17 Feb 2026 - 21:49 CST

William Whipple’s surviving record does not read like a man who trusted atmosphere.

He was formed, first, by commerce and the sea: a Portsmouth merchant who learned that the republic’s “domestic” life is never domestic for long, because credit, shipping, allies, adversaries, and the price of risk all cross borders without asking permission. He was formed, second, by committees and campaigns: a Continental Congressman and militia commander who learned that legitimacy is not a mood but a chain of custody - of orders, jurisdictions, and written authority that can be shown, challenged, and obeyed. The Portsmouth Athenaeum’s finding aid for the Langdon-Whipple-Elwyn papers captures that reality bluntly: Whipple’s materials include correspondence, congressional committee papers, military papers, and financial memoranda - the paperwork of a man who understood that a republic runs on records, and that power without paper becomes power without restraint.

That habit makes him a useful lens for this year’s opening weeks, because what has distinguished the public climate since January 1 is not simply conflict, but the pace at which posture has changed - and the widening gap between how power speaks and how power is made answerable.

On the home front, the Minnesota flashpoint has continued to evolve in exactly the way a Whipple would recognize from wartime governance: escalation, public scrutiny, institutional friction, and then a visible effort to reframe command. Reuters has reported a “reset” in which Tom Homan was placed in charge of the Minneapolis operation, with Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino removed from that role and reassigned, while operational guidance shifted toward de-escalation cues - instructions not to engage “agitators,” fewer confrontational optics, tighter control of encounters. If one reads this as mere theater, one misses the more important signal: governments do not shuffle command and rewrite field temperament unless they believe legitimacy is becoming a cost center.

But Whipple would not mistake a change of command for a change of condition.

He negotiated and administered under pressure; he understood that a system can lower its voice while keeping the same discretionary powers intact. In war, you can change the watchwords and still keep the same latitude for force. The question that matters is not whether Washington sounds calmer, or whether Minneapolis has fewer agents on camera. The question is whether the republic is insisting on what Whipple’s generation insisted on whenever force touched the citizen: clear authority, visible oversight, and procedures strong enough to survive the next emergency.

That same demand for examinable authority is now colliding with courts in ways the founders would recognize as the constitutional immune system doing its job. Reuters has also reported that a federal judge ordered the acting ICE director to appear and explain why he should not be held in contempt in litigation connected to detention-related disputes - an unusually direct insistence that executive power show its work rather than merely assert it. In Whipple’s world, that is not a partisan victory. It is the mechanism: a republic forcing an answer, on the record, when an agency grows too comfortable with its own discretion.

Yet Whipple’s lens widens beyond Minneapolis almost immediately, because he belonged to a generation that learned - in blood - that foreign relations are not an accessory. They are the environment in which domestic choices ripen into consequences.

Here, too, the opening weeks have been defined by leverage talk, alliance management, and the blunt use of economic instruments as signals. Reuters has reported on U.S. rhetoric and policy proposals involving tariffs aimed at Denmark, framed in connection with renewed arguments about Greenland. Whatever one’s view of the merits, the Whipple lesson is the same: when you use trade tools as geopolitical punctuation, you do not merely pressure a counterpart; you teach every ally to re-price trust. In the eighteenth century, Whipple’s America lived on credit and coalition; it could not afford to treat allies as incidental. Modern America is larger, but the logic of alliance is unchanged: reliability is a form of power, and it is expensive to rebuild once discounted.

The Pacific carries the same tension, expressed with different vocabulary. Reuters has reported on sharpening U.S.-China-Taiwan signaling, with Beijing’s posture toward Taiwan treated not as a local quarrel but as a systemic security risk that pulls in American commitments and regional calculations. Whipple would have recognized the underlying pattern immediately, because he saw it in the Revolution’s own diplomacy: small places become large tests when they sit at the hinge of credibility. The dispute is never only about the island, or the map. It is about whether commitments mean what they say when pressure rises.

So if Whipple were writing in the voice of these entries - not as a ventriloquist for modern policy preferences, but as a man trained by logistics, oaths, and the moral burden of command - his insight would likely be unromantic.

He would say: stop grading the republic by its tone.

A softer posture in Minnesota may be prudence or merely tactics. A courtroom demand for an ICE director’s appearance may be correction or merely the first round of delay. A tariff threat aimed at an ally may be negotiation or may be the beginning of a habit in which economic force replaces diplomatic care. A hard line in the Pacific may be deterrence or may become, if mishandled, the kind of irrevocable signaling that leaves no exit except escalation. In each case, the only honest question is the Whipple question: what is written, who can review it, and what happens when the system is told “no”?

Because Whipple lived through the moment every republic eventually meets: the moment when necessity becomes a solvent, and men begin to treat procedure as weakness.

His answer was not gentleness. It was discipline. Keep records. Clarify authority. Put command under scrutiny. Make the use of force legible. Make foreign commitments coherent enough that allies can plan without guessing what your next impulse will be. In other words: do not ask citizens to trust moods. Ask institutions to submit to limits.

In a year already defined by recalibration - by personnel moves, posture shifts, leverage threats, and courts forcing visibility - the danger is not only what happens in any single incident. The danger is the habit we train: whether Americans learn to accept administrative discretion as a substitute for judicial permission at home, and whether America’s partners learn to treat American assurances as provisional abroad.

Whipple would have called that a strategic and constitutional self-injury.

Not because conflict is avoidable. He was no stranger to conflict. But because a republic that cannot hold itself to procedure under stress will eventually discover that stress is permanent - and that the only thing it has truly normalized is power acting first and justifying later.

He would not ask us to panic. He would ask us to document.

And then he would ask the question his era learned to treat as sacred: when the pressure rises again - as it will - will the limits still be there, in writing, enforceable, and obeyed?

14 Feb 2026 — 19:10 CST

A republic’s most revealing moments are rarely the ones where power is loud. They are the moments when power changes its voice.

Since the year began, the Minnesota immigration operation has moved through a familiar American sequence: escalation, injury, scrutiny, legal friction, and then - suddenly - tone management. Two deadly encounters involving U.S. citizens in Minneapolis became a national flashpoint, and reporting on the federal posture that followed has been less about a single raid than about a system deciding, in public, how answerable it intends to be.

The new element; the one that makes this week feel different from last - is not that officials now speak more carefully. It is that the administration has begun to rearrange personnel and reframe tactics in ways that look, from the outside, like a partial retreat. Reuters reported that Tom Homan was put in charge of the Minneapolis operation, replacing Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino amid a broader “reset” as political pressure mounted. Reporting also described new operational guidance for ICE officers in Minnesota, less confrontation-forward, more controlled, directing them not to interact with “agitators,” a small detail that nonetheless reveals the shift: when a posture is being reconsidered, the first sign is often not policy, but instructions about temperament.

Bovino’s removal from the Minnesota spotlight and reassignment back toward his prior post has been widely reported, framed as consequence and damage control after public backlash and escalating scrutiny. Even the way the story is told - “demoted,” “stood down,” “reassigned” - is part of the point. A government that believes it is losing legitimacy rarely says so directly. It changes faces, lowers the volume, and hopes the record becomes harder to keep.

But the founding generation did not measure safety by volume. They measured it by structure.

That is why the most constitutionally significant developments since January 1 have not been rhetorical at all. They have been procedural and judicial. A federal judge in Minnesota ordered the acting ICE director to appear and explain why he should not be held in contempt in connection with detention-related litigation; an unusually sharp instance of the judiciary insisting on visibility when executive power grows confident. Whether one cheers or resents that posture, it is the mechanism the founders built: not faith in good men, but friction among institutions.

And behind Minnesota sits a broader national argument about enforcement methods - especially what counts as lawful authority at the threshold of the home. The Associated Press has reported on internal guidance and disputes involving administrative warrants and enforcement authority, part of a larger debate about whether executive-branch paperwork is being treated, in practice, like judicial permission. The question is older than any administration: when the state moves quickly, does it still accept the burden of external oversight, or does it begin to certify itself?

Here is where Josiah Bartlett is unexpectedly useful as a lens.

Bartlett was a physician before he was a governor and a signer; trained to treat fear as data but not as doctrine, and trained to distrust the human tendency to confuse urgency with certainty. His public life ran through the disciplines of triage: stabilize first, then diagnose; act decisively, but keep notes; do not call a fever cured because the patient sweats less.

That is the danger of this moment’s apparent turn.

A softened tone from Washington may be real. A personnel shuffle may even be corrective. But neither is proof that the underlying system has become more answerable. Bartlett would have recognized the category mistake immediately: relief is a symptom; accountability is a test result.

If we want to know whether the republic is correcting itself or merely recalibrating, the measurement is unromantic.

Do investigations proceed with preserved evidence and clear jurisdiction when federal force kills a citizen? Do courts get compliance without delay, deflection, or procedural gamesmanship? Do enforcement authorities clarify - publicly and in binding form - what standards govern entry, detention, and use of force? Do “temporary” operational innovations remain temporary when public attention drifts?

The founders did not require cynicism. They required records.

Bartlett’s contribution to this season of strain is not a partisan conclusion. It is a clinical habit: do not confuse a change in affect with a change in condition. If the republic is becoming healthier, it will show up where health always shows up: in transparent fact-finding, in enforceable limits, in institutions that can still say no.

A government that learns to speak more gently may be learning restraint. Or it may simply be learning public relations. Bartlett would not guess which. He would watch the chart.

Because in a republic, the real question is never whether power can pivot. Power can always pivot. The real question is whether power, when it pivots, leaves behind enforceable precedent - or only a quieter room that will heat again the moment the pressure returns.

And the only honest way to answer that is the old way: keep the record, insist on procedure, and refuse to call the patient cured until the results are in.

28 Jan 2026 - 14:23 CST 

There are moments in public life when the most important change is not a policy, but a temperature.

Since the year opened, the country’s civic fever has not been confined to one city or one controversy. It has moved the way inflammation moves: pressure building beneath the surface, then a sudden spike: an operation, an arrest, a contested death, a court order, a protest line, a new memo, a new reassignment; followed by the brief, uneasy lull that comes when everyone realizes the body cannot keep surging forever.

Minnesota has become one of the places where that fever is easiest to read because the record has been so public and so quickly evolving. Reporting in recent days describes a federal posture that hardened, then began to soften - not out of philosophical conversion, but under the weight of scrutiny, litigation, and the ordinary friction of a system that still contains other centers of authority besides the executive branch. In Reuters’ account, leadership changes and internal warnings followed visible escalation, including a federal judge summoning a senior ICE official in a contempt-related dispute, and a demotion or stripping of title from a commander whose public statements had embodied the earlier posture.

The pattern is familiar enough to be misunderstood.

Some will call it a victory for decency. Others will call it mere theater. The founders would have warned us away from both reflexes. They knew that tone could change without accountability changing. They also knew that accountability often begins with something as small as a forced pause; because pauses are where records are preserved, jurisdiction is asserted, and the first serious questions are finally asked aloud.

That is where Josiah Bartlett becomes useful, not because he can be turned into a ventriloquist for modern arguments, but because his life trained him to distrust panic and to treat “improvement” as something proved by outcomes.

Bartlett came to public service through medicine. He learned, early, what many political men never learn: that crisis invites confident remedies that can kill the patient. In Kingston, when diphtheria swept through and ordinary treatments leaned toward bleeding and starvation, he chose a different approach (cooling, observation, adjustment) and his reputation grew because he treated dogma as less important than whether the patient lived. That habit - measurement over bravado, restraint over spectacle - follows a man into politics even when the subject is no longer fever, but force.

He was not a theatrical figure in Congress. He was described as diligent, attentive to detail, and influential more by labor than by speech. Yet he was also, in the decisive hour, unmistakably clear. New Hampshire, called first in the roll, gave the first “aye” for independence through Bartlett. He understood that a republic requires firmness at the right moment. The question is what sort of firmness.

What would a physician-statesman notice in our present moment?

He would notice that the administration’s apparent shift - pulling back, changing assignments, speaking more carefully - arrived only after the system began producing hard consequences: disputed deaths, clashes over jurisdiction, court involvement, and public documentation that refused to stay private. He would not be shocked by that. He would recognize it the way a doctor recognizes a body’s forced correction when stress becomes unsustainable.

But he would also insist on the difference between symptom relief and cure.

A softened rhetorical posture is not, by itself, a constitutional recovery. It may simply be a reduction of visible swelling while the underlying condition continues to advance. In medicine, Bartlett would have said: do not confuse a quieter patient with a healed patient. In public life, the analog is plain: do not confuse calmer press statements with restored limits.

This is why the dispute about warrants and home entry matters so much, and why it cannot be treated as a technical quarrel for lawyers alone. Recent reporting has described internal guidance and arguments around the use of administrative paperwork (documents generated within the executive branch) as a basis for entry or arrest in ways that critics say press against the Fourth Amendment’s demand for judicial warrants at the home. Even where courts ultimately sort the legality in particular cases, the civic diagnosis is already available: when the executive branch grows comfortable treating its own paperwork as functionally equivalent to a judge’s order, it begins to certify itself.

Bartlett would have understood that habit instinctively. He practiced in a world where false confidence could become lethal. The more urgently you feel the need to act, the more disciplined you must become about proof.

So, if he were writing a missive in this hour, he would not ask first whether the administration has become more “reasonable.” He would ask whether the system has become more examinable.

Are investigations proceeding in a way that preserves evidence and permits independent review? Are jurisdictional disputes being resolved by law, or by power? Are courts being obeyed promptly, or treated as obstacles to be managed? Are the standards for entry, arrest, detention, and force being clarified publicly so that citizens can know what the government claims it may do?

Those are the vital signs. Without them, “de-escalation” is only a mood.

And Bartlett, who called the Declaration “the greatest state paper ever conceived by the mind of man,” would have reminded us why: the American claim was never merely that we would be strong. It was that we would be bound.

Bound means that power can be made to stop. Bound means that the home is not entered by confidence alone. Bound means that when blood is shed under contested facts, the public does not have to beg for the right to see the record. Bound means that courts are not props, and that oversight is not conditional on the executive branch’s willingness to cooperate.

This is why the current “turn” in posture - whatever its sincerity - should be recorded soberly, not celebrated as virtue and not dismissed as nothing. A good physician does not mock improvement. But neither does he stop treatment because the fever broke for an afternoon.

If pressure from courts, states, and public scrutiny has forced a recalibration, that is evidence that the constitutional immune system is still functioning. The task is to strengthen that system, not to relax because the patient looks less agitated.

Bartlett’s deepest counsel, I suspect, would be painfully unfashionable: slow down and document.

Not because urgency is imaginary, but because urgency is the condition under which republics make their worst mistakes; mistakes that become habits, and habits that become “normal.”

He would tell us that the country can survive anger, and it can survive sharp disagreement. What it cannot survive is a long season in which force is used under disputed facts and then insulated from examination because that is how a people learns, gradually, to accept the replacement of law with administrative will.

In medicine, you do not restore health by shouting at the body. You restore it by insisting on the disciplines that make recovery possible: clear measures, clean procedures, accountability to reality, and a refusal to confuse temporary relief with repair.

For citizens now, that means insisting, calmly and relentlessly, on the old basics. Not slogans. Not vengeance. Not denial.

Records. Warrants that mean what they say. Courts that are obeyed. Evidence that is preserved. Accountability that does not depend on whether officials feel like granting it.

Bartlett would recognize that as the only kind of cure a republic ever gets.

27 Jan 2026 - 7:36 CST

The last forty-eight hours have introduced a change in tone from Washington that would have been unthinkable only a week ago.

After weeks of escalation in Minnesota - public threats, mass deployments, and an enforcement posture that seemed to invite confrontation - the administration has begun to speak differently. Senior figures have been reassigned. Federal leadership has acknowledged conversations with state and local officials that emphasize de-escalation. Some agents are being pulled back. And the rhetoric that once leaned heavily on domination and inevitability has been replaced, at least publicly, with language of coordination and review.

It is tempting to call this a reversal.

But the founders were trained to distrust reversals that arrive only after blood, backlash, and scrutiny.
They understood that power rarely abandons a posture because it has discovered restraint. More often, it adjusts because restraint has been imposed by courts, by public outrage, by institutional friction, or by the simple recognition that bravado has begun to cost more than it delivers.

Elbridge Gerry was particularly clear-eyed about this pattern. He did not assume that officials acted in bad faith. He assumed something more ordinary and more dangerous: that authority, once exercised without clear limits, grows accustomed to itself. His insistence on explicit restraints, on written guarantees, on external checks, on structures that forced justification, came from the belief that tone is never a substitute for accountability.

That is the lens through which this moment should be read.

A softened posture toward Minnesota does not, by itself, answer the questions raised by Minneapolis. It does not resolve the disputed facts surrounding Alex Pretti’s death. It does not clarify who controls a scene when federal force is used against a citizen. It does not explain how warrants are understood, or how administrative authority is being interpreted inside the home. And it does not, on its own, establish whether the system is correcting itself or merely changing faces.

The founding generation was not hostile to correction. They welcomed it. But they measured correction differently than we often do now. They did not ask whether leaders sounded more reasonable. They asked whether power had become more answerable.

Gerry warned that rights are not secured by moments of moderation, but by habits of restraint. A government that learns to speak carefully without being constrained structurally has not been tamed; it has been coached. That distinction mattered to him because he had lived through its earlier forms - imperial authorities who occasionally softened their language while continuing to expand their reach.

So, the question this shift raises is not whether the temperature has dropped. It is whether the rules have reasserted themselves. If investigations proceed independently and without obstruction, that will be evidence of correction. If evidence is preserved and jurisdiction respected, that will be evidence of correction. If the legal standards governing entry, detention, and force are clarified publicly and enforced consistently, that will be evidence of correction.

If, however, today’s changes amount only to a rearrangement - new overseers, quieter language, the same unresolved authorities - then what we are witnessing is not restraint, but recalibration.

The founders were not impressed by recalibration. They were impressed by submission to limits.

Gerry would have cautioned against mistaking relief for repair. Relief is emotional. Repair is procedural. Relief fades quickly. Repair leaves a record.

A republic does not preserve itself by applauding every retreat as virtue. It preserves itself by insisting that retreats become precedents by making sure that when power steps back, it does not step back only until the noise passes.

So, I record this moment without celebration and without cynicism.

A change in tone is welcome if it signals a return to discipline. A change in posture is meaningful only if it results in accountability that can survive the next crisis.

The test is not whether this administration has learned to speak more carefully. The test is whether the system has re-learned how to say no.

That is the difference between a temporary pause and a constitutional correction.

26 Jan 2026 - 9:32 CST

After spending the morning reviewing some of the posts being shared online by some of my Masonic brethren, I felt compelled to put some thoughts down for my both my own personal reflection and record as well as to promote further debate and discussion.

Rather than respond in the heat of the moment, I want to slow the room for a moment and speak from a place we share; not as partisans, and not as spectators, but as men shaped by older disciplines.

Both the founding generation and the Masonic tradition understood something that is easy to forget in an age of instant reaction: how authority is spoken about trains how it will be exercised. Words are not commentary alone. They are instruction.

The founders were not naïve about disorder or violence. Many of them faced mobs, riots, arson, and armed resistance firsthand. They believed firmly in enforcement and the rule of law. But they were equally clear that legitimacy depends on restraint, especially when those entrusted with power speak publicly. James Madison warned that power rarely announces itself as tyranny; it arrives as necessity, grows comfortable with itself, and slowly teaches people to accept what would once have unsettled them.

That is why republican government was designed to sound procedural rather than triumphant. Authority, in their view, was meant to explain itself, not savor itself. Force, when necessary, was to be justified reluctantly and constrained carefully, not promised in advance with bravado. A republic can survive harsh facts; it struggles to survive a harsh governing tone.

Freemasonry reaches the same conclusion by a different road. The Old Charges do not ask us to withdraw from civic life; they ask us to enter it governed. A Mason’s obligations do not pause outside the lodge. They follow him into public speech, into comment sections, and into the moments when anger or certainty tempts excess. Temperance is not silence. It is the discipline to speak in a way that steadies rather than inflames.

When rhetoric about enforcement leans toward humiliation, domination, or the casual invocation of death, it becomes more than opinion. It becomes conduct. And conduct - especially when visible to others - is precisely what Masonry asks us to examine first in ourselves. The working tools were not given to admire power, but to measure it. The square tests our words. The level reminds us that authority does not elevate us above restraint. The plumb asks whether our public posture stands upright when examined in daylight.

None of this denies the reality that violence against officers is grave, or that force may be necessary in extreme circumstances. The question is not whether the law may act, but how we speak about that action. The founders feared people becoming accustomed to intimidation as governance. Masonry warns against the same habit, because power spoken without restraint rarely remains restrained in practice.

I offer this not as rebuke, and certainly not as political argument, but as a reminder I owe myself as much as anyone else. A Mason is taught to cool the room, not heat it. A citizen of a republic inherits the same obligation. If our principles guide us only when it is easy or emotionally satisfying, then they are not principles, they are preferences.

Both traditions - republican and Masonic - ask something harder of us: to model seriousness, restraint, and clarity when the moment invites spectacle. Order enforced without humility teaches fear. Order defended with discipline teaches legitimacy.

That distinction matters. It always has.

And it is worth remembering that our words, like our actions, are part of the work we leave behind.