Centinel I, Part IV: So Great a Country

            The degree to which Samuel Bryan believed that simplicity was an absolutely essentially element of any government intended to remain apart from despotism, tyranny, and corruption – and the extent to which he was convinced that this need for simplicity was grounded upon a very practical course of reasoning – was made exceptionally clear in paragraphs seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen of Centinel I, all of which sought to address the evident inadequacy of the “extended republic” which the advocates of a more centralized national government tacitly endorsed. The issue at hand was essentially one of size. In addition to taking issue with certain aspects of the structure of government proposed by the United States Constitution, it seemed, Bryan was also highly suspicious of the scale of the undertaking and its effect upon the end result. How could any government, he seemed inclined to ask, intended to exert its authority over the United States of America in such granular areas as taxation, commerce, monetary policy, and criminal justice possibly do so in a manner that didn’t prejudice the needs of certain communities over those of others? Notwithstanding the immense diversity of interests which the various states collectively represented – from plantation agriculture, to mining, to industry, shipping, shipbuilding, and banking – the tremendous physical distances between America’s major population centers, state capitals, and the national capital – at that point, in October of 1787, New York City – presented a host of seemingly insurmountable logistical challenges which Bryan appeared unconvinced that the proposed constitution had adequately addressed. How, in attempting to make law for – and, perhaps more pressingly, lay taxes upon – an otherwise fairly loose agglomeration of communities whose daily lived experiences and practical concerns were not particularly alike, could any government forced to operate at often very significant distances from its constituents possibly create and implement policies that adequately served their needs?

            In attempting to answer this question, Bryan delved for perhaps the only time across the length of Centinel I into the realm of political theory. As it happened, the ability of a large swath of territory to be successfully governed as a republic had been discussed to significant effect by no less august a personage in the realm of Western philosophy than that estimable architect of the theory of separation of powers in government, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755). In his highly influential tract, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) – discussed here previously on more than one occasion – Montesquieu made specific mention, within the context of a larger discussion about the unique qualities of various kinds of governments, of what he believed to be the ideal relationship between the republican form of administration and the physical dimensions of the region to be administered. A stable republic on a large scale was essentially impossible, the great philosophe affirmed, because the mechanism upon which the republican model depends in order to function – i.e. the distillation and implementation of public opinion – worked best in conditions that favored a clear consensus of thought and action. “In a large republic,” he thereby asserted,

The public good is sacrificed to a thousand views; it is subordinate to exceptions; and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have a less extent, and of course are less protected.

The phenomenon which Montesquieu had evidently observed was that it tends to be harder to form an actionable consensus as the number and diversity of opinions involved increases. A group of five people, for example, can almost certainly decide where they’re going to have lunch much more quickly and easily than a group of fifty, or five hundred, or five thousand. As this tendency applied to the business of republican government, it had evidently struck the author of The Spirit of the Laws that the greater the number of people directly involved in seeking out and pursuing the public good, the less likely it became that the public good would ever actually be served. Though Montesquieu did not provide a detailed explanation as to how and why this would be the case, a moment’s thought would seem to affirm the essential logic of his contention.

            Consider, to that end, the topic of trade. In a small republic whose economy is completely and uniformly dominated by agriculture, policy discussions would almost certainly be ruled by the underlying consensus that securing access to viable export markets for the produce of the nation must be among the first priorities of government. Doubtless there would be some objection to this among whatever urban artisans or manufacturers reside within the republic in question. Those seeking to establish a local market for their goods must needs oppose the freedom of trade – and the accompanying lack of economic protections – sought by their agriculturalist neighbors. But the overriding lack of economic diversity essentially guaranteed by the small size of the relevant polity would more or less ensure that such complaints never rise to the level of threatening the aforementioned political consensus. If that same republic were to grow, however, by steadily encompassing territories whose climate, natural resources, or geo-physical situation inclined them towards different kinds of industries than were theretofore possible under the flag of their newfound government, the result must inevitably be the splintering of public opinion and the breakdown of the accustomed consensus. Now possessed of a substantial mining sector, say, as well as an even larger manufacturing sector, it could no longer be taken as a given that the various individuals chosen to sit in the national assembly of the republic could and would arrive at a speedy and effective definition of the public good. With agriculture now possessing a much decreased economic significance, and mining and manufacturing competing for the position of rising industrial concern, compromise becomes essential for any progress to be made at all. While this is not in itself a crippling condition, the end result would almost certainly be as Montesquieu described it. The public good, once quite narrowly defined and easily implemented, becomes “subordinate to exceptions,” takes on a vaguer and more generic character, and no longer serves to benefit quite as deeply as it once did.  

            Samuel Bryan’s description of essentially this same phenomenon in the aforementioned passages of Centinel I are what arguably attest to his familiarity with its terms. Indeed, he affirmed explicitly in paragraph seventeen that,

It is the opinion of the greatest writers, that a very extensive country cannot be governed on democratical principles, on any other plan, than a confederation of a number of smaller republics, possessing all the powers of internal government, but united in the management of their foreign and general affairs.

While this is not Montesquieu exactly, the influence of that earlier writer’s ideas upon the general contours of Bryan’s expressed opinion would seem clear enough. This becomes yet more obvious when one considers his further comment in paragraph nineteen of Centinel I that,

If one general government could be instituted and maintained on principles of freedom, it would not be so competent to attend to the various local concerns and wants, of every particular district, as well as the peculiar governments, who are nearer the scene, and possessed of superior means of information [.]

Granted, Bryan and Montesquieu did appear to come at the same issue from slightly different angles. Montesquieu believed that the inability of republican government to function adequately on a large scale stemmed from the difficulty that must ever arise from distilling many and diverse opinions into useful policy. The greater the number of views that must be taken into account, he asserted, the harder it becomes to locate and act on the public good. Bryan, by comparison, seemed to be concerned more with the physical ungainliness of a large republic than its tendency to govern in terms of poorly-defined generalities.

            Speaking specifically of the United States of America as it existed in 1787 – a union of thirteen states stretching some fifteen hundred miles north to south – Samuel Bryan avowed that whatever government could possibly administer the whole of its extensive territory without succumbing to despotism would inevitably struggle to do so in a particularly effective manner. “The various local concerns and wants, of every particular district” would surely be beyond the abilities of a general government to acknowledge, let alone attend to, rendering whatever directives said government ultimately attempted to pursue of limited use to the general population. Indeed, limited knowledge of the specific practices of diverse and distant regions might even produce policies which benefit the bare majority of the American people while harming a still sizable minority of the same. Local governments, Bryan asserted, “who are nearer the scene, and possessed of superior means of information” are preferable for exactly this reason. Capable of comprehending the needs and concerns of the communities under their auspices far more accurately than an authority located some distance away and burdened with a much wider scope of responsibility, such small, limited governments were likewise bound to be more attentive to the needs of their constituents and more adept at responding in an effective and timely manner.

            Notwithstanding this evident difference in focus, Bryan most definitely agreed with Montesquieu’s basic contention that the larger a republic grew physically, the less competent it became at serving the needs of its citizens. Granted, this was a broadly theoretical contention. As the examples put forward in the relevant passage of The Spirit of the Laws attest, there weren’t many historical examples of republican government on any scale to draw upon whilst arguing for or against the supposed benefits and flaws of that selfsame model. Montesquieu made explicit mention of one of them – that of the ancient Greek city-state republics – by way of affirming that the limited republic was uniquely possessed of political stability. “It was the spirit of the Greek republics [,]” he accordingly declared, “To be as contented with their territories, as with their laws […] All was lost upon the starting up of monarchy, a government whose spirit is more turned to increase and advancement.” Ambition, it seemed, was the great corrupting vice of republicanism, for it must ever have led to conquest, expansion, diffusion, and weakness. A small republic was strong, Montesquieu was keen to point out, because its government possessed the confidence of the greatest number of its inhabitants. And a large republic was weak because the confidence of its people became so difficult to define as to render government either ineffective or – more worryingly – a thing apart.

            The other primary example of historical republicanism which Montesquieu and Bryan alike could have drawn upon – but which neither The Spirit of the Laws or Centinel I did with much effect – would seem to speak to exactly this latter tendency. The Roman Republic, though for many Enlightenment thinkers a beacon of virtuous and balanced self-government, also rather paradoxically stands as one of the foremost examples of how susceptible republicanism can be to political corruption and institutional atrophy. Notwithstanding the exceptionally rigorous limitations placed upon the various political officials who served Rome – term limits, frequent elections, age qualifications, etc. – the profusion of assemblies responsible for various aspects of public administration, and the checks and balances put in place amongst the multifarious organs of government, the Roman Republic still eventually succumbed to its own worst aspects. Lust for territory led to expansion, which in turn brought about a diffusion of political authority, the empowerment of ambitious military figures, the erosion of political norms, and the triumph of demagoguery, populism, and tyranny. From a city-state interested in little more than protecting its own sovereignty and seeing to the needs of its inhabitants, Rome was transformed over the course of four centuries and innumerable wars into an extensive empire whose population, military, and government either tended to work at cross purposes or possessed very different priorities.

The application of this regrettable outcome to the circumstances of late 18^th century America would seem obvious enough. If one of the only reasonably successful republics ever to exist was eventually transformed into a despotic empire as a direct result of its tendency towards territorial expansion, perhaps it was wise to think very carefully about any project which seemed to have the same object in mind. The United States Constitution, of course, did not describe a polity which much resembled ancient Rome, institutionally or structurally. But the republic it did frame embraced a scale and centralization of authority that was to some extent imperial in nature, and this in itself entailed certain fundamental risks. While the United States of America certainly enjoyed the benefit of strong sub-national governments – in the form of the states – which could stand in opposition to the federal government if or when it appeared to exceed its stated mandate, the power possessed by the latter was still substantial, and the distance between the seat of national power and the “provinces” was at times quite large. Bearing this in mind, what was there to prevent the United States government from acting against the interests of a state – or states – located at the far edge of its nominal authority? Being responsible for such a vast and diverse swath of territory, why should this same government not simply ignore all but the most basic needs of the communities under its auspices? Montesquieu had predicted an answer in the negative – i.e. “The public good is sacrificed to a thousand views” – and even a cursory glance at the extant history of republican government would arguably have affirmed the wisdom of his case.    

But most of this was, again, theoretical, and perhaps too theoretical for the liking of Samuel Bryan. As the text of Centinel I seems otherwise to demonstrate, the son of George Bryan was possessed of an eminently pragmatic turn of mind. Whereas, for example, certain of his contemporaries claimed that smaller governments were preferable to larger ones because the former did not threaten so much as the latter to encroach upon the liberties of the individual, Bryan – without necessarily disagreeing with this contention – avowed that simple governments were preferable because people were more likely to adequately scrutinize something they could actually understand. Just so, the aforementioned argument which Bryan offered in Centinel I against the creation of a centralized national government in the United States of America was accompanied by a decidedly practical rationale. “Do we not already see,” he thus avowed,

That the inhabitants in a number of larger states, who are remote from the seat of government, are loudly complaining of the inconveniences and disadvantages they are subjected to on this account, and that, to enjoy the comforts of local government, they are separating into smaller divisions.

In addition to pointing to the lived experience of some portion of his fellow Americans for validation rather than to the sometimes abstract ruminations of European philosophy, this assertion on the part of Bryan also had the advantage of being quite easy to verify.

Centinel I, Part III: Perplexed and Divided, contd.

Given that Bryan spent the prime years of his early adulthood in Pennsylvania, it should come as little surprise that the vision of government which he described in Centinel I as being perfectly suited to, “Best secure the rights of the people” almost perfectly aligned with the framework described in his home state’s constitution. Not only did he believe a unicameral legislature to be the best means by which a given state might accomplish the creation and maintenance of law, but he also affirmed that frequent elections and strict limits upon repeated terms of public service constituted necessary safeguards against permanency in office and its associated sins. With the government of Pennsylvania as it existed in 1787 accordingly serving as a model, Bryan’s rationale would seem clear enough in practice. Having determined to seek redress for a grievance which they believe to have originated in the State House in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania petitioner might well have taken comfort in there being only four institutions with which to contend. If the issue at hand was indeed a matter for that state government rather than any county or municipal authority, the cause thereof  - or some form of remedy – could reasonably expect to be found in the General Assembly, the Executive Council, the Supreme Court, or the Council of Censors.

Notwithstanding the fact that the justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court were then appointed to seven year terms by the President and the Executive Council, each of these bodies existed wholly independent of the others in terms of their selection and responsibilities. Assemblymen, Councilors, and Censors were all popularly elected, and none of the powers which these officers possessed substantially overlapped with those of their colleagues in the other branches of government. Assemblymen, for instance, were never forced to contend with the Executive Council countermanding their efforts to make law for the people of Pennsylvania. Nor were the members of the Executive Council expected to submit the various appointments it was their duty to make to the scrutiny of the Assembly or the Censors. Even the justices of the Supreme Court, whose nominal independence was somewhat lessened by their being beholden for their offices to another branch of government, were kept from weighing in on political questions which would in other states have fallen under their purview. A case like Trevett v. Weeden (1786), in which the Supreme Court of Rhode Island invalidated an act of the legislature which it found to be in violation of the state constitution, would not have been possible in contemporary Pennsylvania, such responsibility having been explicitly allocated to the aforementioned Council of Censors.

Granted, this species of distinct administrative separation could not be expected to constitute a perpetual guarantee of integrity and justice on the part of the magistrates and institutions it acted upon. Ensuring that every citizen living under the auspices of a government could consistently identify the source of a given policy would surely have proven a rather hollow guarantee if the actors deemed responsible for the relevant error or oversight were not also faced with the prospect of replacement at the hands of those they had injured. Fortunately, the framers of Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution had foreseen the potential for such an egregious gap in the public accountability of the magistrates whose powers they had set themselves to describing. Their answer, accordingly, was a mixture of frequent elections and terms limits, the value of which Samuel Bryan later espoused in the cited text of Centinel I. A unicameral legislature forming the basis of his preferred form of republican government, he further explained that the members of this selfsame body should be, “Necessarily excluded by rotation from permanency [.]” By the terms of the aforementioned constitution of Pennsylvania, this kind of “rotation” had included Assemblymen, who were subject to yearly election and limited to serving no more than four years in every seven, members of the Executive Council, who were constrained to three year terms with a period of four years required to elapse before a possible reelection, and Censors, who were to be chosen at intervals of seven years.

The purpose of such measures, as Bryan affirmed, was to prevent any office holder from obtaining a permanent position – and gaining permanent access to power – within the relevant government. Corruption, naturally, was the principle enemy of this kind of initiative, patronage and its attendant vices – cronyism, fraud, inefficiency, etc. – ever gaining strength from the continued exercise of power by a single individual or party. There was also something to be said for the change in perspective that a frequent rotation of public officials was bound to produce. Elected continuously to the same position for a decade or more, any member of a given legislature might very easily – and unknowingly – begin to lose touch with the needs, desires, and concerns of their nominal constituents. Having lived for the better part of those ten years at some distance from the district they were chosen to represent, their life would in due time mold itself to the rhythms of the legislative cycle, with sessions, committee hearings, and votes gradually assuming a far greater importance than the country fetes and town meetings from which their public support was first drawn. While this kind of acute familiarity with the mechanics of legislation would doubtless render the official in question better able to navigate the often treacherous currents of popular government than someone possessed of less experience, it would likely also render them less capable of accurately speaking to and advocating for the specific interests of their district.

This would seem a particularly relevant consideration in the context of a region which suddenly finds itself undergoing rapid and/or drastic demographic or economic change. The magistrate in question might once have accurately represented the general character of the constituency from which they were elected. But the rapid acceleration of a given trend towards or away from this or that industry, resulting in a shift in the commercial status quo, an influx of economic migrants, or an inverse depopulation, could very easily lead to a significant alteration in the concerns of the relevant community and its residents. Having nevertheless managed to secure repeated reelections due to some combination of personal popularity, patronage, and institutional inertia, the incumbent legislator would very likely go on representing that selfsame community in spite of the fact that their knowledge of its needs was in the process of steadily fading to a state of uselessness. Mandatory term limits, though necessarily constraining the public from exercising absolute freedom of choice, would seem a very simple and very effective means of preventing this outcome from every taking place. Forced, by law, to cast aside their sitting representative after a set number of years in office, the residents of the various districts in question would be effectively prevented – and protected – from becoming locked into a choice which might in time prove a great detriment. Having chosen, once, a lawyer as their advocate, they would be made to substitute a merchant in their place, followed by a farmer, a retired military officer, a banker, or an artisan. Each of these individuals would bring a fresh perspective to bear on the legislative processes by which their community was bound, speak on behalf of some new and different profession, and generally ensure that no single party or interest was permitted to enjoy a monopoly on political power.

As presented to the various states in 1787, however, the United States Constitution was not designed to promote what would seem to be such an outwardly desirable outcome. Though said document did set any number of limitations upon how long a given officer of state would be able to serve before facing reelection, none of these same officials were made to simultaneously face permanent removal from office following the completion of a set interval of service. Senators enjoyed the most generous terms, facing election only once every six years, while the President was required to return to the people every four years, and Representatives every other year. Granting that this would seem to compare favorably enough to the cited conditions of the constitution of Pennsylvania – which mandated, after all, that Censors would stand for election once every seven years, Counselors every three year, and Assemblymen every single year – the aforementioned lack of accompanying terms limits would seem to severely lessen the effectiveness of these otherwise highly prudent regulations. Having lived under that selfsame state constitution for a decade – during which time he doubtless became accustomed to the notion that few, if any, public officials should be permitted to submit their names for reelection ad infinitum – Samuel Bryan would assuredly have viewed this particular quality of the proposed national constitution with abiding concern. If the residents of a given district, he would doubtless have been given to ask, were under no obligation to exchange their beloved, or influential, or well-connected representative for another, why should they not simply adopt the most straightforward – and potentially rewarding – path and elect the same person every time? If a President should manage, over the course of his initial years in office, to construct a coalition of parties and interests whose support could guarantee his perpetual reelection, what could possibly stop exactly that from taking place? His fellow citizens, Bryan had previously implied, being somewhat less attentive to matters of public administration than was perhaps strictly desirable, such outcomes undoubtedly appeared to him as being far from unlikely.

This seemed essentially to form one of the principal complaints with which Samuel Bryan sought to attack the United States Constitution in the text of Centinel I. People, he either implied or outright stated, could not necessarily be trusted to act in their own best interests within the context of popular government. They were, of course, possessed of certain unalienable rights which it was the duty of government to recognize and protect. But in addition to being sovereign in their persons, they were also possessed of necessarily limited faculties. Sometimes they were not as vigilant as they should have been in regards to the public institutions which most affected their lives. And often they made very significant political choices based on misapprehensions or on short-term thinking. No doubt Bryan would have encouraged his fellow citizens to correct these failings, engage more critically with the various forms of government they encountered in their daily lives, and cultivate the quality of individual virtue which a republic arguably required to function. But, in the meantime, there was no sense in punishing humans for being human, or pretending as though they were collectively more attentive than was actually the case. The cited critiques of the United States Constitution which Bryan put forward in the text of Centinel I, in addition to showing the effects of his upbringing in 1780s Pennsylvania, seemed to speak to this conviction quite strongly.

Among its various other qualities which he believed were less than ideal, Bryan appeared substantially convinced that the proposed national charter was both impractically complex and hopelessly optimistic. People being naturally prone to lose interest in that which is not immediately and easily explicable, he avowed that any government whose structure and purpose was not discernible at a glance was unlikely to operate under the degree of public scrutiny necessary to keep it from becoming dangerous. Just so, Bryan also observed that, unless explicitly prevented from doing so, the residents of a given constituency would very likely continue to elect the same magistrate time and again. Not only would this threaten to make corruption an accepted part of public life, but it would also serve to steadily reduce the quality of the relevant community’s representation. The answer, in regard to these challenges as in so many others he determined to tackle in the text of Centinel I, was simplicity itself. Make government as straightforward as possible, Bryan affirmed, and keep the rate of turnover high. In this way, not only would fewer people be given to shrug at the actions of their administrators for want of a clearer understanding of what they were doing and why, thus arguably preventing those same administrators from surreptitiously acting in their own interests rather than those of the general public. They would also be far more likely to enjoy the benefit of multiple and shifting perspectives in government, greater transparency, and perhaps even the chance to serve their communities themselves in the absence of an entrenched, patronage-dispensing political class. The proposed constitution could not do these things, was not structurally equipped to do them, and it was evidently for that reason – among others – that Samuel Bryan tended to oppose it.

Centinel I, Part II: Perplexed and Divided

            It likely cannot be said beyond a shadow of a doubt precisely what motivated Samuel Bryan in 1787 to set out his views upon the proposed federal constitution in a series of essays made available to the public. Why did he feel the need to put his words into print? To whom did he believe he was addressing himself? How did he rate his odds of success? For better or worse, these are not questions to which the historical record provides an answer. As to the nature of his concern, however – the quality possessed by the document in question which he believed represented a potential danger to American liberty – Bryan was good enough to provide a fairly forthright answer in the first paragraph of the first entry in what would become a series of publications under the penname of Centinel. With the intention of putting his fellow Pennsylvanians in mind of, “Certain liberties and privileges secured to you by the constitution of this commonwealth,” he accordingly affirmed that,

As yet you have the right to freedom of speech, and of publishing your sentiments. How long those rights will appertain to you, you yourselves are called upon to say, whether your houses shall continue to be your castles; whether your papers, your persons and your property, are to be held sacred and free from general warrants, you are now to determine.

Bryan, it seemed, was mortally concerned that the people of the Keystone State, in spite of successfully claiming and asserting their rights via the adoption of a republican constitution only eleven years prior in 1776, might already have begun to take those same rights for granted. Recognize what you are being asked to give up, he implored them, and do not act with undue haste. That he felt the citizens of Pennsylvania were being asked to give up anything at all naturally forms the crux of his perspective upon both the proposed constitution and political power more generally.

            Had Bryan restricted the treatise which followed to an exploration of the many dangers posed by a powerful, activist government – such as that described by the proposed constitution –  which lacked an accompanying declaration of rights, Centinel I might fairly have been described as making a very sensible – if rather uninteresting – case. Nearly every state constitution then in force contained an explicit enumeration of the various fundamental liberties possessed by the inhabitants of the same. Doubtless this was largely in recognition of the supreme legal and cultural importance attached to the Bill of Rights (1689) within the British libertarian tradition from which the supporters of the American Revolution derived so much. In light of the degree to which that same conflict – only recently settled – had arisen as a result of disagreements over the nature and validity of tradition, precedent, and “common sense,” explicitly codified rights were bound to become an exceptionally important aspect of whatever governments the victorious revolutionaries chose to erect. That the proposed federal constitution made no mention at all of what, if any, civil liberties the resulting government would be inclined to recognize was accordingly the cause of much alarm among a significant portion of the contemporary American public.

Combined with the proposed constitution’s paramount legal status, implied by the text of Article VI – “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof […] shall be the supreme Law of the Land” – it doubtless seemed as though there would be nothing to prevent the proposed national government from wholly disregarding both the natural rights presumed to be possessed by every citizen of the United States – life, liberty, property, etc. – as well as those explicitly guaranteed by the various state constitutions – freedom from unnecessary search and seizure, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, to name but a few. In light of the alarming vulnerability to which the ratification of the proposed constitution seemed prepared to expose the American people, many of the critics of that selfsame document accordingly took it upon themselves either to advocate for its defeat or to convince their fellow citizens to trade their affirmative vote only for the addition of a federal bill of rights. Many of the Anti-Federalist essays subsequently published during the ratification debate (September 28, 1787 – July 26, 1788) made exactly this case. The evident result was that demands for a federal enumeration of rights became the single-most significant hurdle pro-constitution forces were obliged to overcome at a number of the ratifying conventions held in the various states.

Though Samuel Bryan was most certainly also of the opinion that the absence of a declaration of rights within the proposed federal constitution represented a tremendous threat to the fundamental liberties of the American people, this did not form the core of his argument against ratification in Centinel I. Whereas the promise of a federal bill of rights did ultimately allay the concerns of enough delegates at key state conventions to secure the successful ratification of the proposed constitution, the nature of Bryan’s misgivings more or less ensured that they could not have been so easily dispelled. The issue which he took with the theoretical government in question – and which he expressed in the pages of Centinel I – was that it could not possibly have functioned as effectively as its supporters declared it would without eventually succumbing to corruption and despotism. It was not a matter of its simply lacking a few explicit guarantees. On the contrary, it was a question of structure and size, accessibility and oversight. As described in the text of the proposed constitution, Bryan asserted that the national government of the United States of America would be too large, too distant, too powerful, and too complex to perform the basic functions its framers had assigned to it while also respecting the rights and liberties of the people it was intended to serve.

Much of the rationale Bryan deployed to this end in the text of Centinel I could more or less be summed up by the axiom that the best form of government is that which is the easiest for the governed to understand. By Bryan’s reckoning, to “understand” a government would seem to have included both comprehending its function and being able to monitor the same. Speaking to the former, the ninth paragraph Centinel I avowed that,

The great body of the people never steadily attend to the operations of government, and for want of due information are liable to be imposed on-If you complicate the plan by various orders, the people will be perplexed and divided in their sentiments about the sources of abuses or misconduct, some will impute it to the senate, others to the house of representatives, and so on, that the interposition of the people may be rendered imperfect or perhaps wholly abortive.

While the outcome which Bryan appeared to seek certainly aligns with what we’ve since come to think of as small-government conservatism – i.e. public institutions that are rendered more efficient and transparent by being limited in size and power – his stated rationale was arguably much more cynical than that of the average latter-day conservative partisan. The modern advocates of de-regulation, fiscal responsibility, and low taxes tend to couch their priorities within an expressed belief in the ability of the individual to substantially govern themselves – in terms, say, of how they spend their money, make use of their property, or behave towards their neighbors. People, they thereby affirm, are perfectly capable of making sound decisions and living good, productive lives without government constraining their choices or re-distributing whatever wealth they possess. Notwithstanding the somewhat more proscriptive dogmas of social conservatism, this kind of thinking would seem to embody a fairly optimistic view of human nature, wherein it is held that the best qualities of every person should be given the proper space for expression by limiting government interference in their lives.

            Whatever else Samuel Bryan felt about his fellow Americans in terms of their moral or spiritual character, the passage cited above at the very least indicates that he harbored a somewhat less than charitable opinion of their collective intellectual acuity. Either that, or he thought them so prone to laziness that they would inevitably and consistently fail to make the necessary effort to understand how their government functioned if that government was overly complex. Unflattering as this might seem, the aforementioned text appears to be fairly unequivocal. “If you complicate the plan by various orders,” he avowed, “The people will be perplexed and divided in their sentiments about the source of abuses and misconduct [.]” To use an analogy, Bryan might as well have said that if you make a machine which you think is useful and which every person would benefit from possessing too difficult to understand, people will inevitably fail to learn how it works due to some combination of confusion and apathy and thus fail to benefit from whatever boons it has to offer. Upon reflection, this would seem to be almost exactly the kind of advice a veteran designer of appliances, public spaces, or automobiles would surely be given to impart to an up-and-coming apprentice. If there is a chance that people will become confused by something you have built, they might well say, you should count on that chance cropping up nine times out of ten. The solution is to make the things that people are going to interact with on a daily basis as simple and as intuitive as possible. Someone should know how something works just by looking at it, and should never be left scratching their head if that something happens to go wrong.

            It would be difficult to deny that this constitutes very sound advice. It most certainly does. It just isn’t the kind of counsel one tends to hear within the public realm of democratic government. Doubtless, as long as public opinion has been a factor in how a given state is administered there have been discussions in backrooms and smoky parlors about the credulity and the idleness of the common man, his inability to comprehend the great matters of state, and the need for sound guidance and decisive leadership in the highest echelons of power. But rarely do those who, in order to succeed, must sway the public to their point of view speak of such things in a open forum. That Samuel Bryan appeared to do so – in the form of the cited passage of Centinel I – would therefore seem a curious thing indeed. Granted, there were other principles which he felt inclined to uphold, and against which he seemed to think that the proposed constitution stood to act. Recall, to that end, the exhortation he rendered unto his countrymen in Pennsylvania that their continued ability to exercise freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the sovereignty of their persons and property had been placed entirely in their hands by the possibility of their agreeing to ratify the proposed federal charter. Clearly, he feared for this loss of fundamental liberties. It would, in consequence, seem reasonable to conclude that he did not oppose the adoption of the United States Constitution solely because he thought that the national government created as a result would be too complicated for most people to wrap their heads around. That being said, it was the latter justification he spend the better part of a paragraph explaining, and upon which seemed to hang the general thesis of Centinel I.

            The thrust of that thesis appeared to be, in essence, that the framework of government described by the proposed constitution simply wasn’t practical. There were certainly ideological roots to this conviction, not the least of which was Bryan’s avowed belief that what was at stake in America as 1787 turned to 1788 was nothing less than, “All the blessings of liberty and the dearest privileges of freemen [.]” But the general mode of expression in Centinel I – the means by which Bryan sought to justify his various criticisms of the United States Constitution – were of an almost uniformly pragmatic character. Consider, on that head, the description he offered of what an ideal government ought to look like. “Vest all the legislative power in one body of men,” he avowed,

Elected for a short period, and necessarily excluded by rotation from permanency, and guarded from precipitancy and surprise by delays imposed on its proceedings, you will create the most perfect responsibility for then, whenever the people feel a grievance they cannot mistake the authors, and will apply the remedy with certainty and effect, discarding them at the next election.

To his belief that people needed to freely comprehend the government under which their lived, Bryan thus joined the principle of day-to-day transparency and accountability. This would seem to constitute the other dimension of political understanding which he appeared so keen to promote. A government whose function is obvious, after all, and whose various mechanisms remain open to scrutiny not only promotes public trust and engagement. It also ensures that those responsible for error – or worse – cannot simply disappear into a byzantine network of bureaucrats, committees, and departments so as to avoid taking responsibility for their

The organizational framework described by the proposed constitution doubtless appeared specifically constructed to project just this kind of administrative smokescreen. Between a House of Representatives, a Senate, an independent executive branch, and all such offices as it would devolve upon any one of these bodies to fill by appointment, what hope might the average person have harbored of tracing the cause of a particularly injurious policy to its source, let alone of exercising the requisite oversight? A petitioner might make their case to a Representative, who might in turn point to a Senator, who then claims that responsibility lies with the executive branch, which might indicate, when prompted, that the blame should in truth be leveled at a given semi-independent department. And what was then to stop the head of that selfsame department, upon being questioned, from pointing to the legislative committee whose members authorized and funded the offending policy to begin with? Within a system of such manifest complexity, the various branches of which were purposefully intertwined as a means of creating a nominally stable balance of power, mere comprehension would seem to convey only a partial advantage. In order for the governed to truly be secure in the enjoyment of their liberties, they must be able to identify the author of a given measure with ease, entertain a reasonable expectation of that author taking receipt of their responsibility, and possess the means of replacing those who fail to take heed when their performance is thus called into question.