October 8, 1787 - Derby, Connecticut

>Author’s Note: On October 8, Derby’s town meeting unanimously instructed its representatives in Connecticut’s General Assembly to use their influence to have a state convention called “as speedily as possible” to consider the Constitution proposed at Philadelphia. The town was not voting to ratify or reject the Constitution, but asking Connecticut to establish the convention through which that decision could eventually be made.

For weeks, the Constitution had reached us mostly through paper. A newspaper would arrive folded beneath someone’s arm, pass from the tavern to the shop and then to a neighbor’s table, and before long men who had read only part of it were prepared to explain what Philadelphia had done. Today the argument entered the town meeting, where conversation had to become a public decision.

The room was familiar, filled with faces I knew from church, the road, and ordinary town business. Nothing about it looked large enough to hold a question concerning the future government of thirteen states, yet Derby had to decide whether its representatives should urge Connecticut’s General Assembly to call a state convention.

We were not being asked whether Connecticut should ratify the Constitution. That decision belonged to a convention not yet called and delegates not yet chosen. Our question was whether Connecticut should establish the place where the proposed government could receive a formal hearing.

That distinction mattered because the newspapers increasingly spoke as though every American had already become either a supporter or an opponent. Calling a convention required neither conclusion. It required only the judgment that a proposal this important deserved a lawful process through which the people of Connecticut could examine it and decide.

A man might support the convention because he already considered the Constitution necessary. Another might fear its powers but still believe those dangers deserved a proper hearing, while a third might remain uncertain and simply prefer a public decision to endless argument in newspapers and taverns.

Those different motives led to the same result. Derby instructed its representatives to use their influence in the General Assembly to have a convention called as speedily as possible, in accordance with Congress’s recommendation. The surviving record says the resolution passed unanimously.

The unanimity did not mean that everyone in the room had reached the same judgment about the Constitution. It meant that men who might eventually disagree about ratification could still agree on the process through which that disagreement should become an official decision.

That seemed especially important after the reports from Pennsylvania. There, the effort to call a convention had become tangled in a denied quorum, absent legislators, physical coercion, and accusations over whether delay protected deliberation or merely prevented the majority from acting.

Derby’s response was quieter. The town assembled, considered what its representatives should do, and sent an instruction toward the state government without pretending that the final constitutional question had already been settled.

There was something almost ordinary about the procedure, which may have been what made it significant. A national government had been designed hundreds of miles away, but before it could claim authority in Connecticut, the question had to pass back through communities like ours.

The Constitution spoke of states and a general government, but states were made of towns, farms, households, congregations, and workshops. They were made of citizens accustomed to governing close to home, and ratification would require those local communities to connect themselves to a much larger political decision.

For weeks, I had read arguments asking whether the proposed government would remain close enough to the people. Today the people were moving one small step toward that government, using an institution they already understood to decide how the larger question should proceed.

That was when the word consent began to look different to me. It was easy to say that legitimate government rested upon the consent of the governed, but consent required rules for deciding who spoke, where the question would be heard, and how many private judgments became one public answer.

The Philadelphia Convention had proposed a Constitution, and Congress had sent it to the states. Neither body could declare that Connecticut had consented merely because respected men favored the plan, and neither Washington’s reputation nor the enthusiasm of citizens elsewhere could answer for us.

Connecticut would have to decide for itself. Derby could not make that decision on behalf of the state, but it could instruct its representatives to help create the convention where another group of delegates would eventually consider the Constitution.

The process might seem slow to anyone impatient for an answer. Yet it made consent look less like a slogan and more like a structure, because a people does not govern itself merely by holding opinions. Those opinions must move through institutions capable of turning judgment into legitimate public action.

The town meeting was one of those institutions. It was not the entire republic, but it gave citizens a way to move from hearing about government to participating in the process by which government would be accepted or refused.

I wondered how many men in the room had read every clause of the Constitution. I doubted that all of them had, and I was not certain that I had understood every provision myself. That uncertainty did not weaken the reason for calling a convention, because we were not pretending the examination was finished; we were asking Connecticut to create the place where it could formally begin.

The newspaper arguments would continue. Supporters would describe the weaknesses of the Confederation and the advantages of a government capable of acting on national concerns, while opponents would ask whether that strength threatened state authority, local representation, or liberties not expressly protected.

A convention would not remove those disagreements. It would give Connecticut a recognized place where they could be heard before one answer acquired the authority of the state.

When the meeting ended, nothing about the Constitution itself had changed. No new federal government had gained authority over Connecticut, and none of the difficult questions involving taxation, representation, courts, armies, or state sovereignty had been resolved.

Something had nevertheless changed. Until now, I had watched the Constitution move outward from Philadelphia through printed sheets, copied essays, letters, and arguments carried from hand to hand. Today a decision began moving in the opposite direction, from an ordinary town toward the state government.

The Constitution was no longer merely arriving in Derby from somewhere else. Derby had entered the debate by turning local opinion into an official instruction.

Perhaps that is what self-government looks like before history reduces it to famous speeches and final votes. Citizens gather in familiar rooms, decide what question should come next, record their judgment, and send it onward through institutions they already possess.

The Constitution would eventually ask Connecticut for an answer. Derby’s meeting did not provide that answer, but it asked Connecticut to let the people begin giving one.

Further reading

Derby Town Meeting Resolution, October 8, 1787. This local history reproduces the town’s instruction that its representatives seek a state convention “as speedily as possible” and records that the resolution passed unanimously. It also provides brief context about Derby citizens who later served as delegates to Connecticut’s ratifying convention.

Resolution of Congress Submitting the Constitution to the States, September 28, 1787. This primary document records Congress’s unanimous decision to transmit the Constitution to the state legislatures for submission to conventions of delegates chosen by the people. It shows the national procedural step that Derby’s town meeting was asking Connecticut to carry forward.

The Constitution of the United States, Article VII. Article VII establishes that ratification by conventions in nine states would be sufficient to create the new government among the ratifying states. Reading it beside the Derby resolution shows why calling a state convention was necessary before Connecticut could provide an official answer.

Connecticut Elects Delegates for Its State Convention. This collection records the later November elections through which Connecticut towns selected delegates to the state convention. Its Derby entry identifies Daniel Holbrook and John Holbrook as the town’s delegates, showing the next stage of the process Derby had requested in October.

October 8, 1787 - Philadelphia

>Author’s Note: Six members of Pennsylvania’s late General Assembly answered the seceding minority in a statement dated October 6 and published in the Pennsylvania Packet on October 8. The signers were William Will, Jacob Hiltzheimer, Thomas Fitzsimons, Daniel Clymer, George Clymer, and William Robinson Jr. Fitzsimons and George Clymer had also signed the proposed federal Constitution. Their reply focused mostly on defending what happened in the Assembly and answering the minority’s version of events, rather than defending every part of the Constitution itself. I also owe readers a quick apology for falling behind on the series. I’m working today to catch the chronology back up and get us back on pace. Thank you for your patience and for continuing to follow along.

The argument over our Assembly has now lasted more than a week. The sixteen members who stayed away have already explained why they thought delay was necessary, why they believed the Convention in Philadelphia had gone beyond its instructions, and why they feared the proposed government might threaten the rights and powers Pennsylvania already possessed. This morning, six men from the other side answered them in the Pennsylvania Packet.

I unfolded the paper expecting another broad defense of the Constitution. Instead, the six began by arguing about something more basic: what had actually happened in Pennsylvania, and whether the minority’s account of those events was fair.

Their first disagreement concerned Congress. The seceding members had argued that Pennsylvania moved too quickly because the Assembly began arranging a ratifying convention before receiving the proper recommendation from Congress. The six answered by looking back at how Pennsylvania had appointed its delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in the first place.

They pointed out that Pennsylvania had chosen those delegates before Congress formally approved the Convention. The state had acted after hearing warnings about the weakness of the Confederation and after Virginia had proposed a convention, while Congress did not formally support the meeting until later. If Pennsylvania had been willing to act without waiting for Congress then, the six asked, why should it suddenly be required to wait for Congress now?

I could see why that answer mattered. The minority saw the sequence as evidence that the process was being pushed too quickly and without proper authority, while the six treated the same history as proof that Pennsylvania had already acted on its own authority once before.

The second disagreement concerned the men Pennsylvania had sent to Philadelphia. The seceding members complained that the delegation was made up mostly of men from Philadelphia and did not properly represent the interests of the rest of the state. The six answered by reminding readers that members of the later opposition had taken part in choosing those delegates.

They pointed especially to William Findley and Robert Whitehill. According to the six, Findley had received very little support when delegates were chosen, while both men had earlier accepted the practical argument that representatives from Philadelphia or nearby were easier to send because they could attend more regularly. Their larger point was simple: if the makeup of the delegation was such a serious problem, why had it become an urgent objection only after the delegates returned with a Constitution the minority disliked?

That question had some force, but it did not settle everything for me. A man can agree to send someone to a convention and still become dissatisfied with what that person eventually proposes. Disliking the result does not necessarily mean the earlier choice was dishonest.

Still, the six had raised something worth thinking about. Sometimes an objection truly becomes clearer only after its consequences appear. Other times a principle becomes important only because a political result has become inconvenient. From the outside, it can be difficult to tell which is which.

The argument then turned to the authority of the Philadelphia Convention itself. The seceding members had said Pennsylvania’s delegates were sent to revise and strengthen the Confederation, not to throw it aside and design an entirely new system. In their earlier address, they had gone so far as to argue that once the delegates went beyond those instructions, they were acting more as private individuals than as official representatives of Pennsylvania.

The six did not pretend that the question was simple. They admitted that it was difficult to say exactly how far the delegates’ authority reached, but then they shifted the argument in another direction. The Constitution, they said, was only a proposal.

No state was required to accept it simply because the Convention had written it. The people of each state would still have the opportunity to approve or reject the plan through special conventions. From the point of view of the six, that meant the most important question was whether the proposed government was good or bad, rather than whether every part of it fit perfectly within the Convention’s original instructions.

That was a strong answer because it reminded me that the Philadelphia Convention had no power to impose its work upon Pennsylvania. The Constitution could still be refused. If the delegates had proposed more than some people expected, perhaps that was less dangerous if the people themselves still held the final decision.

Yet the answer also left me uneasy. If representatives may go beyond their instructions whenever the final result is only a recommendation, then instructions begin to look more like advice than limits. A proposal may bind no one, but the authority given to representatives must still mean something in a government built upon delegated power.

The six became much more certain when they reached the walkout itself. They described the minority’s absence as a deliberate attempt to make the Assembly unable to conduct business.

From their point of view, sixteen elected representatives had accepted public office and promised to perform its duties, but then left the chamber because they knew they would lose the vote. The six believed that went beyond disagreement. It turned absence into a weapon against the legislature itself.

The seceding members had described their actions very differently. They believed that staying in the chamber would provide the quorum needed to push Pennsylvania toward a convention before citizens had enough time to understand the Constitution. Because they could not stop the measure by ordinary voting, they treated their absence as the only remaining way to delay it.

They also argued that the delay had accomplished something. The election for convention delegates was moved later, giving Pennsylvanians more time to read the Constitution and consider what it might mean for them. From their point of view, the walkout had not destroyed public debate. It had created more time for it.

The six saw a dangerous principle in that defense. If a minority could stop legislation simply by staying away whenever it expected to lose, then a small group of representatives could repeatedly prevent the Assembly from doing anything at all.

That possibility was easy to understand. A quorum rule exists to make sure a legislature does not act when too few members are present. Yet the same rule can become a kind of veto if enough members deliberately stay away whenever the majority is ready to act.

The six took the argument even further. They said the seceding members had violated one of the basic rules of political society: eventually, the few must give way to the many. In their view, the minority had stopped being a dissenting group inside the legislature and had tried to make the legislature itself unable to function.

I understood what they meant, but the principle still made me uneasy. A republic must allow majorities to make decisions or government eventually stops working, yet a majority cannot be right simply because it has more votes.

Constitutions, procedures, rights, and quorum requirements exist partly because there are times when the majority itself needs limits. The real difficulty was deciding whether this was one of those times.

The minority believed the situation was serious enough to justify unusual resistance. They thought Pennsylvania was being rushed toward a decision that could affect the state’s government, its courts, its taxing power, and the rights of its citizens before ordinary people had been given enough time to understand what was being proposed.

The six saw the matter differently. The Assembly was not voting to ratify the Constitution. It was only calling a convention where representatives chosen specifically for that purpose could debate it and decide whether Pennsylvania should accept or reject it.

That difference may have been the strongest part of their case. If the Assembly had been deciding the Constitution itself, breaking the quorum might have looked more like resistance to a final and permanent decision. Instead, the Assembly was arranging the very process through which Pennsylvanians would be able to make that decision.

From the point of view of the six, the minority was not protecting the people from having the Constitution imposed upon them. It was preventing the people from reaching the place where they would be able to judge it.

Then came the part of their reply that troubled me most.

M’Calmont and Miley had been forced back to the State House after the Assembly failed to reach a quorum. The seceding members described broken lodgings, torn clothing, abuse, and physical force. The six denied that the Assembly itself had treated the two men badly and argued that the minority’s earlier misconduct deserved punishment rather than sympathy.

Yet whatever words either side used, the basic fact remained. M’Calmont and Miley had not returned freely.

That made the argument about majority rule much harder. If elected representatives should not be allowed to destroy a quorum simply because they expect to lose, does that mean people outside the legislature may physically force them back so the majority can proceed?

I could understand both arguments separately, but I could not make them fit together comfortably. The six wanted readers to see the force used against the two men as the consequence of the minority’s own obstruction, while the minority wanted readers to see that same force as proof that the majority had abandoned republican procedure when procedure no longer gave it the result it wanted.

Each side placed responsibility on the other. Each side believed its own unusual action had become necessary because the other side had already broken the proper rules.

That may be the most dangerous part of the whole affair. Once both sides believe ordinary procedure has failed, each begins to justify doing something extraordinary in order to save it.

The minority stays away because the majority is moving too quickly. Citizens force members back because the minority has made the Assembly unable to act. Then each side points to the other and says, in effect, that there was no other choice.

That reasoning can carry a republic a very long distance from ordinary government.

The six ended by returning to the point they believed mattered most. Whatever disputes surrounded the Convention’s authority, Pennsylvania’s delegation, or the conduct of the Assembly, the Constitution remained only a proposal until the people of the states approved it through their own conventions.

That brought me back to the question underneath the entire Pennsylvania fight. Who has the right to slow down a public decision, and who has the right to insist that the decision be allowed to happen?

The majority says representation stops meaning much if elected members can refuse to attend whenever they are likely to lose. The minority says deliberation stops meaning much if a majority can hurry an important decision and overcome resistance by force.

Both sides claim to be defending republican government. Both sides claim to be protecting the people from the actions of the other.

That is why the dispute cannot be reduced to majority rule against minority rule. A republic needs the ability to make decisions, but it also needs rules that keep decision-making power from becoming arbitrary.

Give the minority too much power and government can be paralyzed. Give the minority too little protection and debate can become little more than a ceremony performed before the majority does what it had already decided to do.

I folded the Packet less certain than the six men who had signed their reply. They had answered several of the minority’s claims and had given a serious explanation for why they believed Pennsylvania had the authority to call a convention.

Their broadest argument was also the hardest one. At some point, the few must give way to the many if government is going to function, but a free government must also decide when the few have a legitimate reason to resist before they give way.

Pennsylvania did not answer that question simply by restoring a quorum. The crisis showed why a republic needs rules both for action and for restraint, because once either side decides ordinary procedure no longer protects the public, the disagreement quickly becomes a fight over who is justified in breaking that procedure first.

The convention will now move forward, and Pennsylvanians will eventually decide whether the proposed Constitution should govern them. Yet the fight left behind by the Assembly may tell us almost as much about republican government as the Constitution itself.

A government has to be able to act, but the way it reaches a decision matters too. The Six Assemblymen have defended the need for action. The people answering them have made sure the question of restraint has not disappeared.

Further Reading

The Reply of the Six Assemblymen, Pennsylvania Packet, October 8, 1787. The primary document behind this installment, including the six members’ defense of Pennsylvania’s authority to act, their discussion of the Philadelphia delegation, their argument over the Convention’s authority, and their criticism of the quorum-breaking walkout.

Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Pennsylvania, Volume II. Places the reply directly alongside the Address of the Seceding Assemblymen and records its publication in the Pennsylvania Packet on October 8.

The Address of the Seceding Assemblymen. The minority’s own explanation of why they refused to attend, what they feared about the Constitution, and how they described the forced return of M’Calmont and Miley.

Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788. Wider background on Pennsylvania’s unusually bitter early ratification fight and the public responses that followed the minority address.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resource/chapteri/

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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-

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.

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 29, 1787 - Philadelphia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair play.

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

>Author’s Note: The piece behind today's entry appeared in Eleazer Oswald's Independent Gazetteer on September 28, 1787. Writing under the signature Tar and Feathers, the author responded to an anonymous critic of the proposed Constitution by attacking his motives, warning that his identity might become known, and suggesting that an angry public might reward him with a coat of tar and feathers.

There are arguments one expects to encounter when opening a newspaper. Whether Congress should possess greater power, whether the proposed Senate is too distant from the people, whether representation is sufficient, and whether the new Constitution gives too much authority to men who may someday prove less virtuous than the gentlemen who designed it have all become familiar subjects. Today I discovered another method of constitutional reasoning: tar and feathers.

The writer in the Independent Gazetteer begins with an anonymous author who had recently offered objections to the proposed Constitution in the Freeman's Journal. According to the writer before me, this critic had acknowledged that some of his objections concerned matters of relatively small importance, which apparently made the very act of raising them suspicious. Why, Tar and Feathers asks, would anyone introduce such objections at a moment when America required unity? His answer is not particularly charitable. The critic must be attempting to sow dissension among what he calls the weak, the credulous, and the ignorant.

That is a convenient way to conduct an argument. If a man agrees with you, he has seen reason, while if he disagrees with you, perhaps someone has merely deceived him. The proposed Constitution receives rather different treatment. The writer calls it a masterpiece of politics and points to its provision for amendment as an answer to those worried about imperfections. Even if defects exist, he argues, the system is not fixed forever and can later be altered.

There is an argument there worth considering. No human work is perfect, and a government capable of correction may indeed be preferable to one incapable of changing when experience reveals a defect. Then the newspaper takes a rather sharp turn. The anonymous critic, Tar and Feathers says, appears to be the same man who previously attacked the Convention under the signature Z. Whether the writer actually knows this, I cannot tell from the paper before me, but he seems confident enough to move from answering the man's objections to warning the man himself.

The critic, he says, should remember that his name might yet become known. If it does, he might be branded with infamy as an enemy of the happiness of the United States. The writer then advises him to choose another subject in the future if he wishes to avoid the resentment of an angry public, which might perhaps honor him with a coat of tar and feathers.

I stopped at that passage and read it again. It is one thing to write that another man's reasoning is foolish, another to call his motives dishonest, and something else entirely to remind an anonymous writer that anonymity may fail him and that a crowd might be waiting when it does. We have not forgotten what tar and feathers means. During the struggle with Britain it became one of the punishments used by crowds against men judged enemies of the American cause, and whatever amusement may be found in putting the words into a newspaper, there is little ambiguity in the image.

Perhaps Tar and Feathers means the threat as exaggeration. Newspapers are not famous for restraining themselves when a sharper phrase can be found, and pseudonymous writers seem particularly courageous when another man must absorb the consequences of their courage. Still, if the threat is only a joke, I am not entirely certain what makes it funny. A man stripped, covered in tar, coated in feathers, and paraded before his neighbors is not being invited to reconsider an argument. He is being taught what it may cost to express one.

The entire question before us concerns the construction of a government for free citizens. Men are arguing about whether power will be sufficiently restrained, whether representatives will remain accountable, whether liberty will survive stronger national authority, and whether future rulers can be trusted with the powers placed in their hands. Those questions become rather difficult to examine if asking the wrong one may cause your neighbors to discover your name.

I find myself thinking about the anonymous writer whom Tar and Feathers attacks. I have no reason to assume his objections are correct merely because someone has threatened him, just as I have no reason to assume the Constitution is defective merely because one of its defenders has lost his temper. His arguments must still stand or fall upon their merits, and that seems the only useful standard available to us.

If his objection to representation is weak, show why it is weak. If he misunderstands the Senate, explain the Senate, and if he exaggerates the danger of federal power, demonstrate where his reasoning fails. The Constitution is called a masterpiece in the very piece before me. If that description is deserved, there ought to be enough ink in Philadelphia to defend it without reaching for a bucket.

There is also something peculiar about defending republican government by warning a citizen against speaking too freely about it. We have spent considerable blood insisting that political authority ultimately belongs to the people, yet the people cannot exercise judgment if they are permitted to hear only arguments that have survived the approval of the crowd. A citizen who must first determine whether his neighbors will tolerate his opinion is not entirely free to examine the government being offered to him.

None of this makes every critic courageous, reasonable, or correct. Some men undoubtedly write nonsense, and others may disguise private interests beneath the language of public virtue. Yet the proper answer to bad reasoning ought to be better reasoning. Threatening the speaker may silence an objection, but silence is not the same thing as answering it.

I read the final lines again because they bothered me more the second time than the first. The writer does not simply hope that his opponent will be proved wrong; he advises him to choose another subject if he wishes to escape public resentment. That sounds less like persuasion than a warning, even if it has been wrapped in the language of political enthusiasm.

Perhaps I am making too much of newspaper bravado. Perhaps tomorrow everyone will laugh about the phrase, finish his ale, and return to arguing about representation and taxation. Tonight, though, I find myself wondering about something smaller than the structure of Congress and perhaps just as important to a republic: when a citizen is told that he may speak freely, provided the crowd approves of what he says, how free is the argument really?

The Constitution before us may deserve adoption, rejection, amendment, criticism, or defense. We may spend several more weeks arguing loudly enough to disturb every respectable household in Philadelphia, and perhaps that is exactly what the moment requires. But if we are to decide this question as citizens, we must first be allowed to ask it as citizens, and I would prefer that we do so without boiling the tar.

Further Reading

“Tar and Feathers,” Independent Gazetteer, September 28, 1787 This transcription contains the original piece behind this post. The writer praises the proposed Constitution, attacks an anonymous critic in the Freeman’s Journal, warns that his identity might become known, and closes by suggesting that an angry public might give him a coat of tar and feathers.

UW-Madison Center for the Study of the American Constitution, “Pseudonyms and the Debate over the Constitution” UW-Madison uses this September 28 threat as an example of why anonymity mattered during ratification. The article explains that pseudonyms could protect writers from political intimidation, social or economic retaliation, and sometimes physical danger.

McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787-1788 This older documentary collection gathers many of the short newspaper pieces circulating through Pennsylvania during the ratification struggle. It is particularly useful because it preserves the surrounding newspaper conversation rather than presenting only the famous constitutional essays.

The Constitution of the United States, Article V Tar and Feathers argues that imperfections in the proposed Constitution could later be corrected. Article V is the amendment mechanism underlying that argument, setting out how amendments can be proposed and ratified.

​

The Word Has a Definition: Gaza, the West Bank, and the Evidence Behind the Genocide Debate

Today, Israel announced that it will close the British Consulate General in East JerusalemThe decision came after Britain announced a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, along with broader sanctions targeting people and companies involved in settlement construction, financing, infrastructure and real estate. France and Canada are moving in the same direction, while a larger group of countries announced support for restrictions on settlement trade. Israel has denounced the measures as interference in its affairs.

On the surface, this looks like another diplomatic dispute in a conflict that has generated thousands of them. It is more significant than that. Britain's action follows years of international warnings about settlement expansion, forcible displacement and settler violence in the West Bank. It also arrives after the United Nations' human-rights system crossed a separate and much more serious threshold in Gaza: in September 2025, an independent UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

That sentence requires precision. A UN-mandated commission has reached a genocide finding. The International Court of Justice has not yet issued a final judgment finding Israel responsible for genocide. Those are two different things, and confusing them weakens rather than strengthens the case for examining what has happened.

So instead of beginning with the accusation, begin with the law.

What does genocide actually mean?

The word is thrown around so frequently in political arguments that it is easy to forget that genocide has a specific legal definition.

Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as certain acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The United Nations explains that genocide therefore requires two components: a prohibited physical act and a particular intention to destroy the protected group. The intent requirement, sometimes called dolus specialis, is what distinguishes genocide from even extraordinarily severe war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The Convention identifies five possible acts:

1. Killing members of the group.

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm.

3. Deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to cause the group's physical destruction, in whole or in part.

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births.

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another. group.

All five do not have to occur. One prohibited act can constitute genocide if the required intent to destroy the protected group is proved. Conversely, an enormous death toll by itself does not automatically establish genocide. The legal question eventually comes back to intent.

That distinction matters enormously in Gaza.

Four of the five acts

In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel published a 72-page legal analysis applying the Genocide Convention to Israeli conduct from October 7, 2023 through July 31, 2025.

It concluded on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the Convention's five genocidal acts: killing Palestinians, causing serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. The Commission did not base its genocide finding on the fifth category, forcible transfer of children to another group.

The third category is particularly important because genocide does not require lining an entire population against a wall and executing it. Deliberately creating conditions under which part of a protected population cannot physically survive can also qualify.

The Commission examined the siege of Gaza, restrictions on humanitarian assistance, destruction of housing and agricultural resources, forced displacement and the destruction of medical infrastructure. It concluded that the blockade and restriction of aid had created conditions capable of destroying Palestinians through starvation and deprivation. It also found that the collapse of Gaza's health system deprived the population of care necessary for survival.

The fourth category, preventing births, is less commonly discussed. An earlier Commission investigation documented the destruction of maternity facilities, reproductive healthcare and Gaza's principal IVF fertility clinic. It concluded that the destruction of reproductive healthcare had partly destroyed the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza and constituted measures intended to prevent births under the Genocide Convention.

Those are findings about the prohibited acts. The much harder question is what motivated them.

The question of intent

Israel argues that there is no genocidal intent. Its stated military objectives have been the destruction of Hamas's military capabilities, protecting Israel from another October 7 attack and recovering hostages. Israel says it has attempted to reduce civilian casualties and facilitate humanitarian assistance, and it accuses the Commission of selectively presenting evidence, statistics and statements while ignoring the realities of fighting Hamas in densely populated territory. Israel categorically rejected the Commission's genocide report as false and politically motivated.

That argument cannot simply be brushed aside because intent is precisely what the Genocide Convention requires.

The Commission therefore examined statements by Israeli civilian and military leaders alongside the overall pattern of conduct. It applied a demanding standard used in previous International Court of Justice genocide jurisprudence: whether genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the totality of the evidence. The Commission concluded that it was. It further concluded that statements by senior Israeli officials constituted direct evidence of genocidal intent and found Israel responsible for committing genocide, failing to prevent it and failing to punish it.

That conclusion is extraordinary. But it is important to describe who reached it. The Commission is an independent investigative body created under the UN Human Rights Council. It is not the International Court of Justice, and its finding is not a final judicial judgment binding Israel.

What the world's highest court has actually said

South Africa brought a separate case against Israel before the International Court of Justice in December 2023 under the Genocide Convention.

In January 2024, the Court did not rule that genocide had occurred. At the provisional-measures stage, the Court specifically said it was not deciding the merits. It found that at least some of the rights South Africa sought to protect, including Palestinians' right to protection from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention, were plausible enough to justify emergency measures while the case continued. It ordered Israel to prevent acts falling under Article II, prevent and punish direct public incitement to genocide, preserve evidence and facilitate humanitarian assistance.

That case remains unresolved today. Israel submitted its counter-memorial in March 2026. The Court has given South Africa until November 2027 for another reply and Israel until May 2029 for its rejoinder. In other words, anyone saying that the ICJ has already found Israel guilty of genocide is overstating what the Court has done. Anyone saying the genocide case has already collapsed is equally wrong. It remains before the Court.

October 7 cannot disappear from the story

Any serious investigation also has to begin the war where it began.

The same UN Commission that investigated Israeli conduct found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes during the October 7 attack, including intentionally attacking civilians, murder, torture, cruel treatment, taking hostages and destruction of civilian property. Investigators also documented patterns of sexual and gender-based violence and concluded that they were not isolated incidents.

Israel has the right to defend its population against armed attack. International humanitarian law also binds Hamas, and atrocities against Israeli civilians do not become lawful because Palestinians have suffered occupation or displacement.

But the reverse is equally important. October 7 does not suspend the Genocide Convention. One population's civilians do not lose their protection because armed members of their nationality committed atrocities. The question is not whether Israel had a legitimate reason to fight Hamas. The legal question is whether the means subsequently employed crossed into crimes prohibited regardless of the justification for going to war.

That distinction is fundamental.

Gaza after the ceasefire

The October 2025 ceasefire reduced the intensity of fighting and allowed humanitarian conditions to improve in important respects. Food insecurity eased from its worst levels. AnY investigation should acknowledge evidence that cuts in either direction.

It did not restore Gaza.

A UN satellite assessment published this summer found approximately 82 percent of Gaza's structures damaged, including more than 134,000 assessed as destroyed. OCHA reported that almost the entire population of roughly 2.1 million remained concentrated in less than half of the Gaza Strip. As of August, an estimated 1.98 million people still required shelter assistance, while military strikes and civilian casualties continued despite the ceasefire framework.

These 2026 conditions do not themselves prove genocidal intent. They do show the physical legacy against which the legal debate is taking place.

Then there is the West Bank

This brings us back to today's confrontation between Britain and Israel.

The genocide finding issued by the Commission in 2025 was specifically about Gaza. The Commission did not issue the same legal determination for the West Bank. In fact, its report explicitly said its genocide analysis was limited to Palestinians in Gaza, although it warned that Israeli conduct raised serious concern that genocidal intent could extend to Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied territories.

The evidence emerging from the West Bank nevertheless deserves attention on its own terms.

In its 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law, that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful, and that Israel must cease new settlement activity and evacuate settlers. Israel rejects this interpretation and maintains historical and security claims to the territory.

The situation has accelerated since then. As of August 10, 2026, the United Nations said approximately 3,800 Palestinians had been displaced in the West Bank this year because of settler violence, demolitions and evictions, nearly half of them children. The UN had documented more than 1,430 settler-related incidents affecting roughly 260 Palestinian communities and reported that settlers and Israeli security forces have sometimes acted together.

That is separate from the northern West Bank refugee camps. A UN Human Rights Office report released four days ago found that Israeli forces forcibly displaced the entire populations of the Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarm refugee camps during operations beginning in early 2025 and have continued to prevent them from returning. More than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced. OHCHR said the scale and systematic nature of the operation raises concerns about forcible transfer as a crime against humanity and about ethnic cleansing.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide are not the same thing

This distinction is worth making because Britain's foreign secretary has now explicitly described conduct in parts of the West Bank as ethnic cleansing.

The United Nations does not recognize ethnic cleansing as an independent crime with its own treaty definition. UN investigators have historically described it as using force or intimidation to remove a particular population from a geographic area. Acts used to accomplish ethnic cleansing can constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and in some circumstances they can also constitute genocide.

The difference is again intent. If the goal is to remove a population from territory, that may amount to forcible transfer or ethnic cleansing. If the purpose is to physically destroy the protected group, in whole or substantial part, using one of the prohibited acts of the Genocide Convention, the legal category can become genocide.

That is why it would be premature to simply take the Gaza genocide finding and paste it onto the West Bank. But it would be equally irresponsible to ignore documented mass displacement while settlements expand into the territory from which Palestinians are being removed.

Why Britain acted now

Britain's announcement does not impose a general embargo on Israel. It specifically seeks to separate normal trade with Israel from economic activity connected to settlements in occupied territory.

The British government says recent settlement expansion, unprecedented settler violence and particularly the E1 settlement project threaten the territorial viability of a Palestinian state. Britain, France and Canada announced plans to ban settlement goods, while Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden joined the broader statement supporting restrictions or considering further measures. The same declaration condemned Hamas's October 7 attack and affirmed Israel's legitimate security interests.

Israel responded by announcing the closure of the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem, ending British involvement in training Palestinian security forces, removing British personnel from the Gaza coordination mechanism and banning several British politicians from entering. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar called the British measures hostile interference.

That is what makes today's story larger than a trade dispute. A group of Western governments is beginning to move from saying that settlement expansion violates international law to imposing economic consequences for participating in it.

Where the evidence leaves us

There are several conclusions that can be stated without exaggeration.

There is now a formal finding by a UN-mandated independent Commission of Inquiry that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza under the definition written into the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Commission found four of the Convention's five prohibited acts and concluded that genocidal intent could be inferred from both official statements and the overall pattern of conduct.

Israel categorically rejects that conclusion and argues that its intent has always been to destroy Hamas rather than Palestinians as a people. The International Court of Justice has issued binding provisional measures under the Genocide Convention but has not yet decided whether Israel committed genocide. That case may continue for years.

Separately, the legal record regarding the West Bank is increasingly difficult to dismiss as merely a political disagreement. The ICJ has found Israel's settlement regime and continued presence in the occupied territory unlawful. UN investigators are documenting accelerating settlement expansion, thousands of displaced Palestinians, attacks on communities and more than 33,000 people still prevented from returning to three refugee camps. Britain now describes some of that process as ethnic cleansing and has begun imposing economic consequences.

None of this erases the murder, hostage-taking, torture and sexual violence committed by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7. Those crimes deserve accountability too. But accountability is not a finite resource. The crimes of one side cannot legally absolve the crimes of another.

Perhaps that is where the argument should begin.

Not with whether we like the word genocide. Not with whether using it helps one political camp or harms another. Not even with which flag someone carries.

Start with the definition written after humanity promised that such a crime would never again be treated as merely an internal matter. Then place the evidence beside it.

And ask whether the institutions created to enforce that promise are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Primary material:

UN definition of genocide and related crimes

1948 Genocide Convention

UN Commission's 2025 genocide analysis

ICJ South Africa v. Israel case record

UN investigation of October 7 and Gaza war crimes

Latest UN West Bank displacement ·

UK government's September 8 settlement statement

Source: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/our-press-releases/disabled-veteran-files-lawsuit-against-n-c-city-and-police-officers-who-forcibly-arrested-him-tased-his-service-dog-and-engaged-in-retaliatory-online-harassment-campaign/

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Iran's vice president recently warned Americans to think about stockpiling gasoline and fuel because "dark months" could be ahead for the American economy. Taken alone, that sounds like wartime rhetoric. Put beside the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, though, and it deserves a closer look. Roughly one-fifth of the world's petroleum normally moves through that narrow passage, so even a partial disruption can reach far beyond the Middle East.

I do not think we can say we are reliving the 1970s. The United States produces much more energy today, vehicles are more efficient, and institutions such as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve exist specifically because of what happened fifty years ago. But the comparison is worth understanding, because the oil crises of the 1970s were never just about expensive gasoline.

The story actually begins before 1973

In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran's oil industry, challenging the enormous influence Britain held through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Two years later, Mossadegh was overthrown in an operation in which declassified American records show the CIA played a direct role, alongside British involvement. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi emerged with his position strengthened and became one of Washington's closest allies in the Middle East.

It would be too simple to say the 1953 coup caused the Iranian Revolution. Iran had deep internal political, religious, economic and social conflicts of its own. But 1953 became part of the larger history of resentment toward foreign interference, the Shah's increasingly authoritarian government and Iran's close relationship with the West. Those tensions would matter enormously by the end of the 1970s.

Then came the first oil shock

Richard Nixon was president when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973, beginning the Yom Kippur War. The United States resupplied Israel, and Arab oil-producing countries responded by cutting production and imposing an embargo against the United States and several other nations they believed were supporting Israel.

This is often called the "OPEC embargo," although that is not quite accurate. OPEC included Arab and non-Arab producers. The embargo was primarily carried out by Arab petroleum-exporting countries associated with OAPEC. Oil had become a geopolitical weapon intended to pressure Western governments over Israel and the territories it had occupied after the 1967 war.

The economic consequences spread rapidly. Oil prices rose severalfold, Americans encountered shortages and gas lines, transportation costs increased and inflation accelerated while economic growth weakened. The United States eventually found itself dealing with something that came to define the decade: stagflation, the miserable combination of high inflation and weak economic growth.

Oil was not responsible for everything that went wrong. Inflation had already been building, Bretton Woods was collapsing, Nixon had ended the dollar's convertibility into gold in 1971, and American monetary policy had problems of its own. The important lesson is that the oil shock struck an economy that was already under stress, allowing several separate problems to begin reinforcing one another.

The embargo ended in March 1974 after American diplomacy helped produce progress toward military disengagement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The underlying conflict was nowhere near solved, but enough movement had occurred for the Arab exporters to lift the embargo. What did not return was the old assumption that cheap imported oil could always be taken for granted.

America built defenses because of 1973

The shock fundamentally changed American energy policy. The International Energy Agency was created in 1974 so major oil-consuming nations could coordinate during future emergencies. Gerald Ford signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in 1975, establishing the framework for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and federal automobile fuel-efficiency standards.

The first oil entered the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 1977. Jimmy Carter then signed legislation creating the Department of Energy that same year, consolidating numerous federal energy responsibilities under one department.

That history matters now because many of the tools being used during today's crisis are descendants of 1973. The reserve, coordinated international emergency responses and much of the country's modern energy-security structure were created because policymakers never wanted another embargo to catch the United States as unprepared as it had been.

Then Iran collapsed

By the late 1970s, the Shah faced growing opposition from religious movements, secular activists, nationalists, workers and others who opposed the monarchy for very different reasons. Jimmy Carter was president when the Shah left Iran in January 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile soon afterward, the monarchy collapsed and the Islamic Republic emerged.

Iranian oil production plunged during the upheaval, causing a second oil shock. Unlike 1973, there was no initial coordinated Arab embargo against the United States. One of the world's largest oil producers was simply undergoing a revolution, and markets reacted by competing for uncertain supplies.

Relations between Washington and Tehran then collapsed completely. Iranian militants seized the American embassy in November 1979, beginning the 444-day hostage crisis. Less than a year later, Iraq invaded Iran, creating a war between two major Persian Gulf oil producers just as the world was still absorbing the effects of the Iranian Revolution.

That is probably the most important part of the 1970s comparison. The problem was not one terrible month. It was years of instability. When energy prices stay elevated long enough, businesses stop treating them as temporary. Prices change, wages respond, investment gets delayed, governments intervene and central banks face increasingly difficult decisions.

China was transforming at the same time

The 1970s were also a turning point far beyond the Middle East. Nixon traveled to China in 1972, beginning the major opening between Washington and Beijing. Mao Zedong died in 1976, the Gang of Four fell, Deng Xiaoping emerged as China's dominant leader and China began moving toward the economic reforms that would eventually transform the global economy.

The United States and the People's Republic of China formally established diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979 under Carter. China at that time was nothing like the petroleum-consuming industrial giant it is today. That difference makes the Strait of Hormuz even more important now because enormous amounts of Persian Gulf energy travel east toward China, India, Japan and South Korea.

A serious Hormuz disruption therefore does not simply hurt America. It affects Asian manufacturing, shipping, European energy markets and the price everyone pays while competing for alternative supplies.

Iran-Contra came later

Iran-Contra is connected to this history, but it should not be confused with the events that caused the 1979 oil shock. It happened during Ronald Reagan's presidency in the mid-1980s, when American officials secretly facilitated arms sales to Iran while seeking leverage connected to American hostages in Lebanon. Money from those transactions was diverted to support Contra forces fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

When the operation became public in 1986, it triggered congressional investigations, the Tower Commission and an independent counsel investigation. Iran-Contra was not a cause of the Iranian Revolution. It was evidence of how complicated the relationship between the United States and post-revolutionary Iran had become.

So how similar is 2026?

The Strait of Hormuz normally carries around 20 million barrels of petroleum each day. Pipelines can bypass some of that traffic, but nowhere near all of it. That means a sustained disruption can remove enormous amounts of energy from normal global trade routes.

The United States is better positioned than it was in 1973. Domestic production is much higher, vehicles are more efficient, the economy uses less energy for each dollar of output and emergency reserves exist. Those are real advantages, and they are why a major physical disruption does not automatically produce 1970s-style economic conditions.

But being a major oil producer does not isolate America from the world market. Oil is globally priced, so losing supplies overseas still increases the value of petroleum produced in Texas or North Dakota. The effects then move through refineries, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and eventually consumer prices.

Diesel may be more important to watch than gasoline. Diesel moves trucks, agricultural machinery, construction equipment and much of the physical economy. A few weeks of expensive diesel can be absorbed. Months of expensive diesel eventually appear in the price of food, shipping, construction and manufactured goods.

That is where an energy crisis can become an inflation crisis. If inflation begins rising while economic growth is weakening, the Federal Reserve faces the same basic dilemma that made the 1970s so difficult. Cutting interest rates could support growth but risk worsening inflation, while keeping rates high could fight inflation while putting additional pressure on businesses, housing and employment.

We are not there yet. Today's American economy is not the economy of 1979, and it would be a mistake to pretend otherwise. But the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is being used, supply routes are under stress and the longer the disruption lasts, the less useful it becomes to think about this as simply another temporary spike in gasoline prices.

What I think citizens should watch

The biggest variable is duration. A temporary disruption in Hormuz hurts. Six months can begin changing business decisions. A year can change supply chains, investment and government policy. If high diesel prices persist, transportation and food become more expensive. If those costs spread into broader inflation while economic growth weakens, the comparison with the 1970s becomes much stronger.

That is why I would pay less attention to any single threat from Iran or any single day's oil price and more attention to whether the disruption becomes embedded in the economy. The dangerous moment comes when companies, governments and households stop expecting energy prices to return to normal and begin making long-term decisions around scarcity.

The 1970s became a turning point because several things that looked separate at the time eventually connected. The postwar monetary system was breaking apart, oil producers were gaining geopolitical power, the United States was dealing with Vietnam and Watergate, Iran's monarchy collapsed, China began transforming its economy, and the Cold War entered another unstable period.

Looking backward, we can easily draw lines between those events. Living through them would have felt different. An oil crisis looked like an oil crisis, inflation looked like an economic problem, a revolution looked regional and China's reforms looked like a completely separate story.

That is what makes the current moment interesting. Maybe the Hormuz crisis is brought under control, production returns, fuel prices fall and 2026 becomes another serious disruption that the modern energy system successfully absorbed. That remains entirely possible.

But historical turning points rarely announce themselves while they are happening. I do not think we have enough evidence to say we are entering another 1970s. I do think we have enough evidence to start watching for the same pattern.

Sources and further reading

Bibliography

1. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. “Oil Embargo, 1973–1974.” Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations. This is one of the best primary-government overviews of why the embargo began, how it interacted with the Yom Kippur War, and why it ended in March 1974.

[Oil Embargo, 1973–1974](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

2. U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States. “Memorandum Prepared in the Directorate of Plans, Central Intelligence Agency,” March 8, 1954. This declassified document directly describes the 1953 operation against Mohammad Mossadegh and its objective of installing a pro-Western government under the Shah.

[FRUS document on the 1953 Iran operation](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54IranEd2/d363?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

3. U.S. Department of Energy. “SPR Origins.” This explains how the 1973–74 embargo led Congress and the Ford administration to establish the Strategic Petroleum Reserve under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975.

[Origins of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve](https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/spr-origins?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

4. International Energy Agency. Sheltering From Oil Shocks. 2026. This is especially useful for comparing the current crisis with 1973. The IEA describes the present Middle East disruption as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market and documents the collapse in Hormuz traffic.

[IEA: Sheltering From Oil Shocks](https://www.iea.org/reports/sheltering-from-oil-shocks?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

5. U.S. Energy Information Administration. World Oil Transit Chokepoints. This provides the underlying data for the Strait of Hormuz, including roughly 20.9 million barrels per day of oil moving through the strait in recent prewar data and its importance to global petroleum trade.

[EIA World Oil Transit Chokepoints](https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/World\_Oil\_Transit\_Chokepoints?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

6. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. “Rapprochement with China, 1972.” This covers Nixon's visit to China, the Shanghai Communiqué, Kissinger's diplomacy, and the broader Cold War realignment occurring at the same time as the energy upheavals of the 1970s.

[Rapprochement with China, 1972](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/rapprochement-china?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

7. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. “China Policy, 1977–1980.” This traces the Carter administration's negotiations leading to formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China in 1979.

[China Policy, 1977–1980](https://history.state.gov/milestones/1977-1980/china-policy?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

8. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. “President's Special Review Board: Records, 1987 (The Tower Board).” This is a strong archival starting point for Iran-Contra and documents the investigation into the arms-for-hostages dealings with Iran and the diversion of funds to the Contras.

[Tower Board records on Iran-Contra](https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/finding-aids/presidents-special-review-board-records-1987-tower-board?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

9. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Consumer Price Index, July 2026.” This provides the current inflation data needed to distinguish today's energy shock from the much more severe inflationary environment of the 1970s.

[July 2026 Consumer Price Index](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/cpi\_08122026.htm?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)

10. Reuters. “Oil Ends Week Higher on Renewed U.S.-Iran Strikes, Diesel Hits Record.” September 4, 2026. This provides current reporting on Brent crude, record U.S. diesel prices, renewed U.S.-Iran fighting, and reduced tanker movement through the Strait of Hormuz.

[Reuters: September 2026 oil and diesel update](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-set-steepest-weekly-gain-since-mid-july-over-intensifying-us-iran-tensions-2026-09-04/?utm\_source=chatgpt.com)