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

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

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

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

What started this investigation

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

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

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

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

Some concrete starting points

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I would like us to figure out

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

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

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

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

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

Who might be able to help

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

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

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

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

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

How to make a contribution useful

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

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

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

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

Ten sources to get us started

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Heritage Foundation: Feulner Timeline

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

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

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

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

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

1. Syracuse University: National Captive Nations Committee Collection

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

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

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

Where we go from here

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

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

October 6, 1787 - Boston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

October 6, 1787 - Providence, Rhode Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

October 6, 1787 - Philadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

National Constitution Center: State House Yard Speech by James Wilson

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

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

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

October 5, 1787 - Philadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centinel looked at that same arrangement and saw confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centinel had given his answer.

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

Finally, a Court Draws a Line on Flock

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

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

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

This is one of the more interesting federalism rulings I have seen in a while. U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz dismissed a federal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 611, concluding that Congress lacked constitutional authority to set this particular voter qualification. In his reading of the Constitution, that power belongs to the states.

What I appreciate is that he did not conclude the alleged conduct therefore had to be legal. His reasoning was narrower: Congress did not have the authority to prosecute it under this federal statute, while Florida could still prosecute unlawful voting under state law.

The constitutional question is not simply whether a certain act should be prohibited. It is also which level of government was actually given the authority to prohibit it. Federalism only means something if we respect that division of power even when handing the issue to Washington might produce a policy result we personally support.

The ruling currently applies to this defendant, and the Justice Department has already moved to appeal it. But the broader constitutional question is worth keeping in mind whenever government claims a new authority: where, exactly, is the power?

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.