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.
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