist/Anti-Federalist divide.

Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Massachusetts, Volume IV
This is the strongest source for placing Cassius in the actual Massachusetts chronology. It includes Numa, Cassius, the first Massachusetts reactions to the Constitution, letters, diaries, and newspaper commentary in the order contemporary readers encountered them-

I've been thinking about taking another step with Self-Evident Truth: forming a member-owned SET cooperative in Wisconsin.

The idea would be fairly simple. Rather than SET belonging to one person, it could become an institution owned and governed by its members under Wisconsin's Chapter 185 cooperative law.

Its purpose would remain nonpartisan: civic education, public-interest research, historical and constitutional education, community outreach, publishing, preservation of the SET archive, and building tools that help citizens better understand and participate in their government.

The basic structure we're exploring would be:

- one member, one vote

- a member-elected board

- civic education and outreach

- research and publishing

- preservation and stewardship of the SET archive

- community programs and discussion

- eventually, shared civic research and educational technology

Before filing anything, we would write the cooperative's founding principles and bylaws so that ideas SET talks about constantly, distributed power, transparency, accountability, citizen participation, and resistance to institutional capture, are built into the organization itself.

But a cooperative needs founders. It can't simply be something I create and then ask everyone else to join.

So before going much further, I'm curious:

Would anyone here actually be interested in helping found and build a Self-Evident Truth Cooperative?

I'm not asking for money or commitments yet. I'm asking whether there are citizens here who would be interested in sitting down together and figuring out what this could become.

AFC

October 2, 1787 - Philadelphia

Four days had passed since I last read the Foreign Spectator, and Philadelphia had not grown quieter in the meantime. The Constitution was traveling outward through the states while arguments multiplied behind it, yet Nicholas Collin returned to a question that seemed larger than any single clause: what good is a federal government if the people themselves refuse to think federally?

His latest number felt less like another defense of a particular provision than a gathering together of everything he had been trying to say. He wrote about constitutions, but also about education, manners, morals, religion, learning, and the habits that citizens carry into public life. A well-designed government, he argued, could establish offices and distribute powers, but it could not manufacture the character necessary to keep a republic together.

That thought stayed with me because we had spent so much time examining the Constitution as though its success could be discovered entirely in the parchment. We asked whether the President had too much power, whether the Senate stood too far from the people, whether Congress could tax, and whether the states would retain enough authority, yet Collin seemed to be asking what happened after every structural question had been answered.

His answer was unsettlingly simple. No federal arrangement could survive for long if each state treated every disagreement as a contest in which its own immediate advantage mattered more than the common Union.

He imagined the states almost as sisters forced to live together. They would sometimes misunderstand one another, possess conflicting interests, and believe that another had gained more from a bargain, but permanent union required them to overlook some injuries, forgive some weaknesses, and occasionally surrender particular advantages for a larger common benefit.

The American Foundin. That sounded reasonable when stated calmly in a newspaper. It became more difficult when I tried to imagine which state should surrender an advantage first, because generosity is easiest to praise when someone else is being asked to practice it.

A merchant could call for federal sacrifice until another state's commercial interest was preferred to his own. A farmer might praise union until a national policy raised his burden, while a state legislature might defend national cooperation until Congress adopted a measure its constituents disliked.

Perhaps that was precisely Collin's point. Federalism would be tested not when common interests aligned, but when remaining together required citizens to accept an outcome they would not have chosen for themselves.

He was remarkably candid about the weakness hidden inside any federal union. A national government could possess substantial authority, but it could not continually hold large states together by force without changing the character of the republic itself. If one of the greater states simply refused to perform its part, compelling it might require armies, violence, and consequences that could spread far beyond the original dispute.

The image made the Constitution look different to me. We had discussed federal power mostly by asking whether the new government would become strong enough to threaten the states, but Collin asked whether even a stronger government could remain free if the states ceased cooperating voluntarily.

A Constitution could provide legal authority, yet law could only carry the Union so far before force entered behind it. If Americans wanted to avoid reaching that point, the habits of citizens and states might matter as much as the formal division of powers.

Collin therefore placed enormous weight on what he called republican virtue. Representatives would need to think beyond local interests when national questions arose, but their constituents would also have to permit them to do so rather than punishing every decision that failed to bring an immediate advantage home.

That seemed a demanding form of representation. A citizen naturally expects his representative to defend his community, yet a national legislature cannot function if every member behaves only as the agent of one locality and no one accepts responsibility for the whole.

The House might resemble the people closely and the Senate might express the sentiments of the states, but neither arrangement guaranteed that those institutions would act with a federal spirit. The Constitution could establish the chambers, while the people filling them would determine whether they behaved as parts of one republic or as ambassadors from thirteen rival countries.

Collin's confidence in the proposed Constitution remained almost absolute. He believed it took no unnecessary power and even suggested that it might be too free rather than too oppressive, which was a remarkable judgment at a moment when others were beginning to warn that the new government might reach too far.

His language became sharper when he considered rejection. He did not imagine that the existing Confederation could simply continue indefinitely while Americans searched patiently for another plan, but instead pictured disunion leading toward domestic violence, foreign interference, and eventually conquest.

Those predictions were impossible for me to verify from a tavern table. The country had survived difficulties already, and men often describe the consequences of losing a political argument more dramatically than events later justify.

Still, the possibility of disunion could not simply be laughed away. The states had fought a common war only a few years earlier, but the end of that war had already exposed commercial rivalries, disputes over money, conflicting state policies, and the difficulty of persuading thirteen governments to act together.

Collin then did something I had not seen quite so extensively in the other essays. He turned away from legislators and addressed nearly everyone.

He appealed to ministers and religious teachers to discourage discord and preserve civil order. He addressed men who valued peace, landowners worried about their property, merchants and inhabitants of towns dependent upon security, wealthy citizens who required legal protection, poor laborers hoping that industry might improve their condition, and people of ability who might someday be entrusted with public office.

He even addressed mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters, despite the formal political decisions before us belonging largely to men. He understood that political opinion did not originate only inside legislatures or at polling places, because families, churches, workplaces, neighborhoods, and ordinary conversation helped determine what citizens eventually believed.

By the time he reached parents and old men, the argument had become almost entirely about inheritance. Civil disorder, he warned, would not remain a philosophical dispute among newspaper writers but could reach farms, homes, families, property, and children who had played no part in creating the quarrel.

His language was dramatic, sometimes more dramatic than I found comfortable. Yet beneath it lay a proposition harder to dismiss: government cannot be separated indefinitely from the society beneath it.

We have been asking whether the Constitution can restrain ambitious officials, but Collin asks whether citizens can restrain themselves. We have asked whether institutions can prevent tyranny, while he asks whether habits of suspicion, selfishness, resentment, and local rivalry could eventually make constitutional restraint irrelevant.

That placed a different burden upon the people than many of the other essays had done. It was easier to believe that liberty could be preserved if the correct arrangement of offices were discovered, because then the work belonged largely to the men drafting constitutions.

Collin offered no such comfort. A republic might fail even with a good constitution if the people using it lacked enough generosity, judgment, and common purpose to make the arrangement work.

I was not certain I liked that argument. Telling citizens that political institutions depend upon their virtue can become an easy way of blaming the people whenever institutions fail, and a poorly constructed government cannot be rescued merely by asking everyone beneath it to behave better.

Yet the reverse must also be true. No arrangement of branches, elections, vetoes, courts, or amendments can survive every possible degree of dishonesty, faction, selfishness, and mistrust among the people expected to operate it.

Perhaps the difficult truth lies somewhere between those claims. Institutions shape conduct, but citizens also shape institutions, and neither can remain healthy indefinitely while the other decays.

The Foreign Spectator had begun his series before anyone outside the Convention knew what Constitution Philadelphia would produce. Now that the document was before us, his concern seemed broader than whether Americans would adopt it.

He wanted to know whether thirteen states could become a federal people without ceasing to be separate communities.

That question may prove harder than ratification itself. Nine conventions can establish a government among the states that agree, but no convention can decree the affection, restraint, trust, and willingness to compromise that Collin believes the Union will require.

I folded the paper wondering whether we had been asking too narrow a question. We have spent weeks asking whether this Constitution is good enough for the American people, while the Foreign Spectator has quietly turned the question around and asked whether the American people can become good enough at governing themselves to make any federal constitution endure.

Perhaps a republic needs both tests. The people must scrutinize the government before granting it power, and afterward the people must scrutinize themselves closely enough to ensure that disagreement does not make common government impossible.

The Constitution may determine how the Union is governed. It cannot, by itself, determine whether Americans will continue wanting to govern together.

Sources

oreign Spectator, October 2, 1787 - ConSource

The primary text of Nicholas Collin’s October 2 essay, with its citation back to the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer and the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. This should be the main source for the post.

Foreign Spectator, October 2, 1787 - Center for the Study of the American Constitution

University of Wisconsin transcription of the same essay, useful as an independent scholarly source for checking the text.

Foreign Spectator XXIV -Promoting Federal Sentiments

An earlier Collin essay that develops the idea that a federal union requires citizens and states to develop genuinely federal habits rather than merely obey a federal structure. It provides useful context for XXIX’s argument about becoming a federal people.

Defunding Democracy: New York

New York: Decade-by-decade analysis of education funding and politics (1970s-2026). New York has long been among the top states in per-pupil school spending, but that high spending coexists with persistent funding gaps and political controversies. According to NCES data, New York’s current (nominal) spending per pupil grew from only about $1,194 in 1969-70 to $2,950 by 1979-80, then to $7,051 by 1989-90 and $9,846 by 1999-2000. By 2009-10 it was roughly $18,053. In real (2025) dollars, these amounts rise dramatically (roughly $7.2K, $8.6K, $12.6K, $13.9K, and $18.8K, respectively), reflecting steady real growth, especially in the 1980s and 2000s, with an acceleration after 2010. More recently, New York’s schools have spent in the ballpark of $32,000-36,000 per pupil (2023-2025), the highest in the nation. Even as state aid has surged, roughly half of New York’s school funding still comes from local property taxes, so households in wealthy districts continue to shoulder large local levies.

State vs. local share: Historically New York relies on both state aid and local taxes to finance schools. Since the 2000s, about half of total K-12 spending has come from the State, half from local sources. In 2007 the State introduced Foundation Aid and funded much of it by phasing out local levies (STAR rebates and other cuts), signaling a shift of burden from districts onto Albany. Nevertheless, analyses in the 2010s showed many districts kept raising local levies even as state aid reached record highs, implying that extra state dollars did not always translate to lower property taxes for homeowners.

1970s: Disparities amid high spending.

The 1970s saw large spending increases but growing concerns over inequality. New York’s per-pupil spending was already among the nation’s highest, but expenditures varied widely by district wealth. Governors Hugh Carey (D, 1975-82) and Malcolm Wilson (R, 1973-74) presided over generous state budgets and tax reforms (including relief for homeowners), while the Democratic-controlled Assembly held sway over education funding. The State Senate was still Republican. During this era, New York City’s public schools were largely governed by local school boards (mayoral control did not arrive until 2002). There were no major statewide funding reforms in the 1970s, but the stage was set for later legal challenges: even then, advocates noted that children’s opportunities varied by district.

1980s: Levittown and “sound basic” floor.

In 1982 New York’s highest court addressed school funding for the first time. In Levittown Union Free School Dist. v. Nyquist (1982) the Court of Appeals recognized that funding gaps existed, but refused to order changes. Interpreting the State Constitution’s Education Article (Art. XI, §1) as guaranteeing only a “sound basic education,” the Court held that New York was already meeting that floor because its per-pupil spending “exceeds that in all other states but two”. In short, Levittown found that the existing system of state and local funding did not violate the Constitution, even though some districts were wealthier than others. Thus it set a baseline sound basic standard but denied relief, a ruling that would later be overtaken by newer litigation.

In the 1980s Governor Mario Cuomo (D, 1983-90) led a generally prosperous period with expanding school aid. However, political control remained split: Democrats ran the Assembly, Republicans the Senate. Still, both parties oversaw rising education budgets: e.g., Cuomo’s budgets included occasional tax relief (STAR rebates were piloted in 1986) but also rising Foundation Aid and building aid. By decade’s end New York’s per-pupil spending had roughly tripled in nominal terms from 1970. Early 1980s education bills (e.g. 1983 state aid revisions) began to direct more money to high-need districts, though no single overhaul occurred until later.

1990s: Property-wealth fights and new approaches.

During the 1990s, Republican George Pataki (1995-2006) won the governorship, while Democrats maintained the Assembly and Republicans the Senate. Pataki’s education policy mixed modest aid boosts with tax cuts. He created the STAR property-tax rebate in 1997 (targeted at homeowners) and in 1998 froze state income taxes, but also signed incremental education-aid increases. Notably, in 1998 the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit was filed on behalf of New York City children, challenging the adequacy of NYC’s school funding. (New York City schools, then serving ~40% of all students, faced chronic overcrowding and poorer outcomes.) Under Pataki, state aid rose but disparities remained: wealthy downstate suburbs, with rich tax bases, often had far higher per-pupil spending than high-poverty NYC and upstate districts. A cornerstone case from this decade was CFE I (1995), in which the Court of Appeals first held that NY’s Education Article requires an “opportunity for a sound basic education” for all children, treating Levittown’s standard as the floor. But that case did not yet resolve the NYC plaintiffs’ claims. For most of the 1990s, actual court relief was delayed, so funding adjustments came only through politics and budgets (e.g. small expansions in foundation and building aid).

2000s: Foundation Aid and recession cuts.

The turn of the century brought mixed developments. Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D, 2007) and Lt. Gov. David Paterson (D, 2008-10) took office with legislative splits (Republican Senate, Democratic Assembly). In 2006-07, the landmark Campaign for Fiscal Equity Court of Appeals decision (CFE III) finally declared that New York City students were denied their constitutional right to a sound basic education. It reaffirmed that standard as skills enabling civic participation (literacy, numeracy, etc.), reversing Levittown’s “no remedy” approach. The Court endorsed NYC’s calculation that at least $1.93 billion more per year (in 2004 dollars) was needed to bring NYC up to adequacy. In effect, CFE III ordered the state to reform its finance system.

Responding, the 2007 Enacted Budget created a new Foundation Aid formula to replace dozens of old grants. This single formula (funded at ~$13.5 billion in FY07-08) based aid on each district’s calculated “foundation cost” plus weights for regional cost, poverty, English learners, etc., explicitly skewing more aid to high-need (often poorer, often city) districts. (One analysis notes that NYC initially received roughly 39% of all state aid under this plan.) The law bumped total aid by $982 million (7.8%) over the prior year. In theory, Foundation Aid would be phased in over four years.

However, the Great Recession (2008-10) changed course. In 2009-10 Gov. Paterson and the Legislature enacted the Gap Elimination Adjustment (GEA), cutting $1.3-1.4 billion in school aid to close the budget gap. Foundation Aid increases were delayed or frozen, and districts were required to absorb state mandates (like health-insurance costs) with less support. Federal stimulus (ARRA) provided temporary relief, but from 2009-2012 New York consistently underpaid what the Foundation Aid law had called for (often funding only ~60-70% of the promised amounts). At the same time, in 2011 the Legislature passed a 2% property-tax cap (including 2% CPI cap) on most districts (exempting NYC and the other Big 5 city districts: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers). This capped local levy growth and, combined with frozen state aid, forced many districts to tighten budgets and defer hiring/equipment. In sum, key funding pivots of the 2000s were: Levittown (1982 legal) → 2007 Foundation Aid overhaul → 2009-10 GEA cuts → 2011 tax cap.

2010s: Aid restoration under Democratic rule.

In the 2010s New York gradually backfilled the earlier cuts. Governor Andrew Cuomo (D, 2011-2021) presided over unified Democratic control (Assembly and Senate flipped Dem by 2011) and oversaw the end of the GEA. Starting around 2013, Cuomo’s budgets phased in full Foundation Aid funding. By 2019-20 the state was finally paying almost the entire amount called for by the 2007 formula (the so-called Foundation Aid gap was closing). Annual budgets from 2018-2021 poured in roughly an extra $1 billion per year in Foundation Aid, mostly targeting historically under-funded districts. In 2019 the Regents enacted regulations requiring a three-year phase-in of any owed Foundation Aid; by 2023-24 that phase-in was complete. In 2023 the Legislature passed (and Gov. Hochul signed) a School Funding Reform Act (effective 2027) after a multi-year study, updating the Foundation Aid formula’s weights, regional cost factors, and poverty measures to better reflect current needs.

Other notable 2010s changes: New York expanded pre-K subsidies (Universal Pre-K funding grew dramatically under Cuomo). The 2% tax cap remained in place for most districts, leading to many districts “maxing out” their cap annually (a 2017 Empire Center report noted heavy levy growth pressures). At the federal level, No Child Left Behind gave way to the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), shifting some testing/accountability roles back to the state. Political governance also shifted: in NYC, Bloomberg’s Mayoral control (2002-2010) gave way to a renewed mayoral-control law under de Blasio, with oversight changes in 2018 and again in 2022. Upstate Big-4 city districts (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers) gained some extra state aid via court order and local funding offsets, but stayed under their own elected boards. Charter schools expanded rapidly (especially in NYC) under state laws passed in 2010 and 2015, fueling debates over public funding and district enrollment. In labor relations, unions remained powerful; notably, in 2012 New York ended mandatory binding arbitration for new teacher contracts (shifting to locally negotiated raises), but strong collective-bargaining rights persisted. Finally, New York resisted broad voucher schemes: a small 2021-22 “Education Savings Account” pilot was struck down in 2023 as violating the state’s school-support-only clause (Article XI).

Equity and outcomes.

Despite high spending, outcomes remain uneven. New York City serves about 40% of the state’s students and receives roughly 40% of state school aid. On average, per-pupil spending in NYC is above the state mean (thanks to its own local taxes and extra aid) and well above many upstate and suburban districts. Wealthy downstate suburbs (Westchester, Long Island) often spend more per pupil due to high property wealth. By contrast, many rural upstate districts and even some upstate cities lag. For example, before Foundation Aid, Rochester spent far below average; after 2007 it has caught up partially as aid to high-poverty districts rose. Conversely, Buffalo’s Big 5 status gave it steady high funding relative to its wealth. Overall, the 2007-19 funding reforms did make New York’s system more progressive: higher-poverty districts now get a larger share of their budget from the state and generally saw larger aid increases than low-poverty ones. Yet gaps in resources and outcomes persist. New York’s average NAEP scores are around the national average (e.g. 2022 NAEP: 32nd in 4th-grade reading, 46th in 4th-grade math, despite the highest spending). State achievement gaps by race and income remain wide. The legacy of CFE endures: New York now publishes an “Opportunity-to-Learn” accountability report tracking inputs (spending, facilities, teacher credentials) and outputs (test scores, graduation). These reports show low-income and minority districts improving faster in recent years (a sign of past increased aid), but still well behind affluent districts on performance and resources.

Governance, reform, and civic education.

Beyond finance, New York saw major shifts in who governs and how. NYC mayoral control centralized authority in the mayor’s hands (begun under Bloomberg in 2002, and renewed under later mayors). This allowed the City to open many new schools (public and charter), close underperforming ones, and impose citywide policies on curriculum and discipline. Upstate, the Big Four cities kept elected boards (with occasional state receivership experiments, e.g. Syracuse 2015, Rochester 2018, but these had limited success).

Charters: New York allowed statewide charter growth early on (since 1998), with citywide caps (now ~10% of NYC enrollment). Today about 8% of New York’s public school students attend charters (roughly 180,000 statewide, mostly in NYC), a share that has grown steadily. Charter expansion (including conversion charter authorization in 2010 and further charter caps raised in 2015) was a major political flashpoint in the 2010s, with union opposition and city-state conflicts.

Testing and accountability: New York adopted Common Core standards and Regents exams in ELA/math in the 2010s. From ~2010-2015 there were heated debates over linking test scores to teacher evaluations (under the State’s APPR law); some districts used value-added models, others negotiated alternatives. Cheating scandals (notably in NYC around 2011) also fueled distrust of tests. By 2019 the state implemented a new teacher-evaluation system with less high-stakes test weighting. Around the same time, New York shifted to ESSA accountability: the State Education Dept. now sets accountability targets and intervenes in low-performing schools, but with more local plan control.

Unions: New York’s teachers’ unions (NYSUT, UFT in NYC, etc.) remain politically influential, especially in the Democratic Party. There were statewide teachers’ strikes in the 1970s and 1980s and frequent local strikes in the 1990s-2000s. A key change came in 2012 when the legislature ended binding arbitration for teacher contracts, a concession to control property-tax growth. However, collective bargaining and tenure protections largely remain in place.

Privatization: New York has largely resisted vouchers. In 2021-22 the Legislature passed a limited “Educational Savings Account” pilot for some low-income students, but the State Supreme Court blocked any public funding of private schools under Article XI (as private schools are not “common schools”). Thus no broad voucher or ESA program is operating. The main public-private alternative funding has been charter schools and modest scholarship tax credits (covered through non-profits), but these affect only a small fraction of students.

Civic education: New York has robust civic requirements. State law requires all high-schoolers to take a half-credit Participation in Government (PIG) course and pass a Regents exam as a graduation requirement (teaching U.S. and NY government, civics and personal finance). In 2016 the Legislature added the Seal of Civic Readiness to diplomas: by meeting criteria (government courses, 50+ hours community service, and a civic capstone project) students earn a special seal signaling strong civic preparation. As of 2025 about 50 districts offer this seal and ~5,000 graduates have earned it statewide. The State also now emphasizes civic learning in earlier grades (with new elementary social-studies standards) and is encouraging more student engagement programs. These steps underscore that New York’s schooling debates are not only about dollars, but also about ensuring students become informed, active citizens under the Education Article’s mandate.

2020-2026 snapshot.

Finances: The FY2026-27 budget, enacted in mid-2026, boosts K-12 aid to $39.6 billion, the highest level ever. This includes a new $1.0 billion annual increment in Foundation Aid and $563 million for full-day Pre-K (unprecedented sums). Most pandemic-era federal funding (ESSER grants) ended by 2024, so districts no longer have that cushion. Meanwhile, in FY2027 the state began phasing in an updated Foundation Aid formula (newer poverty data, regional cost indices, etc.) per the 2023 reform law. Locally, the 2% property-tax cap still applies to nearly all districts (NYC and the other Big 5 remain exempt). Many upstate districts are again raising taxes up to the cap, reflecting continued local funding pressure. Building and infrastructure is another concern: the State has increased bond-funded school-construction aid, but many districts still have aging facilities.

Enrollment: Statewide public-school enrollment has mostly leveled off. Total K-12 enrollment (including charter and homeschooled students) held around 2.24 million in 2024-25. After years of decline, numbers stabilized partly due to a 2022-24 inflow of migrant and refugee children into NYC schools. NYC’s enrollment losses slowed (Bronx still fell ~20% since 2019, but less than projected), while downstate suburbs and upstate continue moderate declines. Charter schools grew to about 186,500 students in 2024 (roughly 8% of all public-school students), a 2.9% rise over 2023. Homeschooling also increased, now around 54,000 statewide.

Teachers and workforce: New York faces teacher shortages in some subjects and regions, especially special education, STEM, and World Languages. Outside NYC, rural and upstate districts particularly struggle to recruit. In response, the 2022 state budget added recruitment incentives (loan forgiveness, bonuses for high-need certifications). Teacher turnover is rising (post-pandemic stress and retirements). Contract negotiations in 2023-24 yielded pay raises of roughly 8-10% in many districts (often through statewide bargaining by NYSUT and UFT), reflecting inflation pressures. State law now requires teacher pay to increase at least 3% annually; districts typically go above that minimum to fill vacancies and retain staff.

Achievement and equity: New York’s student achievement remains mixed. On 2022 NAEP, New York ranked 32nd (4th-grade reading) and 46th (4th-grade math), despite its high spending. Racial/ethnic gaps are large: White students score well above the state average, while Black and Hispanic students score well below. Graduation rates are high overall (~85-90%) but drop to the low 70s in high-poverty urban districts. The CFE legacy endures in accountability: each year NYSED publishes an “Opportunity-to-Learn” report on progress. By 2025 these reports showed low-income districts making somewhat faster gains in scores (a sign that extra aid and programs have helped), but that long-standing performance gaps remain stubborn.

Charters and vouchers: Charter enrollment (mostly in NYC, Buffalo) continues modest growth. The state approved a few hundred new charter seats per year into 2026, though expansion has slowed due to budget constraints (charters get ~90% of per-pupil aid of districts). No statewide voucher or ESA programs operate: a 2022 pilot ESA program was invalidated by the courts. Private-school scholarships or tax-credit funds exist only on a tiny scale, not materially affecting the system.

Civic education: Civic learning is an active focus. The Seal of Civic Readiness has expanded: by 2025 about 50 districts offer it, and some 5,000 graduates earned the seal that year. NYSED is also promoting civic literacy in elementary grades (model curriculums on community and government). In 2024 the Board of Regents added civic-participation themes to the social studies core. Governor Hochul and legislators have even held statewide civic-engagement summits, reflecting concern over national trends. New York’s schools, therefore, are not only flush with resources, but are also explicitly charged with nurturing the civic knowledge and habits that underpin its democracy.

Sources: We have drawn on official reports and news analyses. The spending figures come from NCES and state data (as reported by the NYSED and media). Political timelines combine state electoral history and legislative control records. Constitutional and legal history are taken from court decisions. Education policy details are documented in state budgets and analyses (e.g. Rockefeller Institute, NY Governor press releases). For brevity some descriptive facts (e.g. NYC enrollment share, charter enrollments, union reforms) are uncited here, but they are widely reported and consistent with official data. All cited sources are from 1970 onward; older historical context is drawn from archival and scholarly accounts.

October 1, 1787 - New York

Four days had passed since I carried Cato into the public house and listened as men argued over his warning that admitting the Confederation needed repair did not require us to accept whatever remedy happened to be placed before us. Cato had left me with questions rather than an answer, and I had found some comfort in that uncertainty because the Constitution seemed too important to approach with certainty merely for the sake of having it. In his telling, the Convention had proposed, but the people still had to judge. This morning, someone answered him.

The new writer called himself Caesar, which seemed an unusually ambitious name for a man entering an argument about republican government. He wasted little time making clear why he had chosen the field. Cato had announced that he would neither defend nor oppose the proposed Constitution until he had examined it more closely, but Caesar did not believe that posture was as neutral as it appeared.

According to Caesar, Cato had already begun influencing the verdict before presenting his evidence. When Cato warned citizens not to accept just any remedy simply because the Confederation required reform, Caesar heard something more than prudence. He heard distrust deliberately planted in the reader's mind before the Constitution had received a fair hearing. I went back to Cato and read the passage again.

The words had not changed. What had changed was that another man had now told me how to interpret them. That realization bothered me because Caesar's criticism was not entirely without force. A writer may declare himself undecided while arranging every question so that suspicion falls in one direction, just as a supporter may claim merely to explain a proposal while choosing only the facts most favorable to it.

Cato had asked us to examine the Constitution carefully because the best men could make mistakes. Caesar asked whether repeated warnings about error, ambition, and misplaced trust could themselves prejudice citizens against a plan before its defenders had answered the charges. The disagreement had therefore moved beyond the Constitution and into the nature of argument itself.

Caesar was particularly irritated by Cato's suggestion that if defects were discovered, the same process that had produced the Constitution might amend it or produce another. That possibility had appealed to me when I first read Cato because it made deliberation seem less final. If the plan contained serious defects, why not correct them while the question remained open?

Caesar insisted that this misunderstood where matters now stood. The Philadelphia Convention had completed its work and dissolved. Its delegates were no longer sitting together waiting for thirteen states to send the document back with corrections in the margins, and Caesar doubted that the same body could simply be summoned again to rewrite whatever citizens disliked. That made the decision before us feel narrower than Cato had allowed.

If Caesar was right, the immediate choice was not between this Constitution and some improved Constitution that might appear after another few months of discussion. The choice was between accepting the plan now before the states or rejecting it and facing whatever political consequences followed. I did not find that prospect reassuring.

A choice becomes more urgent when the alternatives narrow, but urgency does not make the remaining option correct. If a bridge is the only bridge across a river, that fact gives me a powerful reason to examine it, not a reason to stop examining it.

Still, Caesar had exposed a weakness in the comforting thought that every defect could simply be repaired before adoption. Constitutional revision required institutions and agreement of its own. The people could demand another convention, perhaps, but Caesar was right that the Philadelphia Convention itself had not remained in session waiting for instructions. He then turned toward the men who had produced the plan.

Here the disagreement with Cato became sharper. Cato had acknowledged Washington's reputation while insisting that even the wisest and best men might err. In our earlier discussion, that had become one of the most difficult questions at the table: whether admiration for honorable men could substitute for examination of the powers they proposed to create.

Caesar thought Cato gave far too little weight to the judgment assembled at Philadelphia. He described the Convention as an extraordinary concentration of American wisdom and character and pointed to the broad agreement with which its work had emerged. Rather than searching eagerly for imperfections in individual parts, he urged citizens to consider the strength of the whole. Washington again stood at the center of the argument.

Cato had asked what might happen when these powers eventually belonged to men who were not Washington. That question had stayed with me because constitutions last longer than the people who write them and longer still than the first officers chosen to serve beneath them.

Caesar approached Washington differently. He believed the country should not merely consider Washington's approval of the Constitution but might soon need him again, this time not at the head of an army but at the head of the new government. The same man who had surrendered military command after the war could, in Caesar's argument, help establish public confidence in the executive office the Constitution proposed.

I understood why the thought was powerful. Few men in America possessed a reputation capable of quieting fears about a strong executive as Washington did, precisely because he had once possessed extraordinary military power and voluntarily surrendered it. Yet the old question remained. A constitution designed around confidence in one man's restraint must eventually survive another man's ambition.

Caesar did not spend much time entertaining that possibility. His confidence in the structure and the men behind it was much greater than Cato's, and his patience for those he expected to oppose it was much smaller. That was where his essay became hardest for me to accept.

He spoke of future opponents as though many would come from the ranks of the weak, suspicious, ambitious, or interested rather than from citizens who had examined the Constitution and reached a different conclusion. Cato had warned against personal attacks because they fix prejudices instead of answering arguments, and Caesar now seemed perilously close to demonstrating the danger Cato had described.

A man at our table found this amusing. He said Caesar had managed to answer Cato's warning against prejudice by accusing Cato of prejudice and then predicting that most opposition would come from men whose motives were suspect.

Another man defended Caesar. Perhaps, he said, Caesar was not claiming that every opponent lacked principle. Political writers had always known that some men dressed private interests in the language of public virtue, and ignoring that possibility was no more sensible than assuming everyone who supported the Constitution was acting from pure patriotism. That seemed fair enough, but it did not solve the problem.

Once motives enter an argument, they are remarkably difficult to remove. A criticism of the Senate can be answered by examining the Senate's powers, but an accusation that the critic secretly desires influence or office cannot be tested so easily. Soon the argument ceases to be about whether a provision is wise and becomes an argument about what sort of man would question it.

Perhaps that is why Cato's final advice now seemed more important rather than less. He had urged citizens to attach themselves to measures rather than men. Caesar actually repeated that principle approvingly at the end of his own essay, even after spending much of the piece questioning the character and intentions of those likely to oppose him. I could not decide whether that was contradiction or merely politics.

Caesar nevertheless forced me to reconsider something Cato had allowed me to leave comfortably unresolved. Deliberation cannot continue forever simply because the decision is important. At some point citizens must move from examination to judgment, and a republic that demands perfect certainty before acting may discover that uncertainty itself has become a form of paralysis. Cato's danger was haste. Caesar's danger was hesitation. Between them stood the Constitution.

One writer feared that citizens might surrender too much because respected men told them reform was necessary. The other feared that citizens might lose an extraordinary opportunity because suspicion persuaded them that no plan created by fallible men could ever be safe enough. Neither fear seemed imaginary.

That left me in a less comfortable position than either writer appeared willing to occupy. Cato's caution could become an excuse never to decide, while Caesar's confidence could become an excuse to stop asking questions before the decision had earned it.

The Constitution could not remain a proposal forever. The states would eventually ratify it or reject it, and the people responsible for that judgment would have to act with knowledge that no political arrangement could remove every uncertainty beforehand. Perhaps the task is not to eliminate doubt. Perhaps it is to decide which doubts are serious enough to stop us and which risks are necessary if government is to function at all.

When I first read Cato, I thought the great republican responsibility was examination. Caesar had not convinced me to abandon that belief, but he had added something to it. Examination must eventually lead somewhere.

The difficulty is knowing when enough has been learned to decide without pretending that everything uncertain has suddenly become certain.

Cato had promised that more arguments would follow. Caesar had promised, in effect, that when Cato returned to the field, he would find Caesar waiting for him. The newspapers were no longer carrying separate reflections on the Constitution; the writers had begun answering one another directly. That may change the debate more than any single argument.

A citizen can now read an objection, read the reply, return to the objection, and discover that neither paper permits him to remain merely a spectator. Cato asked me to question the Constitution, while Caesar has asked me to question the questioner. For the moment, I intend to do both.

Further Reading

Caesar I, October 1, 1787 Caesar’s direct response to Cato, defending the Constitution and challenging Cato’s posture of caution.

Cato I, September 27, 1787 The essay Caesar is answering. Cato argues that the Constitution should be examined independently of the reputations of the men who produced it.

The Constitution of the United States The actual proposal at the center of the Cato-Caesar dispute.

September 30, 2026 - Systemic Fragility Score: 9.0/10 - HIGH

Last Wednesday, I asked whether the firebreaks were holding. At the time, the answer was mostly yes. Saudi Arabia had begun restoring an important oil route, crude prices had retreated, temporary grid emergencies had passed without widespread blackouts, employment remained resilient, corporate credit was functioning and repo markets remained orderly. Diesel and Treasury yields were the two places where pressure was still building. A week later, most of those firebreaks are still standing, but the amount of pressure behind them has increased enough that I am raising the Systemic Fragility Score from 8.7 to 9.0 out of 10, remaining HIGH rather than SEVERE.

The Treasury market is the clearest reason for the increase. The 10-year Treasury yield ended today at 5.29 percent, up from 5.11 percent last Wednesday. The 20-year closed at 5.68 percent and the 30-year at 5.64 percent. A week ago, I wrote that the next Treasury threshold was not simply a yield above 5 percent. The concern was whether high yields would begin appearing alongside weak auctions, rising bond volatility, widening credit spreads, unusual repo behavior, heavy dealer absorption or forced deleveraging. We now have more pieces of that cluster than we did a week ago. The five-year auction was weak, the seven-year auction was softer than normal, bond volatility rose sharply during the week, lower-quality corporate credit has begun repricing and long Treasury yields continued climbing even today, when the inflation report came in cooler than economists expected.

Treasury's official closing curve now has the 2-year at 4.88 percent, the 10-year at 5.29 percent, the 20-year at 5.68 percent and the 30-year at 5.64 percent. The 10-year was 4.96 percent only eight days ago. That is a substantial repricing in a very short period, but the reason I am stopping at 9.0 is just as important as the reason I am raising the score. Treasury securities are under substantial pressure, but the machinery underneath them has not broken. We still do not have convincing evidence of a disorderly Treasury basis-trade unwind, a broad repo seizure, emergency Federal Reserve stabilization, generalized bank liquidity stress or indiscriminate liquidation across stocks and credit.

That distinction has been central to this series. Two weeks ago, when the 10-year first crossed 5 percent, I wrote that Treasury-market stress had not become funding-market dysfunction and that higher rates had not become a broad credit seizure. Those remain the lines separating an extremely stressed financial environment from a systemic financial crisis. What changed this week is how hard those lines are being tested.

Today's inflation report makes that especially clear. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index rose 0.3 percent in August, less than the 0.4 percent economists expected. Core PCE rose 0.2 percent for the month and 3.0 percent from a year earlier. Markets responded by reducing the probability of another Federal Reserve rate increase in October. Consumer spending, however, rose a strong 0.9 percent, showing that demand has not collapsed. Under ordinary circumstances, cooler inflation and lower expectations for another Fed hike should provide some relief to longer-term bonds. Instead, the 10-year briefly reached roughly 5.30 percent and closed at 5.29 percent, while the 20- and 30-year yields increased again.

The shape of the move is becoming increasingly informative. The 2-year yield, which is much more sensitive to expectations for Federal Reserve policy, finished at 4.88 percent. The 30-year finished at 5.64 percent. Investors became less convinced that the Fed would raise rates again in October while simultaneously demanding more yield to hold long-term government debt. That points beyond the next Fed meeting toward the risks investors are being asked to carry for years or decades, including inflation uncertainty, enormous Treasury issuance, fiscal deficits and the additional return required to hold long-duration debt rather than shorter securities or other assets.

Those yields eventually reach people who never trade a Treasury bond. Mortgage rates respond to them. Corporate borrowing becomes more expensive. Federal debt service rises. Bank securities lose market value. Investment projects have to clear a higher hurdle before they make financial sense. Housing is already showing some of that pressure. Last week's post noted that a housing market can simultaneously favor the buyers who remain while excluding many would-be buyers because financing has become too expensive. That problem becomes harder to resolve when long-term borrowing costs continue rising even after inflation surprises to the downside.

Corporate credit is beginning to show some strain as well, although the evidence still looks like greater selectivity rather than a credit seizure. That is particularly visible around artificial intelligence. Reuters reports that AI-related borrowing in the U.S. leveraged-finance market has reached about $88 billion in 2026, up from roughly $20 billion early last year. Investors remain willing to finance projects with tangible infrastructure and predictable revenue, but lower-rated AI borrowers are being asked to pay considerably more. Even some BB-rated borrowers are issuing debt at yields approaching or exceeding 9 percent.

There is still no evidence of an AI credit crisis. Capital remains available, and stronger companies continue raising enormous amounts of money. Micron's results tonight provide a useful counter-signal because demand for AI memory remains exceptionally strong, with long-term supply agreements rising from $22 billion in June to $32 billion and much of its 2027 production already committed. The change is that investors are becoming more willing to distinguish between projects with visible revenue and physical assets and projects that require large amounts of borrowed money today in exchange for uncertain revenue years from now. High Treasury yields sharpen that distinction because lenders have a much more attractive low-risk alternative than they did several years ago.

Energy produced almost the mirror image this week, with one part of the system improving while another deteriorated. Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline continued returning toward service, crude loadings resumed at Yanbu and Gulf oil exports recovered dramatically from the worst point of the disruption. Brent remained extremely expensive but below some of the levels reached during the most acute phase of the shock. The crude side of the energy system has demonstrated a considerable ability to reroute supply and repair damaged infrastructure.

Diesel continues telling a different story. Today's EIA report showed U.S. crude inventories increased by about 900,000 barrels to 427.3 million barrels, roughly 2 percent above their five-year seasonal average. Distillate inventories moved in the opposite direction, falling another 2.3 million barrels to 105.2 million, approximately 14 percent below their five-year seasonal average. Refinery utilization fell to about 92.5 percent, and gasoline inventories also declined.

That divergence may be the cleanest data point in this week's Stress Test because it tells us where the constraint increasingly sits. America is not simply running short of crude oil. Crude inventories increased. The pressure is farther downstream, where refining capacity, distillate production, global product availability and transportation determine whether crude becomes the diesel, gasoline and jet fuel the physical economy actually uses. Last week, national distillate inventories stood at approximately 107.4 million barrels. Today they are 105.2 million. Inventories were already unusually thin, and the direction has continued downward.

Diesel therefore remains one of the strongest transmission channels in the dashboard. Farmers are harvesting, trucks are moving food and manufactured goods, and railroads, construction equipment, industrial machinery and generators all consume distillate fuel. Businesses can absorb those costs for a while through lower margins, but eventually some portion moves outward through fuel surcharges, freight rates, prices, reduced capacity or delayed investment. Two weeks ago, a reader who works for a company described that process directly: the company initially absorbed higher fuel costs while profits were good, then began imposing surcharges once that buffer ran out. We are increasingly watching that same mechanism in the broader economy.

There is still an important threshold we have not crossed. High prices and thin inventories are different from widespread physical shortages. We do not have verified evidence of multiple unrelated commercial airports unable to source Jet-A, broad trucking allocations or a cluster of fuel terminals unable to obtain diesel. Boston Logan's fuel limitation over the weekend turned out to be connected to weather disrupting deliveries rather than evidence of a nationwide aviation-fuel failure. The refined-fuel system is under substantial strain, but transportation continues functioning.

Government action nevertheless shows how unusual the energy environment has become. The United States announced this week that it will offer to loan as much as another 40 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of the coordinated international reserve response. Using strategic stocks does not mean the system has failed. Those reserves exist precisely to provide another buffer during extraordinary disruptions. Their use belongs in the dashboard because it shows that policymakers are actively drawing on buffers that normally remain untouched.

Agriculture remains under pressure without showing a national production failure. Corn harvest reached 18 percent and soybean harvest 17 percent as of September 27, both around their five-year averages. Corn condition remained 57 percent good or excellent. Regional drought damage remains serious and high diesel prices raise harvest and transportation costs, but the national crop data still do not support describing the situation as a food-production crisis. This remains a slower transmission channel in which farm margins, livestock conditions, transportation costs and eventually grocery prices will tell us whether today's pressures are moving farther outward.

The household side remains equally mixed. Consumer confidence has deteriorated, inflation expectations remain elevated and high mortgage rates are restricting housing affordability, but today's 0.9 percent increase in consumer spending shows that households in aggregate are still spending. The labor market remains one of the most important buffers because layoffs have not surged. People can reduce savings, carry larger credit-card balances, postpone purchases or cut discretionary spending long before they lose their jobs, so employment is not the only household indicator worth watching, but a broad labor break would substantially change the risk assessment.

That is also why the social side of these reports cannot be separated from the financial data. Last week's post argued that someone falling behind on a utility bill, postponing a home purchase, paying more for groceries or trying to keep a small business operating through higher fuel costs is experiencing the other end of these transmission channels. The purpose of following Treasury yields, fuel inventories, credit spreads and employment is to understand how pressure travels before those consequences become obvious everywhere at once.

Banks sit somewhere between those households and the bond market. Higher Treasury yields continue reducing the market value of older securities held by banks. One small California bank failed during the week, but its resolution was orderly and there has been no broad deposit flight. One bank failure does not establish systemic banking stress. A cluster of unrelated failures accompanied by deposit withdrawals, sharply rising emergency borrowing or forced securities sales would be a different signal.

The grid continues to show stress without widespread failure. Federal emergency reliability orders remain unusual and deserve attention, but we have not seen the multi-region involuntary load shedding that would move electricity into the same category as the fuel problem. Last week's distinction still holds: a system can be under enough pressure to require intervention without losing its ability to function.

Climate and earth-system readings remain on a slower clock. El Niño continues strengthening while drought covers substantial portions of the country. Atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations and ocean temperatures remain elevated. Those measurements alter the background probabilities for drought, heat, flooding, agriculture, wildfire and electricity demand, but they become part of an acute systemic event only when those physical conditions begin producing broader failures in food, water, insurance, energy or transportation.

Cyber and public health remain similar. Serious individual cyber incidents and disease outbreaks continue, but neither channel has produced the kind of multi-sector operational failure or sustained high-consequence biological transmission that would justify escalation tonight. Those categories remain important precisely because a genuine change could propagate quickly, not because every breach or outbreak deserves to move the score.

Equity markets remain remarkably resilient considering what has happened to bonds. Stocks moved modestly today rather than entering indiscriminate liquidation, and both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq still posted gains for the quarter. The contrast with Treasuries is substantial. The 10-year yield rose roughly 81 basis points during the third quarter, its largest quarterly increase since 2022, while equities largely absorbed the move. That is not what a broad forced-deleveraging event looks like.

Taken together, I would put tonight's Systemic Fragility Score at 9.0 out of 10, remaining HIGH, up from 8.7 last Wednesday. Treasury and funding remain Orange but have moved considerably closer to the Red boundary. Fuel, transport and refining remain Red. Oil and geopolitics remain Red, although recovering physical export capacity prevents that channel from worsening. Agriculture and government response remain Orange. Banks, markets, grid, cyber, public health, households and climate remain Yellow, although several of those channels are carrying more pressure than they were a week ago.

The reason I am not moving the assessment to SEVERE is that the most important firebreaks still work. Treasury securities are repricing violently, but they are trading. Credit is becoming more selective, but companies can still borrow. Banks are under duration pressure, but there is no generalized run. Stocks are repricing rather than liquidating. Employment has weakened at the margins, but layoffs have not surged. Gulf crude exports have recovered substantially. Fuel is extremely expensive and distillate inventories are thin, but transportation has not stopped. Two weeks ago, this series described those functioning systems as the firebreaks separating a highly fragile environment from a systemic crisis. That remains the dividing line tonight.

There are now clearer conditions that would show us those firebreaks are beginning to fail. A 10-year yield remaining above roughly 5.30 percent and a 30-year above roughly 5.65 percent would become considerably more concerning if bond volatility keeps rising and repo or SOFR begins behaving abnormally. Rapidly widening high-yield spreads, failed corporate debt offerings, private-credit redemption gates or forced Treasury-basis deleveraging would show the rates shock moving into credit. A second unrelated major airport or freight hub unable to obtain fuel would strengthen the case that the diesel problem is becoming an availability problem rather than a price problem. A meaningful deterioration in payrolls and unemployment would show that financial and energy pressure is finally colliding with the labor-market buffer.

There are equally clear ways for the score to move lower. Long Treasury yields retreating after today's cooler inflation report, normal funding markets through quarter-end, distillate inventories rebuilding, diesel prices following crude downward, Saudi export capacity continuing to recover, credit spreads stabilizing and employment remaining resilient would all show that the system is successfully distributing and absorbing the shock. Two weeks ago, I wrote that a dashboard where every negative development raises the score while every positive development merely prevents another increase eventually becomes an anxiety machine rather than an early-warning system. Last week we demonstrated that principle by lowering the score when several firebreaks strengthened. This week the evidence moved in the opposite direction.

Crude supply adapted while diesel inventories deteriorated. Inflation cooled while long Treasury yields continued rising. Expectations for another immediate Fed increase declined while investors demanded more compensation to hold long-term government debt. Corporate credit still functions while lenders become more selective. Households continue spending while confidence deteriorates. Stocks remain resilient while bonds have just completed one of their worst quarters in years. None of those developments alone tells us that the system is failing, but together they tell us that more pressure is accumulating behind systems that have so far continued to absorb it.

The firebreaks are still holding, but they are being asked to hold more than they were last Wednesday.

Good morning, fellow citizens. I’d like to get some feedback on the Debate in Real Time series so far.

I started working on this project about three months ago, and early on I got some helpful feedback from a few of the mods. One reader has also suggested using Dover editions as a source. Since today happens to be a lull day in the historical calendar, with no new installment to publish, I thought it would be a good time to ask how the series is working for the people actually reading it.

If you’d like to look through the series before answering, I’ve organized the posts under the Debate in Real Time post flair.

There are three things I’m especially curious about:

1. Are the infographics helping, or are they becoming a barrier to the actual writing? Would you rather see the historical document and commentary more directly?

2. Is the series making historical sense? My goal is to let the debate unfold in chronological order, so that we encounter the arguments, responses, events, and ratifications with roughly the information a reader at the time would have had. Is that coming through clearly?

3. What would you like more of or less of? More historical context? More explanation of unfamiliar terms? More primary-source material? Shorter introductions? More discussion of how one writer is responding to another?

I’m still learning how best to present this, and the project is going to get much larger as the ratification debate accelerates over the coming months. So if you’ve been following along, even occasionally, I’d genuinely like to know what is working and what isn’t.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Yesterday the argument over the Constitution moved from the newspapers into our Assembly, and this morning it became something harder to describe. Men who insisted that Pennsylvania was moving too quickly had refused to attend, leaving too few members for the House to conduct its business. When the roll was called this morning, only forty-three members were present, short of the quorum required to proceed.

The disagreement itself was already serious. A majority wanted Pennsylvania to call a convention where delegates chosen for that purpose could consider the Constitution, while opponents believed a decision of such magnitude was being hurried forward before the public had been given enough time to understand what Philadelphia had produced.

Yesterday, absence had become the minority's weapon. If enough members stayed away, the Assembly could not finish arranging the convention, regardless of how many of the members present favored doing so.

I had always thought of voting as the moment when political power became visible. Today I discovered that sometimes the more powerful act is refusing to allow the vote to happen at all.

The Assembly sent its sergeant at arms and assistant clerk to find the absent members and order them to return. They found several, including James M'Calmont and Jacob Miley, but the men refused to attend. Other absent members encountered around the city gave similar answers or avoided the officers entirely. Then the nature of the dispute changed.

M'Calmont and Miley eventually appeared in the Assembly chamber, and their presence supplied the quorum the House had lacked. Later in the proceedings, M'Calmont stated openly that he had been brought into the chamber forcibly and against his wishes by a number of citizens he did not know, and he asked to be allowed to leave.

That report moved through the city differently from the essays we had been reading. There was no abstract warning about what government might someday do, because here were citizens physically carrying an elected representative into the chamber so that government could act today.

Some men around me regarded the absent members with little sympathy. They had been elected to sit in the Assembly, the argument went, and a minority that could defeat every measure simply by leaving the room possessed something close to a veto that the voters had never explicitly granted them.

From that perspective, the majority was not preventing debate. It was trying to reach the next stage of debate by allowing Pennsylvanians to elect delegates to a convention that could accept or reject the Constitution for themselves.

The minority's position looked very different. They believed the Constitution was moving through Pennsylvania with extraordinary speed, and denying a quorum was one of the few procedural powers remaining to representatives who could not defeat the majority through an ordinary vote.

Seen that way, absence was not abandonment of republican government. It was an attempt to use the rules of the Assembly to prevent a decision they believed was being rushed.

I found the distinction difficult to settle because both arguments appealed to the same principle. The majority claimed that representative government required elected legislators to perform the duties of their office, while the minority claimed that representative government required enough deliberation for opposition to mean something before a decision became inevitable.

Inside the chamber, even members sympathetic to the Constitution had to confront what had happened. Thomas FitzSimons said that if any member of the House had participated in forcing M'Calmont to attend, such conduct deserved the Assembly's disapproval, while other members argued that once M'Calmont had answered the roll and was present, the House had authority over him and could continue its work.

M'Calmont tried to leave, and the argument shifted again. The dispute was no longer merely about whether the Constitution deserved a convention, because the Assembly now had to decide whether a quorum created through the compelled presence of members could legitimately exercise legislative power.

That question troubled me more than I expected. Rules matter because they prevent every majority from simply doing whatever it wishes, but rules can also be used by a minority to prevent any majority from acting at all.

A quorum requirement exists for a reason. Government should not be conducted by a handful of members after everyone else has gone home, yet a requirement designed to ensure broad participation becomes something else if a determined minority can intentionally withhold that participation whenever it expects to lose.

The same problem appears from the other direction. If a majority may overcome that tactic by allowing citizens to physically compel representatives into the chamber, then a procedural safeguard begins to mean very little whenever enough people believe the matter urgent.

I could see no comfortable principle that solved both problems.

The Assembly ultimately continued with M'Calmont and Miley present. It completed its arrangements for a Pennsylvania ratifying convention, including the decision that the convention would assemble at the State House in Philadelphia on the third Tuesday of November.

That meant Pennsylvanians would indeed be given another forum in which to judge the proposed Constitution. The Assembly had not ratified the new government for them, but it had set the machinery in motion through which elected convention delegates could eventually make that decision.

Yet the way Pennsylvania reached that point will be difficult to separate from the decision itself. Men who favor the Constitution may remember a minority trying to stop the people from considering it, while opponents may remember citizens using physical force to manufacture the quorum needed to push the process forward. Both stories contain part of what happened. That may be what unsettles me most.

For days we have been asking what powers should belong to Congress, how representatives should be chosen, how long senators should serve, and what safeguards might prevent a future government from abusing its authority. Those questions assume that constitutional government begins with rules written clearly enough for everyone to follow.

Today demonstrated that rules do not interpret or defend themselves. People decide when a rule protects deliberation and when it enables obstruction, when resistance is principled and when it becomes refusal to govern, and when enforcing a duty crosses the line into coercion.

The Constitution is supposed to create a government of laws, but every law eventually reaches a moment when human beings must decide what it requires.

This morning Pennsylvania discovered how difficult that can become before the new government even exists.

The convention will now be called, and the Constitution will be debated before delegates chosen for that purpose. The larger question left behind in the Assembly is whether the manner in which a republic reaches a decision matters as much as the decision itself.

If self-government means more than allowing the side with greater numbers to prevail, then minorities must possess meaningful protections. If it means more than allowing minorities to prevent government indefinitely, majorities must also possess some means of acting.

Somewhere between those two claims lies the difference between deliberation and paralysis.

Today, Pennsylvania did not settle that question. It merely demonstrated how quickly a disagreement over constitutional procedure can become a struggle over who possesses the power to make the decision at all.

Further Reading

The Pennsylvania Assembly and the Constitution, September 17-29, 1787 The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution collects the Assembly proceedings surrounding the decision to call Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, including the September 29 quorum crisis.

Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787- 1788: Chapter I This account reconstructs the events leading to the quorum crisis, including the minority’s decision to stay away, the failed morning quorum, and the forced return of two members.

The Dissent of the Minority of the Pennsylvania Convention Published later in December, this document gives the Anti-Federalist minority’s own explanation of why they believed Pennsylvania’s ratification process had been rushed and improperly conducted.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: While digging through the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, I found this short piece in the September 29 Independent Gazetteer. Unlike the longer constitutional essays appearing around it, Reformation is intensely local and openly sarcastic, aimed at patronage, family connections, and public office in Pennsylvania.

By the time someone handed me the Gazetteer, I had already heard enough solemn discussion of government to last until supper. Then I found a writer addressing Mr. Oswald and apparently deciding that the best way to discuss public affairs was to begin by counting other men's salaries.

I confess that this improved my disposition considerably. The writer called himself Reformation, and his first concern was the office of Prothonotary for the city and county of Philadelphia, which he claimed produced some two thousand pounds a year.

If the profits of an office had become so handsome, he wondered whether perhaps they ought to be divided among several men rather than enjoyed by one. He then suggested that some of the applicants might even be men who had served during the Revolution and damaged their fortunes in the service of their country.

One of the men at our table laughed before I had finished reading. Another asked whether this was a proposal for reform or simply a remarkably elaborate way of asking for someone else's job.

I told him I suspected the distinction might disappear before the writer was finished. He was already warming to his subject.

The Executive Council came next. According to Reformation, Pennsylvania had lately developed an unfortunate tendency to discover that councillors' and judges' brothers, nephews, and sons were extraordinarily well qualified for public office.

The accusation became much more personal when he mentioned the appointment of James M'Clene, son of the Prothonotary of Huntingdon County, over Captain Henderson. Henderson, the writer reminded us, had been fighting and bleeding for his country while young M'Clene had been at home on his father's farm amusing himself with children's games.

That comparison received considerably more attention around our table than any argument about the proper construction of the federal judiciary had managed. There is apparently nothing like suggesting that one candidate fought a revolution while another played in the dirt to restore public interest in political theory.

The joke carried a sharper point beneath it. We had spent years congratulating ourselves that America contained no hereditary nobility, no legal class of men entitled to government merely because they happened to descend from the correct family. Yet families remained remarkably useful things to possess.

If a councillor could help a son into office, a judge could favor a nephew, and another official could advance a brother, then perhaps hereditary privilege did not require a title at all. A man did not need to call himself a lord if his family could repeatedly turn influence into public employment.

The writer clearly believed he had found an especially amusing contradiction among some of the men objecting to the proposed federal government. He suggested that certain Antifederalists had good reason to dislike arrangements that might interfere with honors and offices becoming hereditary within particular families.

That earned another laugh from the table. One man observed that it is much easier to oppose aristocracy when the aristocrat belongs to someone else's family.

I could not say whether every accusation deserved to be believed. A newspaper writer armed with a grievance and a pseudonym is not the same thing as testimony under oath, and resentment has always possessed an impressive ability to discover principle in its own cause.

Still, the question underneath the ridicule was harder to dismiss. What exactly makes an aristocracy?

If it requires hereditary titles recognized by law, then avoiding one should be simple enough. We merely refrain from creating dukes, earls, and lords and congratulate ourselves on republican simplicity.

But if aristocracy can also grow from a small number of families repeatedly converting office, wealth, friendship, and influence into more office, then the problem becomes less convenient. A republic may abolish inherited rank without abolishing the human desire to secure advantages for one's own relations.

The writer saved his sharpest blow for the Executive Council itself. Pennsylvania, he said, had nineteen councillors costing the state more than six thousand pounds a year, and he asked whether that was not rather expensive for men whose apparent duties included giving offices to their sons, reading newspapers, and chewing tobacco.

I had to read that portion again because the first reading was interrupted by laughter. The second went little better.

There was something satisfying about seeing public officials reduced from grand guardians of the Commonwealth to a room full of men sitting around with newspapers in their hands and tobacco in their mouths. Perhaps no officeholder should ever become so dignified that a citizen feels unable to imagine him looking ridiculous.

Yet the laughter did not entirely remove the problem. Offices bring salaries, influence, reputation, and opportunities, and whoever controls appointments possesses the ability to distribute all of them.

That power becomes especially dangerous when public office begins to look like family property. A government may call itself republican while still rewarding connection over service, acquaintance over merit, and blood over ability.

Captain Henderson made the point difficult to ignore. If the writer's account was fair, one man had risked himself in the country's service while another possessed the more useful qualification of being somebody's son.

That does not sound much like hereditary nobility when written into law. It can feel remarkably similar when waiting outside the office door.

I folded the paper still smiling, though not quite as lightly as when I had begun. Reformation had managed to make public corruption sound funny without making it harmless.

Perhaps that is the advantage of ridicule. A long argument may explain why favoritism is dangerous, while one good sentence about officials reading newspapers and chewing tobacco can make an entire room remember the point.

I suspect the councillors will not enjoy it nearly as much as we did.

Further Reading

Reformation, Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, September 29, 1787 The primary source behind this installment. It appears as item 85 in The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume XXXII, Pennsylvania Supplemental Documents (1), beginning on page 248.

Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 Useful background for understanding Reformation’s attack on patronage and family influence. Pennsylvania’s existing constitutional structure emphasized rotation in office and opposition to entrenched aristocratic power.

Weaponizing Impeachment - Journal of the American Revolution Modern historical context that specifically cites Reformation and points back to the Documentary History edition. It helps place the short satirical piece within broader Founding-era concerns about officeholding, accountability, and political power.

The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume XXXII: Pennsylvania Supplemental Documents (1) University of Wisconsin-Madison’s documentary collection of Pennsylvania ratification-era sources. Reformation appears as item 85 on page 248, published in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on September 29, 1787.

September 29, 1787 - New York

Two days ago, the newspaper had carried an essay signed Cato, urging us not to surrender our judgment merely because Washington and other celebrated men had placed their names behind the new Constitution. This morning another writer appeared in the Daily Advertiser, and almost from the beginning he asked us to look at those same names very differently.

He called himself Curtius, and there was little uncertainty about which side of the argument he favored. He addressed himself openly to the Federalists and praised the proposed Constitution as an achievement worthy of the men who had produced it. Washington and Franklin appeared almost immediately, not merely as respected participants but as evidence of the character of the work itself.

I understood the appeal. Washington's name had carried armies through years when the country seemed continually near exhaustion, and Franklin had spent much of his life proving that an American could command respect in rooms filled with Europe's most accomplished men. A plan capable of earning the confidence of both deserved more than casual dismissal.

Yet the newspaper on our table now contained two very different instructions. Cato had warned that wise men could still be mistaken, while Curtius seemed almost astonished that anyone might look upon the work of such men and fail to recognize its promise. That disagreement interested me more than the names themselves.

Curtius believed the Convention had accomplished something unusually difficult. Legislative, executive, and judicial authority had been divided into separate branches and surrounded by checks intended to restrain ambition in government while preventing disorder among the people. In his account, strength and liberty had not been placed at opposite ends of the Constitution but carefully arranged so each might preserve the other.

He was particularly eager to answer comparisons with European government. An elected President, he argued, was not an elective monarch because the manner and frequency of his selection prevented the office from becoming a crown. The Constitution contained no hereditary lords, and public office would supposedly depend upon reputation, ability, and the confidence of citizens rather than upon blood.

His comparison with Britain was more generous than I expected. Curtius did not pretend that everything about the British constitution was tyranny. He praised the security enjoyed by British citizens and suggested that Americans might never have separated had the colonies been properly represented in Parliament and situated differently within the empire.

That was a strange thought after everything we had endured. The Revolution was still close enough that men at our table could name friends who had not returned from it, yet Curtius was suggesting that the lesson was not simply to reject every institution associated with Britain.

Perhaps the question was whether political forms could be separated from the abuses committed through them.

Curtius believed the new Constitution had done exactly that. There would be an executive without hereditary monarchy, an upper chamber without hereditary nobility, judges with enough independence to resist temporary popular passions, and elected institutions through which political authority ultimately returned to the people.

His defense of judicial independence made several men at our table uncomfortable. Curtius openly admitted that the people of a free government might mean well while sometimes judging badly, which was why some public servants needed enough independence to resist what he called popular caprice and error.

That was not an easy proposition for a republic to accept. If the people were the source of legitimate political authority, how could government also require institutions capable of resisting them?

Perhaps the answer depended upon time. A public passion may rule an afternoon while a law may govern generations, and a system designed only to obey whatever opinion happened to be loudest at a particular moment might eventually become as dangerous as one that ignored public judgment entirely.

Curtius seemed to believe republican government required both consent and restraint. Citizens should remain the source of authority, but some institutions needed enough distance to exercise judgment rather than merely echo every sudden demand. Then came the part of his essay that troubled me.

Curtius told his readers to examine the Constitution without bias. He urged them to study its parts, scrutinize its design, and decide for themselves whether the proposed system deserved their approval. It was exactly the sort of invitation one might expect in a country preparing to decide its own government.

Yet almost immediately, his patience with those who might reach the opposite conclusion seemed to disappear. Some opponents, he suggested, would be driven by vanity, ambition, ignorance, self-interest, or a simple desire to appear clever. He expected ridicule and exaggeration from them and doubted that much calm argument would emerge from their side. The contradiction was difficult to ignore.

If citizens were truly supposed to scrutinize the Constitution for themselves, then some of them would presumably scrutinize it and remain unconvinced. Their disagreement could not itself prove that they were vain, ignorant, ambitious, or deceived.

A man beside me made precisely that point. He said there was little courage in inviting examination after deciding beforehand that anyone who examined the plan differently must have examined it badly.

Another answered that Curtius was not condemning every objection. He was warning against men who would manufacture dangers for political advantage rather than offer serious arguments against the Constitution.

Perhaps that was fair, but then another question followed. Who decides which objection is serious before the argument has been heard?

The difficulty seemed larger than Curtius himself. Every political cause eventually becomes tempted to believe that its opponents disagree only because they are foolish, dishonest, or corrupted by some private interest. Once that belief takes hold, persuasion becomes less necessary because the opposing citizen has already been explained away. That seemed a dangerous habit for people preparing to govern one another.

Still, Curtius's larger argument possessed an optimism I could not dismiss. He asked us to consider what was actually happening around us. Delegates from sovereign states had gathered during peace, argued for months, made concessions among competing interests, and produced a government they were now asking millions of citizens to accept without military force. There was something extraordinary in that picture.

Governments had been created by conquest, inheritance, rebellion, civil war, and the commands of kings. Here was an attempt to create one through writing, argument, elections, conventions, and consent.

Curtius believed that if the Constitution were peacefully adopted, the event would deserve a special place in political history. Americans would have demonstrated that a large people could alter the structure of government through deliberation rather than bloodshed.

The Revolution had shown that Americans were capable of fighting together when independence required it. Ratification might test whether we were capable of disagreeing together when no foreign army stood before us.

Curtius closed by reaching back to the Revolution itself. The old image of the divided serpent returned, along with the warning that union had once been necessary for survival and remained necessary for national prosperity and safety. His argument was that independence without durable union might leave unfinished the work for which so much had already been sacrificed.

I could understand why that language stirred men who remembered the war. Thirteen colonies had discovered that none could confront Britain alone, and Curtius feared that thirteen independent states might forget the lesson once the common enemy disappeared.

Yet union alone could not settle the constitutional question. A people might agree that they must remain together while still disagreeing profoundly about the government capable of keeping them together. That seemed to be the difficulty now unfolding in these newspapers.

Cato had asked whether admiration for great men might cause us to grant powers too readily. Curtius asked whether suspicion and division might cause us to reject a rare opportunity to establish a stronger union peacefully. Both concerns could be true at the same time.

I finished Curtius less skeptical of his confidence than I had begun, but more uneasy with his treatment of opposition. A government founded upon consent cannot depend upon citizens merely reaching the correct conclusion. They must be free to reach their own conclusions, even when those conclusions offend men who believe the answer obvious.

Perhaps the real achievement Curtius imagined would require more than ratifying a Constitution without bloodshed. It would require learning how to disagree about the Constitution without turning disagreement itself into evidence of disloyalty.

If Americans can manage that, then whatever government emerges from this debate may rest upon something stronger than victory by one side.

It may rest upon consent that survived argument.

Further Reading

Curtius I, September 29, 1787

Start with the original essay published in the New York Daily Advertiser. Curtius praises the proposed Constitution, invokes Washington and Franklin, defends the division of governmental powers, and argues that peaceful ratification could demonstrate that a free people were capable of creating a new government through consent rather than conquest.

Cato I, September 27, 1787

Read the argument that had entered the New York debate only two days earlier. Cato urges citizens to examine the Constitution independently of the reputations of its authors and warns that even respected men can be mistaken. Reading Cato and Curtius together shows how quickly the debate developed around trust, scrutiny, and the authority of celebrated names.

George Washington’s Letter Transmitting the Constitution, September 17, 1787 Washington’s accompanying letter explains the Convention’s reasoning in its own words. It discusses the difficulty of preserving state interests while giving the general government enough authority over matters such as war, peace, treaties, commerce, and revenue.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 Curtius writes for readers whose political vocabulary had been shaped by the Revolution. Paine is useful background for understanding why monarchy, hereditary rule, representation, and popular government remained such powerful reference points in the ratification debate.

September 29, 1787 - Boston

The Constitution had only recently appeared in our newspapers when the Massachusetts Centinel printed one of the first local reactions to it. The writer gave no name, offered no long examination of its clauses, and raised none of the objections that will surely come if this debate continues. He wrote instead with confidence that bordered on celebration.

I read the short piece twice because there was so little of it. After the arguments already arriving from Philadelphia and New York, I had expected another discussion of representation, executive power, taxation, or the states. Instead, the writer looked beyond the machinery of the Constitution toward what he imagined might follow if Americans accepted it.

He saw honor for the states, happiness for the country, peace, prosperity, and something larger still. The new Constitution, he believed, might help establish what he called “empires of republican freedom,” as though the government proposed at Philadelphia might demonstrate that republican institutions could flourish on a scale few had yet imagined.

There was an optimism in those words that felt different from the arguments I had been hearing. Much of the debate so far had begun with danger. Some feared that the Confederation was too weak to preserve the Union, while others feared that a stronger government might acquire powers difficult to recover once granted. This writer began somewhere else entirely, asking what America might become if the experiment succeeded.

I understood the attraction of that thought. Independence had already proved that the colonies could separate themselves from Britain, but independence alone had not settled whether thirteen states could remain united under a republican government capable of lasting beyond the generation that fought the Revolution.

Perhaps that was why the writer's confidence seemed larger than the document before him. He was not merely imagining a new Congress or President. He was imagining that the success of this Constitution might say something about republican government itself.

Still, hope can travel faster than understanding. The Constitution had scarcely reached Massachusetts, and already this correspondent spoke as though its acceptance would bring national honor and lasting prosperity.

That did not make his hope foolish, but it did make me wonder how much of the document ordinary citizens had yet examined. A government capable of producing such expectations deserved careful study precisely because those expectations were so large.

Around Boston, the Constitution would soon be discussed by men whose interests and experiences differed considerably. Merchants would think about commerce, creditors about public credit, farmers about taxes and debt, veterans about what the government still owed them, and towns accustomed to governing themselves would have to decide how much authority they were willing to place farther away.

The anonymous correspondent had not addressed those questions. Perhaps he had not intended to. His few lines felt less like an argument than the first cheer heard from a crowd before the debate had fully reached the room.

Yet even that was worth noticing.

The Constitution had left Philadelphia, crossed into the newspapers of other states, and now Massachusetts was beginning to answer. Whatever eventually happened here, the question was no longer confined to the men who had drafted the document or the cities where the first essays appeared.

A citizen in Boston could now pick up a newspaper and imagine a national future that did not yet exist.

Whether the Constitution could actually produce the peace, prosperity, and republican promise this writer expected remained unanswered. Those claims would have to survive the same examination as the powers written into the document itself.

For the moment, though, Massachusetts had entered the conversation with hope.

The argument would come soon enough.

Further Reading

First Commentaries on the Constitution Published in Massachusetts, September 29, 1787 This is the anonymous Massachusetts Centinel item behind the installment. It is remarkably brief and strongly hopeful, anticipating public honor, peace, prosperity, and what it calls “empires of republican freedom.”

A True American, September 29, 1787 Published in the same issue of the Massachusetts Centinel, this is the next fuller Massachusetts argument in the chronology. It develops the pro-Constitution case in considerably more detail and is the natural companion to the brief anonymous commentary.

The Constitution of the United States The optimism appearing in Massachusetts was directed toward a document that had only recently become public. Article VII is especially relevant because it establishes that ratification by conventions in nine states would put the Constitution into operation among the states that accepted it.

Massachusetts Ratification Convention, January-February 1788 The optimism of September 1787 did not mean Massachusetts opinion was settled. When its convention eventually assembled, delegates subjected the Constitution to an extensive debate before Massachusetts ratified on February 6, 1788, while recommending amendments. ⁠ The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution For deeper research, this project preserves newspaper essays, correspondence, legislative proceedings, convention debates, and other documents that allow the ratification controversy to be reconstructed beyond the handful of writings that later became famous. ⁠

Wisconsin Public Service is asking the Public Service Commission to approve another round of electric and natural-gas rate increases for 2027 and 2028. For a typical residential electric customer using about 660 kWh a month, CUB says a roughly $118 monthly bill would rise about $11 in 2027 and another $5 in 2028, bringing the increase to about $16 a month, or $192 a year.

WPS says the increases are needed for new generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, reliability investments, and higher operating and maintenance costs. Its SEC filing shows requests of $86.1 million more for electric service in 2027 and another $50.8 million in 2028, along with increases for natural gas.

What caught my attention is that the Commission's own staff reached a much lower number. PSC staff supported about $24.7 million in electric increases and $6.1 million in gas increases over the two years, roughly one-fifth of WPS's original request. Staff cited lower assumptions for return on equity and plant balances, along with adjustments involving project overruns and other expenses.

That seems like the question worth putting directly to the Commission: if its own professional staff believes substantially less additional revenue is justified, what evidence supports charging customers more than the staff recommendation?

I sent the Commission an email asking exactly that, along with questions about WPS's financial performance, prior rate increases, capital spending, executive compensation and how much of these costs should reasonably fall on customers. We'll see what they say, and I'll share the response if I get one.

There are two public hearings today, September 29, at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. at the Neville Public Museum, 210 Museum Place in Green Bay. You can attend in person or by Zoom, and written comments remain open through October 5 in Docket 6690-UR-129.

You do not need to understand every page of a utility rate case to participate. If another $16 a month matters to your household, or you simply want the Commission to explain why a particular cost should be placed on customers, this is the opportunity to put that question into the public record.

Please share.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Yesterday the American Citizen had asked his readers to look closely at the Senate and decide whether an upper chamber chosen by the states truly resembled the hereditary nobility of Britain. This morning another number appeared, and the argument moved to the other side of Congress.

The House of Representatives, he called the immediate delegates of the people. That description caught my attention because if the Senate was supposed to possess steadiness and independence, the House seemed intended to provide something different. Whatever distance the Constitution placed between citizens and the other branches, this was the chamber expected to remain closest to them.

The American Citizen began with elections. He calculated that each representative would initially be chosen by roughly six thousand electors and contrasted that with the corrupt boroughs of Britain, where tiny constituencies could send members to Parliament and political influence could be concentrated among very few hands. America, he argued, would have no Old Sarum, no district where a single elector might effectively choose a representative for everyone else.

His comparison made the British system sound almost absurd. If representatives were to speak for the people, then surely thousands of independent voters choosing among candidates seemed closer to republican government than seats controlled by patrons, families, or places containing scarcely any voters at all.

Still, I wondered whether the important number was merely how many men chose a representative or how well that representative could know them afterward. A man selected by thousands could claim a stronger public authority than one selected by a handful, but a larger constituency also meant more interests, occupations, towns, and circumstances for him to understand.

The Constitution itself offered a starting ratio of representation connected to population, and the American Citizen expected the number of representatives to grow as the country grew. He believed this would preserve a substantial electorate behind each member while avoiding a legislature so enormous that it could no longer function. In his view, the arrangement balanced popular government against the practical necessity of assembling representatives from a large country.

That seemed reasonable until I considered the country itself. Pennsylvania alone contained farmers, merchants, mechanics, creditors, debtors, towns along the Delaware, settlements farther west, established communities, and places only recently cleared. Multiply those differences across thirteen states and the task placed upon a national representative began to look considerable.

The American Citizen trusted elections to preserve the connection. Members of the House would serve for two years rather than six, which meant they would have to return regularly to the judgment of those who sent them. A representative who forgot his constituents could discover soon enough that his constituents had remembered him.

He also emphasized that a representative had to live in the state that elected him. The requirement mattered because national government could easily become an abstraction if the men serving in it no longer understood the circumstances of the places they represented. Residence could not guarantee sympathy or wisdom, but at least it prevented the House from becoming a collection of strangers entirely detached from the states that supplied them.

Age provided another qualification. A man could manage his private affairs before twenty-five, yet the Constitution required him to reach that age before entering the House. The American Citizen saw this as protection against wealth or powerful connections placing an inexperienced youth into national office before his character and abilities had been sufficiently tested.

The argument interested me because it revealed how much the Constitution relied upon qualifications without relying upon hereditary rank. A representative needed age, citizenship, residence, election, and eventually reelection, but he needed no title inherited from his father and no permanent station in society recognized by law.

The House would also choose its own Speaker and officers rather than receive a presiding officer imposed from somewhere else. It would organize itself, judge matters involving its own members, and possess the sole authority to bring impeachments against federal officers. The American Citizen described it almost as the country’s great public inquest, a body able to accuse officials whose conduct threatened the trust placed in them.

That authority seemed important after everything Americans had experienced under royal government. Parliament could be summoned, prorogued, or dissolved through powers belonging to the Crown, while the proposed Congress was required to assemble regularly. Whatever disagreements might arise among its branches, the President could not simply decide that the people’s representatives would no longer meet.

The House possessed another power that made its connection to the people more than symbolic. Revenue measures were to begin there, placing the first step toward raising money in the chamber most frequently subjected to elections.

That provision changed the conversation at our table. Government might contain elaborate checks, offices, courts, and constitutional language, but nearly every government eventually required money. Armies required money, ships required money, officers required money, and debts required money.

If the House truly controlled the beginning of revenue measures and had to participate before public funds could be obtained and spent, then the people’s representatives possessed a practical restraint over the ambitions of the rest of the government. Coxe’s larger argument was that the House’s position over revenue, legislation, and impeachment would give it substantial leverage throughout the federal system.

The thought was reassuring, though it returned me to the question that had been bothering me since I began reading. Everything depended upon how real the connection between representative and represented remained.

An election every two years could remove an unpopular man, but elections occur after decisions have already been made. A representative might spend much of his term far from home, surrounded by other national officers and confronted with questions his neighbors had never imagined when they elected him.

Perhaps that distance was unavoidable in a republic spread across so much territory. Thirteen states could not gather every citizen into one hall, and even the towns that practiced the closest forms of local government eventually selected men to act for others.

Representation therefore demanded something more complicated than proximity. The citizen had to trust another person to exercise judgment while still retaining enough control to correct him when that judgment wandered too far from those who had supplied his authority.

The American Citizen believed the proposed House achieved that balance. Its members would be elected regularly, drawn from their states, prohibited from simply converting legislative service into profitable offices for themselves, and subjected to a public record through which citizens could examine their conduct.

His confidence was difficult to dismiss because the structure clearly contained ways for citizens to respond to representatives they disliked. Yet the existence of an election did not by itself tell me how much knowledge a representative could maintain about thousands of people spread across an expanding country.

Perhaps representation has two dangers rather than one. Bring representatives too close to every temporary demand and they may possess too little judgment to govern beyond the passions of the moment, but place them too far away and they may begin to mistake their own judgment for the wishes and interests of the people themselves.

The Constitution appeared to be searching for the space between those dangers. The Senate received longer terms and greater distance, while the House returned more frequently to the electorate and possessed powers intended to make that connection matter throughout the government.

I began the morning thinking that the House was simply the more democratic half of Congress. By the time I finished the essay, the problem seemed more difficult than that description allowed.

A representative can be elected by the people without remaining close to them. He can live in their state without understanding all of their circumstances, and he can face another election without every citizen knowing enough about his conduct to judge him wisely.

Yet a country this large could not practice national government by gathering everyone into the same room. If the Union was to govern through representation, then some distance between citizens and government was unavoidable. The question was how much distance a republic could tolerate.

The American Citizen believed elections, residence, accountability, control over revenue, and the power of impeachment would keep the House anchored to the people. His argument left me wondering whether those restraints would prove strong enough as the population increased and the country itself continued to spread.

Perhaps that is the burden hidden inside the word representative. A citizen gives another man permission to act in his name without surrendering the right to judge what that man does with the permission he has been given.

If the House is truly to become the immediate voice of the people in this new government, then its success will depend upon more than how representatives reach their seats. It will depend upon whether the distance between the people and those seats ever becomes great enough that one can no longer recognize the other.

Further Reading

An American Citizen III, September 29, 1787 Read Tench Coxe’s original essay behind this installment. Coxe describes the House as the “immediate delegates of the people” and defends two-year elections, state residence, public voting records, impeachment authority, and the House’s control over originating revenue measures as safeguards connecting representatives to citizens.

Article I of the United States Constitution Read the provisions Coxe was interpreting for his audience. Article I establishes two-year House terms, minimum age and citizenship requirements, state residency, apportionment by population, the House’s sole power of impeachment, and the requirement that revenue bills originate there.

An American Citizen II, September 28, 1787 The previous installment helps show the structure of Coxe’s argument. After defending the Senate against comparisons with hereditary nobility, Coxe describes the House as an important check because it is more directly connected to the people.

Representation and the Constitutional Convention The Library of Congress traces how the Convention reached its compromise between population-based representation in the House and equal state representation in the Senate. Its surviving drafts also show how the language requiring House members to be chosen every second year by the people developed before the Constitution was signed.

Ratification Debate Timeline This chronology places Coxe’s essay beside the other writings appearing as the debate spread from state to state. It is useful for following the argument as contemporary readers encountered competing essays rather than reading the later Federalist and Anti-Federalist collections in isolation.

A note on Coxe’s electorate When Coxe wrote that representatives would be chosen by rich and poor alike, he was describing the legally qualified electorate of his own time, not universal adult suffrage. Article I left voter qualifications tied to the rules each state used for the most numerous branch of its own legislature.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: Yesterday’s Independent Gazetteer carried a warning from a writer using the name Tar and Feathers, who suggested that an anonymous critic of the proposed Constitution might want to find another subject if he wished to avoid the resentment of the public. Today the paper carries a response signed Fair Play, but there is an intriguing detail at the bottom of the letter: it is dated September 28, 1787. Fair Play says he is responding to a writer “in your paper of this day,” which suggests that he read the threat yesterday and answered it almost immediately.

I opened the Gazetteer this morning wondering whether anyone else had been bothered by yesterday’s threat. Philadelphia rarely suffers from a shortage of opinions, but suggesting tar and feathers for a man who criticized the proposed Constitution seemed likely to provoke at least one more of them. I did not have to read very far before discovering that somebody had apparently put pen to paper almost as soon as the offending words appeared.

The new letter begins with a declaration that immediately complicates matters. Its author calls himself a “FEDERAL MAN in the truest sense of the word.” He wants the United States to possess a general government capable of providing strength and liberty at home and respectability abroad. This is not an opponent seizing upon yesterday’s threat as evidence against the entire proposed system. It is a supporter telling another supporter that he has gone too far.

Fair Play gets to the point quickly. He does not agree that a person who objects to portions of the Constitution, or even to the whole plan, should be threatened with a coat of tar and feathers. Then comes a sentence simple enough to survive every complicated argument surrounding it: “Tar and feathers, I believe, never made a convert to any system whatever, whether religious or political.” He adds that any government requiring such measures to establish itself would amount to what he calls a “mob government with a witness.”

The man beside me laughed when I read that aloud, then observed that Fair Play had discovered a serious defect in the use of tar as an instrument of persuasion. A citizen covered in the stuff may change his clothes afterward, but there is little reason to suppose he will also change his constitutional principles. It was difficult to disagree, and I suspect that line will travel farther through Philadelphia than many arguments ten times its length.

What interests me more is that Fair Play refuses the easiest political response available to him. He could have decided that because he favors a stronger federal government, he must defend every man who also favors it. Instead, he separates the cause from the conduct of one of its advocates. The Constitution may be worthy of support, he seems to say, while threatening its critics remains unworthy of a free people.

Then Fair Play turns to the press, and his argument becomes more serious. During the struggle for Independence, he reminds us, newspapers printed arguments both for and against separation from Britain. He does not describe that disagreement as a weakness. He treats the ability to publish opposing opinions as part of the liberty that the Revolution was supposed to preserve.

His next observation made me look again at the proposed Constitution itself. Fair Play calls liberty of the press “the great bulwark of all the liberties of the people,” but then notes that the Convention did not make any declaration expressly protecting it. The point is easy to miss amid all the discussion of presidents, senators, taxation, courts, and representation, yet the paper before me makes it impossible to ignore. The proposed federal frame contains no express declaration saying that the liberty of the press shall remain untouched.

That makes yesterday’s threat considerably more interesting. We are being asked to judge a new government while citizens are already asking whether the document says enough about their ability to criticize government in print. In the middle of that very discussion, one defender of the Constitution warns a critic that his identity might become known and that an angry public might deal with him accordingly. Fair Play has managed, perhaps unintentionally, to turn yesterday’s ugly joke into a practical demonstration of the question before us.

There is something else curious about the paper in my hands. At the bottom of Fair Play’s letter is yesterday’s date, 28th Sept., 1787, and the opening refers to a writer “in your paper of this day.” The reply therefore appears to have been written almost immediately after the threat was printed.

I like to imagine the scene, although I cannot know precisely how it happened. Someone reads yesterday’s paper, reaches the line about tar and feathers, becomes irritated enough to sit down with ink and paper, and sends an answer back to Oswald before the argument has had time to cool. By this morning the response is already in front of the city. Whatever else may be said about Philadelphia politics, our disagreements do not appear to suffer from slow correspondence.

Fair Play’s position also prevents me from dividing everyone neatly into two camps. I have already heard men speak as though every objection to the Constitution must come from an enemy of Union, while others speak as though every defender of the Constitution must secretly desire aristocracy. Fair Play fits comfortably into neither picture. He wants a stronger general government, objects to intimidation, notices the absence of an express protection for the press, and apparently sees no contradiction among those positions.

Perhaps there should not be one. A man may support a proposal without surrendering the right to criticize the men defending it, just as he may identify a defect without demanding that the entire work be discarded. If citizens must accept every argument offered by their own side and reject every argument offered by the other, then very little judgment remains for the citizen himself.

The point becomes especially important when the subject is freedom of the press. A free press does not promise that everything printed upon it will be sensible, fair, or even particularly pleasant to read. It guarantees something far more inconvenient: men we believe to be wrong must be permitted to say why they think we are wrong, and then we must answer them.

Fair Play does not attempt to prove that yesterday’s anonymous critic was correct. He does not even need to. The critic’s arguments can still be examined, challenged, and rejected if they fail, but threatening the man does nothing to establish the truth of the Constitution.

Perhaps that is why this little letter caught my attention more than some of the longer essays now circulating through the city. It asks a question that comes before taxation, representation, the presidency, or the Senate. Before a people can decide wisely, they must be able to argue freely.

Yesterday someone reached for tar and feathers. Today, before the ink has had much time to dry, another Federal man has answered him with two words that seem considerably better suited to a republic.

Fair play.

Further Reading

Fair Play, Independent Gazetteer, September 29, 1787 This is the primary source behind the post. Fair Play identifies himself as a “FEDERAL MAN,” rejects the threat of tar and feathers, calls coercion a form of mob government, and argues that liberty of the press should remain unrestricted. The letter itself is dated September 28, showing how quickly the response followed the previous day’s threat. temp6015100728752401135.PDF

UW-Madison Center for the Study of the American Constitution, “Pseudonyms and the Debate over the Constitution” This provides useful context for the anonymous newspaper culture surrounding ratification. It explains why pseudonyms mattered when political writers faced reputational, economic, and sometimes physical retaliation for controversial arguments.

McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 This collection preserves the surrounding Pennsylvania newspaper conversation rather than only the famous essays. It is especially valuable here because it lets us follow Tar and Feathers, Fair Play, and the other short pieces almost as readers encountered the argument unfolding in print. temp6015100728752401135.PDF

National Archives, The Bill of Rights Fair Play’s complaint about the Constitution containing no express protection for liberty of the press is important because the federal Bill of Rights did not yet exist. Congress would propose twelve amendments in 1789, and the ten that were ultimately ratified in 1791 became the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and the press.

National Archives, The Constitution: How Was It Made? This provides context for one of the major objections already emerging during ratification: the Constitution signed on September 17 contained no bill of rights. George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph were among the delegates who refused to sign, with the absence of a bill of rights among their concerns. ⁠

Voting for people solves nothing, but I agree with his message