On that note, I ask my audience – of
whatever stripe, stamp, or kidney – to cast their minds back to the period and
the events of the late 1780s in the United States of America. The Revolutionary
War has been over for several years, the Continental Congress continues to very
loosely govern the various states under the auspices of the Articles of
Confederation, and the American economy has experienced a rather slow, painful,
and uneven recovery. In an attempt to rectify this stubborn state of financial
malaise – in which hard currency is scarce, debts are rarely repaid, trade has
stagnated, and the paper currency issued on the authority of Congress holds
almost none of its value – a group of notables from each of the thirteen states
agrees to meet in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 for the ostensible purpose
of modifying the governing charter of the union of states. The aim of these
assembled statesmen being the creation of a government better equipped to
respond to the aforementioned economic tribulations, they fairly quickly
determine that only a strong, centralized government will serve the purpose
they have set out to fulfill. Accordingly abandoning the Articles of
Confederation altogether, the delegates then set about framing an entirely new
government for the United States of America, which they proceed to send to
Congress for ratification in September. Though understandably surprised by the
scope and scale of the document they have been asked to consider – the
proceedings of the Philadelphia Convention having been conducted in secret –
the members of Congress nonetheless agree to submit the proposed federal
constitution to the various states in accordance with the accompanying
instructions. State conventions are called, delegates chosen, and a vigorous
public debate ensues.
Enter the Federalist Papers and the
Anti-Federalist Papers – both of which, of course, have been discussed here
before, but neither of which ceases to offer ample reward for investigation.
Specifically, enter Centinel, that pseudonymous – and seemingly spelling-averse
– author of some eighteen essays
published between October of 1787 and May of 1788 whose stated aim was to
dissuade his fellow Americans from too rashly adopting an entirely novel frame
of government before giving due consideration to the flaws, deficiencies, and
implications thereof. Though no more noteworthy in the substance and
presentation of his views than such previously-discussed Anti-Federalists as
Brutus (Robert Yates), A Plebian (Melancton Smith), and Mercy Otis Warren,
Centinel nonetheless makes for an intriguing read, arguably for the very reason
that the general thrust of his argument feels exceptionally familiar. Indeed,
when one reads the first of his eighteen compositions – published initially in
the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on
October 5th, 1787 – the sense of déjà vu is almost overpowering.
Though arguing against the creation of a powerful central government at a time
when he and his countrymen had fought a war against exactly that less than a
decade previous, the basic contours of Centinel’s philosophy and perspective
align extraordinarily closely to the tried-and-true playbook of the modern,
states-rights advocating American conservative. Indeed, one gets the distinct
feeling from reading Centinel I that the last two hundred years have not done
very much at all to alter the basic character of political discourse in the
United States.
Whether this
should be a source of comfort or dismay, I shall leave it for each of us to
decide on our own. There is, however, much to say on the subject of where such
a persistent perspective originated and how it came to be a staple of the
ideological dialogue of American republicanism. Whether one agrees with the
small government hypothesis or not, its influence on the course and development
of American history and culture is impossible to deny. It would therefore seem
far from an idle pursuit to investigate – if not its origins – an early and
very coherent manifestation thereof. How, for example, did the notion that
government should be small and simple become a part of the discussion
surrounding the ratification of the United States Constitution? From where did
the critics of that document derive their belief that political authority
should be highly decentralized? And what caused commentators like Centinel to
conclude that the people could form a much surer check against corruption than
any institutional safeguard? Surely these ideas developed out of some
antecedent, or else originated in response to a particular set of circumstances.
Centinel I, though fairly brief, speaks precisely to these kinds of inquiries,
and in so doing arguably helps lay bare the means by which values that have
become absolutely foundational to the political culture of the United States
first entered the public discourse thereof.
Addressing and
interrogating the significance of Centinel I will, of course, first require some
knowledge of its author, their life, and the circumstances that led them to put
pen to paper in the first place. This, unfortunately, is where the resources
available to the modern investigator come up rather short. Beyond the
widely-held conviction that the author of the Centinel essays was most likely a
Pennsylvanian named Samuel Bryan (1759-1821), and the verifiable fact that they
were initially published between October 5th, 1787 and April 9th, 1788 in
the Philadelphia Independent
Gazetteer and the Philadelphia
Freeman's Journal, there would seem to be very little else to say. Bryan,
for whatever reason, evidently left no more substantial imprint upon the
history of the United States than to have a set of political treatises –
important, yes, but not earth-shaking – connected to his name. The years of his
birth and his death are known, as well as the fact that he corresponded with
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) for a period in the early 19th century.
Much more than that regrettably remains mysterious. This should not be taken to
mean, however, that the customary examination of the applicable context for the
forthcoming series will herewith cease and desist. If there is any maxim to
which America, On Paper can be said
to adhere unfailingly, it is to never say a little when one can instead say a
lot. To that end, let us proceed to set the stage for a discussion of Samuel
Bryan’s Centinel I by approaching the topic at hand in what we’ll call a
lateral fashion. If we cannot talk directly about the author of the document in
question, let us instead talk about the world in which he lived.
Thankfully, though
Samuel Bryan yet remains something of a cipher, his father was by comparison
both famous and well-attributed. George Bryan (1731-1791), born in Dublin in
the 1730s and settled in Philadelphia in the 1750s, was, among other things, a
merchant retailer and trader, a vocal opponent of the Stamp Act (1765), the
first Vice-President and the second President of independent Pennsylvania, a
justice of the state supreme court, trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a
long-serving state legislator, and an early advocate for the abolition of
slavery. Noted by and among his peers as something of a radical, the elder
Bryan was an avowed opponent of both colonial Pennsylvania’s proprietary
governors as well as those who hoped to transform the colony into a direct
possession of the Crown. By way of a refresher, the colonial Province of
Pennsylvania was, from the time of its founding in 1681 until it became the
independent Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1776, the private property of
Quaker luminary William Penn (1644-1718) and his male heirs. Though the elder
Penn was generally well-liked and well-regarded by the inhabitants of the
colony he had founded as a refuge for those suffering religious persecution in
Anglican Britain, his successors as proprietor frequently found themselves at
the center of some controversy or other over issues ranging from freedom of
conscience, to relations with local native peoples, to the taxation of
properties traditionally owned by the Penn family. Bearing in mind that fellow
Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was likewise labeled a radical for
his attempts to strip the hereditary proprietors of their office and turn the
province into a Crown Colony, George Bryan’s apparent opposition to even this
latter course would seem to have set him quite far indeed outside the mainstream
of contemporary Pennsylvania politics.
In addition to
apparently taking all comers in terms of colonial Pennsylvania’s political
status, the elder Bryan was also an early supporter of American independence –
compared, say, to fellow Pennsylvanian John Dickinson (1732-1808), who was an
extremely late supporter of reconciliation – and an ardent devotee of the style
of government subsequently practiced in the Keystone State. Again, by way of a
reminder, the state constitution which Bryan so favored and under which he
served was among the most unusual then in force in the nascent United States. Drafted
by a committee composed of Robert Whitehill (1738-1813), Timothy
Matlack (1730-1826), Dr. Thomas Young (1731-1777), James Cannon
(1740-1782), the aforementioned Franklin, and Bryan himself, the Pennsylvania
Constitution of 1776 was both exceedingly democratic by the standards of the
time and exceptionally decentralized. Having grappled with the authority of a
very conservative, obstructionist governor during the height of the
Anglo-American crisis – in the form of William Penn’s grandson John Penn
(1729-1795) – the elements of Pennsylvania’s political culture already opposed
to proprietary government became increasingly convinced that any kind of
unitary executive at all invited more abuse, corruption, and strife than it
necessarily solved any significant administrative problems. The governing
charter subsequently drafted under the authority of the revolutionary Council
of Safety accordingly did away with the office of Governor, established a
unicameral legislature, and recognized the right of all tax-paying adult men –
regardless of whether or not they owned property – to vote in and stand for
elections.
In the absence of
a unitary chief executive, Pennsylvania’s 1776 constitution erected in its
place a kind of committee known as the Supreme Executive Council. The members
of this body – twelve in number – were to be chosen to serve a term of three
years by voters residing in the city of Philadelphia and in each of the eleven
counties into which the state was then divided. Coinciding with the yearly
election of delegates to the state assembly, a joint ballot of the Council and
this very same assembly was to be held for the purpose of electing a President
and Vice-President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from among the
Counselors previously chosen. Perhaps the only responsibilities to be
exercised by the President without the input of the Council were those
connected to the role of Commander-in-Chief. All other executive powers – appointing judges, attorneys
general, and military officers, filling vacant offices due to death or
resignation, standing in judgement over cases of impeachment, granting pardons
or reprieves, or laying commercial embargoes – were expressly the remit of
either “the president and council” or “the president in council.”
In addition to the
House of Representatives, the Supreme Executive Council, and the state supreme
court – each of which respectively performed the necessary legislative,
executive, and judicial functions – the constitution of 1776 also described a
fourth body whose function and authority appeared to form a kind of hybrid of
these otherwise separate spheres of responsibility. The Council of Censors,
comprised of two delegates elected every seven years from each county and city
in Pennsylvania, was intended essentially to monitor the activities of the
other branches of government and offer correctives as its members felt
necessary. To that end, the assembled Censors could censure government
actions and demand the repeal of legislation they deemed to be
unconstitutional, order the impeachment of such officials as appeared to have
behaved improperly or abused their authority, and call for a convention to
amend the constitution. No other state government erected during the 1770s or
1780s included within its constitutional framework a body of men anything like
Pennsylvania’s Council of Censors, and it should perhaps come as no surprise
that it was one of many innovations put in place in 1776 that was abandoned
upon the drafting of the Keystone State’s second – and far more orthodox –
constitution in 1790.
Granted, there
were other state constitutions drafted during this era which envisioned a
strong legislature and a weak chief executive. The Maryland Constitution of
1776, for example, declared that the Governor of that state was to be elected
by a joint ballot of the bicameral General Assembly, and that said office was
to be accompanied in its decision-making by a five-person Executive Council
chosen by the same means. While this framework would seem necessarily to bind
the office of Governor quite closely to the will of the relevant legislative
body, the chief executive of the State of Maryland – alike with the governors
or presidents of nearly every other state – nevertheless possessed a number of
powers and responsibilities whose exercise did not require the consent or
notification of either the Council or the General Assembly. Given that the
framers of the various state constitutions had – with few exceptions – lived
their entire lives under the auspices of colonial governments whose structure
prejudiced singular executive authority – either in the form of a governor or
of the Crown itself – this is perhaps not particularly surprising. Ardent
though the supporters of Congress were in their opposition to the arbitrary
exercise of executive power, their only involvement with government on a
first-hand basis was along strictly monarchical lines. When it thus came time
for these same statesmen to undertake the task of creating republican state
governments, their imaginations were understandably somewhat limited by what
they were familiar with and what they knew from experience would work. The
results, for the most part, were either a chief executive whose powers were
more or less the same as those exercised by their pre-independence colonial
equivalents – as in New York – or whose authority was limited by, and tied to
the will of, the relevant legislative assembly – an in nearly every other
state. The fact that Pennsylvania did not follow this pattern should
accordingly be taken as a strong indication that the men from whose pens the
first constitution of that state flowed were of a deliberately unconventional
frame of mind.
One of these men,
of course, was the aforementioned George Bryan. A demonstrated radical in his
opposition to both the proprietary form of colonial government and the
alternative centered on the direct authority of the Crown, Bryan was seemingly
able to at last give form to his abiding frustration with the status quo by
helping to craft a new model of civil administration unlike anything
Pennsylvania – or America at large – had yet seen. The vision of government he
and his colleagues gave rise to was decentralized, subject to frequent
elections, and premised on an unusually wide application of the electoral
franchise. What this meant in practice was that decision-making at even the
highest levels had to be made on a collegial basis, almost all power ultimately
devolved upon the most representative branch of government, and only the
destitute – i.e. those who paid no form of property tax – were formally
excluded from the most basic from of civic engagement. Such a government would
theoretically have been more resistant than its traditionally-structured
counterparts to demagoguery, corruption, and elitism, more responsive to
popular opinion, and less inclined towards deference to authority. Legislators
were subject to the constant threat of replacement, the President of the state
was little more than the titular leader of a twelve-member committee, and the
power of censure, legislative invalidation, and impeachment were in the hands
of a body of men kept structurally separate from any other branch of
government. While it would be difficult to say exactly what the effect of these
circumstances might have been on the political culture of Pennsylvania in those
early years of its independence – as far
as levels of civic engagement are concerned, or respect for political
authority, or satisfaction with political outcomes – it would nevertheless seem
reasonably safe to assume that those who came of age in that state during the
1770s and 1780s would have had a very different experience with politics and
public affairs than their counterparts in most other states during this same
period.
Bearing this in
mind, we return once more to the subject of Samuel Bryan, son of George Bryan
and author of the Centinel essays. Samuel, recall, was born in Pennsylvania in
1759. This would have made him only seventeen years old when the constitution
his father helped draft was put into effect in 1776. Without making any
assumptions about how impressionable he was as a youth, this would seem rather
too young to have developed very many concrete biases as to the nature of
political power, the purpose of government, or the proper relationship between
a community of people and their nominal governors. It would accordingly seem
entirely sensible to presume that the younger Bryan’s political opinions were
almost entirely formed during, and shaped by, the eleven years which elapsed
between the adoption of Pennsylvania’s first constitution in 1776 and the
beginning of the process by which the proposed national constitution was
ratified in 1787. At this latter point, Bryan would have been twenty-eight
years old, and lived the entirety of his adult life under a system of
government which had essentially no equivalent among Pennsylvania’s sister
states. The closest in form during the whole of the Revolutionary era had been
that of New Hampshire, whose 1776 constitution provided for a similar structure
comprising a unicameral legislature and an executive council. After less than
ten years, however, the people of the Granite State determined to replace this
admittedly radical form of administration with something far more typical of
what was becoming a standard model – with a governor, a supreme court, and a
bicameral legislature – among the various American states.
Between 1784 – at which point New Hampshire
abandoned its original constitution – and 1790 – at which point the Keystone
State did the same – Pennsylvania thus constituted a major outlier in terms of
the way its inhabitants were given to interact with and think about public
institutions. Not only was this fact bound to have shaped the perspective and
ideology of the aforementioned Samuel Bryan, but the prominent role that his
own father had played in creating said environment must also have impacted on
the ways in which he came to understand government and politics. This is not to
say, necessarily, that the younger Bryan was in any way obliged to share – or
even likely to share – the opinions and biases of his influential pater familias. While evidence certainly
exists among the Founders of ideological alignment crossing generations within
a single family – John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), for example, was often said in
later life to resemble his father John Adams (1735-1826) in appearance,
temperament, and opinion almost exactly – cases can also readily be cited of
precisely the opposite state of affairs. William Franklin (1730-1813), eldest
son of the aforementioned Benjamin Franklin, stands as a stark example of just
that. Though William was a frequent traveling companion of his father during
the latter’s various European sojourns, and though he benefited greatly from
both his father’s partnership in business and patronage in politics – to the
point of gaining appointment to the office of Governor of New Jersey in 1763 due
in large part to the elder Franklin’s persistent lobbying of the government of
Lord Bute (1713-1792) – he ultimately rejected Benjamin’s radical politics and
became a prominent Loyalist leader during the American Revolution.
What this is all by way of saying, in effect, is that close familial connection was no more guarantee of
political alignment during the Revolutionary era than it is today. Samuel
Bryan, it therefore bears reiterating, should not be thought of as possessing
particularly radical, democratic, or populist political views simply because he
was the son of a man whose public career was premised almost entirely on the
promotion of these very same convictions. Rather, the affinity which the
younger Bryan arguably demonstrated in the text of the Centinel essays towards
this particular ideological bearing should be attributed to the environment in
which he first developed a sense of political awareness. To an extent, his
father must have played some part in shaping this environment, either through
implicit socialization or explicit education. But the mere fact of living and
working in Pennsylvania was almost certainly enough on its own. From the time
when he first gained adulthood in the mid-1770s to the moment he put pen to
paper in 1787, Samuel Bryan was subject to, and given frequently to interact
with, a government that was wholly unlike any other that then existed in
America. Pennsylvania during those years was more democratic than any other
state, more decentralized, and possessed of a system of public administration
more amenable to both institutional and popular scrutiny. It would seem rather
unlikely – if not impossible – for a person to spend over a decade living in an
environment thus defined without being significantly influenced by the same.
Granted, it was certainly possible for Samuel Bryan to have come out the other
side of his early adulthood with a very low opinion of his home state’s
government. The fact that a more orthodox constitution was adopted in 1790
would indeed seem to indicate that the majority of people in Pennsylvania were
ultimately unimpressed by what they experienced in the 1770s and 1780s. The
content of tone of Centinel I, however, stands as equally compelling evidence
that Samuel Bryan was not among them.
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