Centinel Called the Convention a Conspiracy and Got a Few Things Right

On September 29, 1787, in Philadelphia, a crowd went looking for two members of the Pennsylvania Assembly. The two had stayed away from the State House on purpose, along with their allies, to deny the Assembly a quorum and stall a vote calling a convention to ratify the brand-new federal Constitution. The crowd found them, hauled them through the streets, and deposited them in their seats. Quorum achieved. Motion carried. Welcome to the birth of American constitutional government, Pennsylvania style.

If you were an opponent of the Constitution watching that scene, you might be forgiven for thinking something fishy was afoot. A young Philadelphian writing as "Centinel" thought exactly that, and he said so at the top of his lungs, in print, for months. He called the Convention's work an aristocratic conspiracy. That charge was wrong. But buried inside his alarm were two or three arguments about the Senate and the federal courts that conservatives today should find uncomfortably familiar. Let us sort the gold from the gravel.

Who Centinel was

The Centinel essays are generally attributed to Samuel Bryan, a young man from a prominent Philadelphia family. His father, George Bryan, was a leader of the faction that had written and defended Pennsylvania's radical constitution of 1776, which created a single-house legislature and a plural executive council instead of a governor. That background matters. Centinel was not a generic opponent of strong government; he was the voice of a particular state political machine with its own theory of how a republic should be built.

The first essay appeared in Philadelphia's Independent Gazetteer on October 5, 1787, less than three weeks after the Convention adjourned. More followed through the winter and into 1788, and they were reprinted across the states. Centinel was one of the most widely circulated Anti-Federalist writers in the country.

The Pennsylvania fight

To understand Centinel, you have to understand how fast and how rough the ratification fight in Pennsylvania was.

• September 17, 1787. The Convention signs the Constitution in the Pennsylvania State House.
• September 28 and 29. The Federalists in the Assembly move to call a ratifying convention before the Confederation Congress has even formally transmitted the document. Opponents withdraw to deny a quorum; the crowd drags two of them back the next day.
• October 6. James Wilson, a delegate to the Convention, gives his State House Yard speech defending the Constitution, including the argument that the national government holds only the powers granted to it, so a bill of rights is unnecessary.
• November and December. The state convention meets. Wilson leads the Federalists.
• December 12, 1787. Pennsylvania ratifies, 46 to 23, the second state after Delaware.
• December 18. The minority publishes its Address and Reasons of Dissent, a detailed list of objections and proposed amendments.

From the opponents' side, every step looked like a stampede. The Convention had met in secret. Its supporters rushed the state into a vote. A mob physically compelled a quorum. Centinel took those facts and drew a conclusion: this was a plot by the wealthy and well-born to seize power before the people could think. (The state-by-state story is told in From Delaware to Rhode Island, the Ratification Fight State by State, and Wilson's role in James Wilson, the Forgotten Founder Who Put the People at the Center.)

What the first essay argued

A note on method first. Centinel's exact eighteenth-century wording is worth reading in a documentary edition of the Anti-Federalist papers, and I will paraphrase rather than risk misquoting him. His argument, in the first essays, runs roughly as follows.

1. The Constitution creates an aristocracy. The Senate, chosen by state legislatures for six-year terms and sharing executive power over treaties and appointments, would become a permanent ruling body. The President would be its tool or its partner.
2. Checks and balances are a fraud. He attacked the theory of balanced government that John Adams had defended in his recent Defence of the Constitutions. A complex government, he argued, hides responsibility; when something goes wrong, nobody can be blamed. A simple government with a single legislature, short terms and frequent rotation lets the people see who is accountable.
3. The new government will consolidate the states. The powers to tax, to regulate commerce and to make all necessary and proper laws, joined to the Supremacy Clause, would reduce the states to administrative shells.
4. The federal courts will swallow the state courts. Broad federal jurisdiction and Supreme Court review of facts as well as law would drag citizens into distant courts and undo the verdicts of local juries.
5. There is no bill of rights. No protection for the press, for jury trial in civil cases, or for conscience.
6. Respected names are being used as cover. He suggested that the endorsements of Washington and Franklin were being exploited to lull the public into accepting a plan they had not examined.

The overheated charges

Let us be fair to the Federalists, because Centinel was not.

The conspiracy charge fails. The Convention met behind closed doors, which bred suspicion, but its rule of secrecy existed so delegates could change their minds without public embarrassment. Madison's notes, published after his death, show men arguing in good faith, losing votes, compromising, and in several cases leaving unhappy. A conspiracy that produces the Connecticut Compromise by a single-state margin and sends its own document out for ratification by popular conventions in every state is the least competent conspiracy in history. If you are plotting to seize power, you do not ask thirteen sets of voters for permission.

The swipe at Washington and Franklin was beneath him. Washington presided over the Convention, said very little, and signed. Franklin, at eighty-one, urged his colleagues to doubt their own infallibility and sign anyway. Suggesting that either man was a dupe was a cheap shot and was received as one. (Franklin's closing speech is examined in Franklin's Closing Speech Asked Delegates to Doubt Themselves and Sign Anyway.)

His theory of simple government lost even in Pennsylvania. Centinel's ideal was the 1776 Pennsylvania model: one house, no governor, constant rotation. Pennsylvanians themselves abandoned it. The state adopted a new constitution in 1790 with a two-house legislature and a single governor, much closer to the federal design. The verdict of his own state on his favorite theory is about as decisive as these things get.

And the larger point: the separation of powers is not a fraud that hides responsibility. It is the Founders' central protection against tyranny. Madison put it plainly in Federalist 47:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Note the words "or many." A single, simple, all-powerful legislature is still a concentration of power, even if it is elected every year. (We read that paper closely in Federalist 47 Defines Tyranny as All Powers Gathered Into the Same Hands.)

Where he was right: the Senate's blended powers

Now the gold.

Centinel's complaint about the Senate was not simply that it was small or long-serving. It was that the Senate mixed legislative and executive functions. Look at Article II, Section 2. The President "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." He "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States." The Senate also tries impeachments.

Centinel's fear was that this blending would produce a cozy partnership between the President and the Senate, a club that would trade appointments and favors, with the House shut out. The Framers answered that the Senate's share was a check on the President, not a merger with him, and on treaties and appointments the check has often worked. But consider how confirmation politics actually operates: holds placed by individual senators, appointments traded for unrelated concessions, lame-duck confirmation sprees, and a permanent bargaining relationship between the White House and the Senate over thousands of positions. The House, the body closest to the people, has no formal role in any of it. That is not a conspiracy, but it is a recognizable version of what Centinel described. (The appointments machinery is explained in Principal Officers, Inferior Officers and the Appointments Clause Explained.)

Where he was right: the federal courts

Centinel's warning about the judiciary was even more prescient. Article III, Section 2 gives the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction "both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." The words "and Fact" terrified Anti-Federalists, because they seemed to allow a federal court to second-guess a local jury's findings. Centinel and the Pennsylvania minority also feared that federal jurisdiction would grow at the expense of state courts until the state judiciaries mattered little.

What happened? The Seventh Amendment answered the jury worry directly: "no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." That is a straight Anti-Federalist victory, and you can read it in The Seventh Amendment Guarantees a Civil Jury for Twenty Dollars and Means It.

But on the broader worry, that federal judges would become the arbiters of nearly every important question, his fears were vindicated over time. The Fourteenth Amendment and the incorporation of the Bill of Rights moved enormous areas of state law into federal court. That has protected real rights; it has also produced decisions like Roe v. Wade, in which federal judges removed a question from the states for half a century, until Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) returned it. The other Anti-Federalist essayist who pressed this point hardest was Brutus, covered in Brutus Warned in 1788 That Unelected Judges Would Swallow the States. And the "Exceptions" clause Centinel read past is a tool Congress has barely used, as The Exceptions Clause Gives Congress a Power Over the Courts It Rarely Uses explains.

The strongest defense of the Federalists, answered

Here is the best case that Centinel deserves no credit at all.

The argument. Centinel was a partisan for a failed state constitution. His essays mixed sound objections with slander, and the sound objections were raised better by others: Mason, the Federal Farmer, Brutus. The country rejected his ideas, adopted the Constitution, and then amended it in the way serious critics proposed. Giving Centinel credit for the Bill of Rights is like giving a heckler credit for the speech.

The answer.

1. Credit for reach, not for originality. Centinel was among the most reprinted Anti-Federalist voices. He did not invent the demand for a bill of rights, but he spread it to readers who never saw Mason's objections. The Pennsylvania minority's dissent, which shared his arguments, put specific amendments in print early, and pressure of that kind helped keep amendments on the agenda.
2. A bad theory can carry a good observation. His preference for a single-house legislature was wrong. His observation that blending legislative and executive power in the Senate creates opportunities for collusion was right, and the Federalists' own theory of separation, from Federalist 47 onward, explains why.
3. The Founders took suspicion seriously. Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The whole design assumes that men in power will push their advantage. Centinel simply applied that assumption to the Constitution itself, which is exactly what a citizen should do.

The press war, briefly

One more thread. Centinel complained repeatedly about the conduct of the press during ratification: Federalist printers, pressure on newspapers that carried opposition essays, and, among Anti-Federalists generally, complaints that opposition papers were being obstructed in the mails. Some of that was exaggerated. Some of it reflected real friction in a country where a handful of printers shaped what most people read. The lesson is that fights over who controls the channels of information are as old as the republic. Then, as now, the remedy was more speech, not less.

What to keep from Centinel

Keep his suspicion; drop his paranoia. Keep his demand for written rights and local juries; drop his romance of the all-powerful single assembly. And keep his central question, which is the right question for every citizen: when a new arrangement of power is presented to you with famous names attached and a deadline to approve it, read it yourself and ask who gains power and who can check them.

Pennsylvania's own history makes the point. It ratified fast, with a mob's help. Its dissenters lost, wrote down their objections, and kept arguing. Within four years many of those objections were in the Bill of Rights, and within three years Pennsylvania had rewritten its own constitution in the Federalists' image. Both sides won something, because both sides kept arguing in print rather than in the streets.

The case in brief

1. Centinel, generally attributed to Samuel Bryan, attacked the Constitution in Philadelphia from October 5, 1787, during a rushed and rough ratification fight that ended in a 46 to 23 vote on December 12.
2. His conspiracy charge, his swipe at Washington and Franklin, and his preference for a single-house legislature were wrong, and Pennsylvania itself abandoned that model in 1790.
3. He was right that the Senate's share of executive power invites collusion and that the House is shut out of appointments and treaties.
4. He was right that federal courts would grow at the expense of state courts and local juries, and the Seventh Amendment answered part of that fear.
5. Read new grants of power for who gains and who checks them, as he did, without assuming bad faith, as he too often did.

What you can do: read Article II, Section 2 and Article III, Section 2 on the Constitution page, then look up your senators' recent confirmation votes on the scorecard.