May 4, 1981 * Link to Annals.

* Portions of this address were delivered on April 6, 1987.

Mr. President, today, I should like to begin a series of statements that will cover the history of the Senate and its deliberations chronologically, examining the major issues that have faced our predecessors and, at times, have shaken the very foundations of the Union. Along the way, I plan to focus attention on some of the remarkable personalities who walked the halls of the Senate—Richard Henry Lee, Roger Sherman, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, Randolph of Roanoke and Blaine of Maine, “Bluff Ben” Wade and “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Huey Long, the senior and junior Robert La Follettes and Henry Cabot Lodges, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Russell.

I will begin by looking closely at the First Congress, where many of our current rules, precedents, and customs were forged. In examining the First Congress, I have been aided by the work of the First Federal Congress Project located at George Washington University. I commend the project's fine work to my colleagues. To date, the project has published three impressive volumes, a documentary history of the First Federal Congress.

The introduction to Volume I of Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America explains the significance of the First Congress, and it is worth quoting at length:

When the First Federal Congress convened in March 1789, it seemed unlikely that the experiment represented by the new Federal Constitution would succeed. The United States had a population of four million and its area was larger than any European state except Russia. There was no example in history and no support in traditional political theory to encourage those who would attempt to govern such a nation by a republican form of government based on the consent of the governed. Many Federalist supporters of the Constitution, as well as Antifederalist critics, doubted that the plan of government devised by the Philadelphia Convention would work in practice, unless changes were made—either formally by amendment or informally by interpretation—to bring the new Constitution closer to their sometimes-conflicting standards of perfection.

Yet the American experiment did succeed. For almost two centuries, this has astonished skeptics. “God,” a familiar epigram observes, “looks after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Indeed, the success of the American form of government has been remarkable; not only has the U.S. Constitution operated to provide a greater degree of justice, prosperity, and liberty to its citizens than that realized by any 0020

As the Senate Journal documents, more than a month would pass before a quorum would gather and the Senate of the First Congress could proceed with its business. National Archives

0021 3 nation in recorded history, but it has also shown such impressive stability that it is now the oldest written constitution in operation in any modern state.

How can we account for this success? Much credit belongs to the genius of the framers of the Constitution—their historical and intuitive knowledge of man and politics. Yet that is not the full explanation. Many nations have come to ruin under constitutions deliberately patterned on the American model. It was the way in which the American people implemented their Constitution that made a functioning system from the document's abstractions. Nothing was more essential to the enduring success of that system than the First Federal Congress. 1

On March 4, 1789, the First Congress was to meet in the newly refurbished Federal Hall in New York City to count the electoral votes for president and vice president, inaugurate the winners, and get on with its business. At sunset on March 3, thirteen of the big guns at New York's battery were fired to signal the end of the floundering government under the Articles of Confederation. At sunrise the next day, church bells rang to welcome the birth of the new constitutional government. The Pennsylvania Gazette reported that “a general joy pervaded the whole city on this great, important, and memorable event.” 2

The jubilation soon died for want of fuel. When the members of the House and Senate assembled, it was embarrassingly clear that only thirteen of the fifty-nine representatives and only eight of the twenty-two senators from the eleven states (Rhode Island and North Carolina had not yet ratified the Constitution) were present. The first entry in the Senate's Journal reads, “The number not being sufficient to constitute a quorum, they adjourned....” 3

I think these first eight men deserve special recognition. From New Hampshire came John Langdon, who had shepherded the Constitution through his state's convention, and Paine Wingate, the Harvard-educated Congregational minister. Massachusetts was represented by Caleb Strong, active in the Constitutional Convention and later governor of his state. Connecticut sent two aggressive Federalists: Oliver Ellsworth, destined to become chief justice of the United States, and William Samuel Johnson, newly elected president of Columbia College. Pennsylvania's two senators were the wealthy Philadelphia financier Robert Morris and the irascible William Maclay, from whose journal of the First Congress we have gained an invaluable picture of political life during that time. Finally, there was William Few, who had completed his long journey from Georgia before the members from New Jersey could bestir themselves to cross the Hudson River.

The Congress under the Articles of Confederation had been plagued by absenteeism. In its final months, that legislature remained virtually paralyzed by its inability to muster a quorum of members. Thus, when only eight of the elected senators presented themselves on March 4, many feared a continuation of the old difficulty. As Charlene N. Bickford, an authority on the First Congress, has written, “These men hoped that the new government could begin its work promptly, conveying an impression of the seriousness of their attention to duty to the public.” 4 When a quorum failed to materialize over the next few days, those who had arrived wrote to their tardy colleagues, “We apprehend that no arguments are necessary to evince to you the indispensable necessity of putting the Government into immediate operation; and, therefore earnestly request, that you will be so obliging as to attend as soon as possible.” 5

Connecticut's Governor Samuel Huntington wrote on March 30 to that state's two senators, who were present in the capital, expressing generally held fears that further delay would undermine national and world confidence in the new government. He explained, 0022 “I Know not but that particular embarrassments in some States may be sufficient excuse for delay to this time; but did those States duly consider the consequences: that at this important Crisis earnest expectation may grow into impatience & finally change to loss of Confidence, & distrust by long disappointment, I am sure procrastination must create anxiety in the friends to the Constitution.” 6

At Mount Vernon, George Washington, a man with a strict sense of duty who felt certain he would be president if only Congress could convene to count the votes, regretted the “stupor, or listlessness.” 7 On April 1, Thomas Scott came over the Alleghenies from western Pennsylvania to give the House its first quorum. But it was not until April 6, when Richard Henry Lee arrived from Virginia, that the first quorum of twelve senators was secured.

Many of his younger colleagues stood in awe of Richard Henry Lee. A striking, tight-lipped gentleman, he was fifty-seven—the same age as George Washington. He, along with Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, had drafted Virginia's first protests against Great Britain. He was most revered for the resolution he introduced at the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, which began with the thrilling words, “ Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” By the time he reached the Senate, Lee had only a few years to live, but he would play an active role. 8

Mr. President, perhaps we can capture a sense of the excitement and commitment with which these first senators approached their new duties by looking in on a ceremony held in southern New Jersey to mark the departure of Senator Jonathan Elmer. The March 26, 1789, event began, as was customary in the late eighteenth century, with a series of toasts. On this occasion, the spirited assemblage drank eleven toasts. For those today who might wish to stage a commemorative toast, I shall read them as given:

1 The new Federal Constitution. May it be speedily put in operation

2 His Excellency General Washington

3 The Hon[orable] John Adams

4 The Senate of the United States

5 The federal House of Representatives

6 The Governor of the State of New Jersey

7 The promoters of public Happiness

8 May the liberties of the people be the principal object of the Rulers

9 Success to Agriculture [M]anufactures & Commerce

10 Honor Virtue & Patriotism

11 A speedy reformation to Rhode Island & North Carolina

With the arrival of Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, on April 6, 1789, a quorum was finally secured. Library of Congress

0023 5

We are advised that these toasts were executed with “the greatest order and decorum.” Following that ceremony, the new senator listened to a farewell address in which he was praised for “your literary achievements, the early and active part you took in the cause of liberty and your country in the late revolution, your knowledge and experience in the Science of Government.”

Elmer responded with suitable humility. He said: “To make a fair experiment of the new federal Constitution by putting it into execution immediately, is an object which I have much at heart. The success of the experiment will depend, greatly, upon the manner in which this grand machine is first put in motion.” He closed with a promise—one that his modern successors, in this age of instantaneous statewide news coverage, might not have been so bold as to venture. He said, “And while I endeavor faithfully to serve my Country in general, I have made it my constant duty to promote the honor and interests of the State to which I belong, and that part of it, in particular, with which I am more immediately committed.” 9

The twelve senators who met on April 6 were the first of the ninety-four men who would serve from that point until 1801. This figure, I should note, does not include Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania who attended and voted in the Senate but was afterward declared ineligible. For information on the characteristics of these first ninety-four senators, I am deeply indebted to a fine doctoral dissertation by Roy Swanstrom of Seattle Pacific College which was printed as a Senate document in 1962. 10

Though the nation was new, these men brought with them records of long experience in political statecraft. Eighteen had been members of the Constitutional Convention. More than forty had served in the ratifying conventions of their states. Forty-two had had experience as legislators in the Continental Congress or the Congress of the Confederation. Eighty-four had served in their state or provincial legislatures. Nine had been governors. Others served as judges, mayors, state attorneys general and treasurers. No wonder John Adams, standing before the Senate for the first time as vice president, was moved and reassured to see before him “so many of those characters, of whose virtuous exertions I have so often been a witness—from whose countenances and examples I have ever derived encouragement and animation.... Those celebrated defenders of the liberties of this country, whom menaces could not intimidate, corruption seduct, nor flattery allure.” 11

About sixty of these first eighteenth-century senators had been in uniform during the Revolution. Joseph Anderson of Tennessee, a Continental captain at twenty years of age, served at the siege of Yorktown. Jesse Franklin of North Carolina, a soldier at seventeen and hero of King's Mountain and Guilford Courthouse, was so hated by the loyalists on the frontier that when he was captured, he was hanged by his own bridle only to have it break, allowing him to escape. Only three senators, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut and Paine Wingate and Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire, were lukewarm to the Revolution. These were men who made painful decisions about whether or not to support the Revolution or whether or not to leave their families behind to spend long months in Philadelphia working on a constitution many predicted was doomed to failure.

Upon reading their diaries and letters, one is tempted to think of these men as colleagues who shared many of the same concerns we do today. During the First Congress, one senator's house was robbed while he was away serving his nation. Another's wife died. William Grayson of Virginia became the first senator to die in office. Another 0024 6 senator was badly hurt in a carriage accident. These senators worried about children growing up back home without them and about infants with measles. Some grew weary during long sessions; some complained about their rooms; and one wrote home about the excellent pineapple he had tasted. 12

Then, as now, the majority of senators were lawyers, and being lawyers left time for other pursuits. In the South, many lawyer-senators owned large estates to which they devoted much time. In the North, many invested in mercantile and manufacturing projects. Elijah Paine of Vermont combined all three pursuits: he was a lawyer, farmer, and owner of a cloth factory and saw and grist mills. The Senate's critics complained about this preponderance of lawyers. Philadelphia's hypercritical Aurora charged that lawyers in Congress were “machines of precedent” and sneered that they could reach no decision without first consulting “Vattel, Grotius, Bynkerschock, or Puffendorf.” Later, when a bankruptcy bill was before the Senate, the Aurora claimed that the lawyers had pushed it through, hoping it would yield “handsome pickings” to a “flock of legal harpies.” 13

Mr. President, although the Senate was delayed nearly five weeks for lack of a quorum, those members who had arrived in New York City were far from idle. First, there was an active social life. Wealthy New York City residents, eager to convince Congress to make that city its permanent home, hosted a succession of dinners and ceremonies. These entertainments served the very helpful purpose of allowing members from differing regions to get to know one another.

There were also jobseekers. While recuperating from a broken jaw occasioned by a tooth extraction, Senator Tristram Dalton of Massachusetts earlier wrote Caleb Strong, that state's other senator:

... you may expect applications in favor of a number of Persons who want Places in the federal Revenue and some will be so modest as to insist on an absolute promise to favor them—perhaps adding that I have promised—for they have already said you have, in a case where I suppose no application has been made to you....

Be assured, [Dear] Sir, that I have not promised my interest to any man—neither will I until at Congress.

Applications to me have been so many and some of them so curious I thought it friendly... to hand you this intelligence in Season lest by false report of my Conduct you be embarrassed. 14

The waiting senators informally discussed selection of a secretary of the Senate and procedures for conducting the Senate's internal business. They gave a great deal of attention to questions of separation of powers and checks and balances between the Senate, House, and the president. Senators also pondered whether they should act as equals or as superiors to House members. Some shared New Hampshire Senator Paine Wingate's concerns that the Senate, as a body, might not be up to public expectations. Wingate wrote to a friend as follows:

I fear that your expectation, and that of the public in general, will be raised too high respecting that new government. You will remember that Congress is but a collective body of men, men of like passions, subject to local prejudices and those biases which in some measure are inseparable from human nature. I say this not to lessen their true merit for I esteem them in general as very worthy characters, but not without considerable imperfections.... And tho I would not attribute a base design to any, yet I may be justified in supposing that partiality and jealousy will blind and mislead some, and it will be next to impossible to harmonize the sentiments of all. The best we can hope for is an accommodating disposition in that which will be tolerably right. 15

The arrival of Richard Henry Lee was the signal for the first senators to get down to the business of the nation. They set to work by electing a president pro tempore, John 0025 Langdon of New Hampshire. Forty-seven and handsome, Langdon and his brother, Woodbury, had both been delegates to the Continental Congress. As speaker of the New Hampshire assembly in 1777, he found the state's treasury empty just when troops were needed to repel Burgoyne's offensive. Langdon rose and said: “I have $3,000 in hard money. I will pledge the plate in my house for $3,000 or more, and I have seventy hogsheads of Tobago rum which shall be disposed of for what it will bring. These are at the service of the State.” He then adjourned the assembly so that its members might volunteer for military service. Langdon joined the brigade, equipped through his generosity, that won the Battle of Bennington. After the Revolution, he personally paid the expenses of the New Hampshire delegation to the Constitutional Convention. 16

John Langdon of New Hampshire was the first president pro tempore of the Senate. Architect of the Capitol

Having elected Langdon, the senators next chose Oliver Ellsworth to go downstairs and inform the House that the Senate was prepared to carry out its constitutional duty of counting electoral votes in the presence of the representatives. Every step of the procedure that followed was a first. In the hushed chamber, the members watched Langdon open and count the electoral ballots. According to the Constitution, the individual receiving the highest number of votes would become president, the second highest would be vice president. While this plan was to secure the ablest men for both offices, in practice it was certain that sooner or later it would produce a president and vice president of opposite political persuasions. Indeed, this happened sooner rather than later, but I will speak of that at another time.

Fortunately, in the first election, there was no party contest. Langdon announced that George Washington had received sixty-nine votes and John Adams, thirty-four. John Jay was a distant third with nine; and nine other men divided the remaining twenty-six votes among them. As vice president, Adams could be relied upon to cooperate fully with George Washington. 17

The Senate dispatched messengers to carry the certificates of election to George Washington at Mount Vernon and to John Adams in Braintree, Massachusetts. Upon receiving the news, Washington said he was “much affected by this fresh proof of my country's esteem and confidence.” He set off for New York on April 16, 1789.

While the Senate waited for Adams and Washington to arrive, it continued its own organization. The House and Senate appointed chaplains and other officers and adopted their rules of procedure. In the Senate, the appointment of committees would be by ballot, and every member could introduce bills on his own responsibility. In the House, the appointment of committees 0026 8 was left to the Speaker, and bills were to be introduced only by special committees after discussion in the Committee of the Whole.

There was little initial dissent over these measures. Rancor between the Senate and House only began to grow when the Senate showed a tendency for self-aggrandizement. The Senate's inflated opinion of itself rekindled all the old fears that had been raised at the Constitutional Convention. The fact that the first senators had been so slow in coming to New York hadn't helped matters. Representative Henry Wynkoop of Pennsylvania expressed the misgivings of many when he wrote that their conduct savored “too much of the remains of Monarchical Government, where those promoted to public office considered themselves as clothed with Magisterial Dignity instead of confidential servants of the People.” 18

During the debates on the Constitution, the Senate was portrayed by its friends as a bulwark of stability—of the “haves” against the hasty and radical action of the “have nots”—and was denounced by its foes as dangerous to the liberties of the people. The type of men elected to the Senate in its early years encouraged those who hoped it would be a conservative influence and confirmed the worst fears of its detractors. No one looking at these first senators could have any doubt about the social class they represented. The Senate roll from 1789 to 1801 read like the Who's Who of wealthy and socially prominent families—they were the “haves” their supporters counted on.

Two of Pennsylvania's first senators were among the nation's richest men. Robert Morris was known as the Financier of the Revolution. William Bingham had made a fortune in war profiteering and invested his profits in land speculation. When the Senate later met in Philadelphia, their homes were the scenes of some of the most lavish entertainment in America.

Maryland's Charles Carroll of Carrollton was reputedly worth half a million dollars—a lot of money in those days. New York's Philip Schuyler owned thousands of acres in the Mohawk and Hudson valleys. George Cabot represented one of the most patrician families in Massachusetts. Ralph Izard of South Carolina was a member of one of that state's oldest families. Even senators from the frontier states of Kentucky and Tennessee came from socially prominent families. William Cocke of Tennessee, who, at sixty-five, enlisted as a private to fight the Creek Indians with Andrew Jackson, came from a family established in Virginia since 1628. 19

Once it finally met, the Senate lost no time in trying to assert its superiority over the House. The senators decided that all communications from the upper to the lower chamber should be merely sent down by the secretary, but that, in the reverse case, two members of the House must bring the communications to the bar of the Senate. The House greeted the suggestion with a mixture of amusement and resentment. It replied, via its clerk, that it would send its messages any way it pleased, and the Senate was powerless to enforce its will. 20

Bruised but unbowed, the senators next tried to enhance their prestige by proposing a pay differential in their favor. At the Constitutional Convention, there had been a move in this direction but it was checked by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina who proposed that senators receive no salary at all, limiting their numbers to wealthy men only. The Constitution stated only that senators and representatives would receive compensation from the federal treasury. The House suggested a compensation of six dollars a day for members of both chambers, plus six dollars for each twenty-five miles traveled to and from sessions. The Senate objected to the implied equality and amended the bill to increase the senators' pay to 0027 9 eight dollars per day. Those independently wealthy senators hardly needed the extra two dollars. The issue was one of prestige, not penury. 21

Several senators used this opportunity to expound on the superior rank of their chamber and their personal disdain for money. The sharp-tongued William Maclay listened in disgust. I quote from his journal:

Up now rose Izard; said that the members of the Senate went to boarding-houses, lodged in holes and corners, associated with improper company, and conversed improperly, so as to lower their dignity and character; that the delegates from South Carolina used to have 600 pounds per year, and could live like gentlemen, etc. Butler rose; said a great deal of stuff of the same kind; that a member of the Senate should not only have a handsome income, but should spend it all.... Mr. Morris likewise paid himself some compliments on his manner and conduct in life, his disregard of money, and the little respect he paid to the common opinions of people. 22

Maclay was outraged and claimed he led the fight against the pay differential as well as against high salaries for any federal official. He adds in his diary, “I did not speak long, and, enraged as I was at such doctrines, I am sure I did not speak well.” 23 When the matter came to a vote, however, only three other senators voted with Maclay.

The House naturally denounced the Senate's proposal. Some representatives argued that they should have the higher pay. Others claimed that higher pay would only cause the senators to prolong sessions. But the amended bill had come back to the House in August, uncomfortably close to the end of the session. Representatives feared that, if they defeated it outright, they would have to go home without any pay at all. While Representative James Jackson of Georgia claimed he would rather go home penniless than accept the principle of House inferiority, his colleagues were in a compromising mood. They reluctantly accepted the salary discrimination, but only for special sessions. The pay bill, as passed, reduced the differentiation to one dollar—senators to receive seven dollars per day while representatives received six dollars. Moreover, the differentiation did not go into effect until March 4, 1795, and applied only to the special session that met between June 8 and June 26, 1795. The act expired March 4, 1796, making the Senate's victory rather hollow. In fact, when the matter of pay came up again in 1796, in the midst of the intense antiaristocratic sentiment spurred by the French Revolution, the senators realized that renewed claims of superiority would only damage their reputations and dropped the issue. 24

The Senate also came under intense criticism for its policy of meeting behind closed doors. The sight of its closed doors, day in, day out, goaded suspicions that dark antidemocratic plots were hatching behind them. The Senate's secrecy contrasted sharply with the deliberations of the House, which were not only open to the public, but reports of which were widely circulated through the newspapers. The National Gazette fumed in 1792:

This Patrician style, this concealment, this affection of pre-eminence but illy accords with the spirit of republican government. The Constitution of the United States acknowledges no superiority of one legislative body over the other, and to assume it is a violation of its principle, and an insult to the character of freemen. It is a strange maxim in republican policy, that the agents of the people should keep their deliberations concealed from those from whom they derive their political existence. 25

Yet, while this policy was soon bitterly attacked for its aristocratic connotations, it was apparently not adopted in a deliberately antirepublican spirit. The Senate was merely following the precedent of its predecessor, the Congress of the Confederation. Even the 0028 10 most outspoken critics of patrician pretensions voiced little objection at the time. Maclay, the bitter foe of aristocracy, was a member of the committee assigned to write the Senate's rules, which not only said nothing about opening the Senate's doors but, instead, ordered that “inviolable secrecy shall be observed with respect to all matters transacted in the Senate.” 26

In this Currier and Ives depiction, made in the 1870's, George Washington takes the oath of office as president of the United States, while Samuel Otis, the secretary of the Senate, holds the Bible. Vice President John Adams stands to Washington's left. Library of Congress

In their letters home, senators justified their decision. Samuel Johnston of North Carolina claimed that opening the doors to visitors would encourage posturing, waste time, and cost money. Paine Wingate of New Hampshire told friends: “You know I am not a friend to mystery and hypocrisy, but there are certain foibles which are inseparable from men and bodies of men and perhaps considerable faults which had better be concealed from observation. How would all the little domestic transactions of even the best regulated family appear if exposed to the world?” 27 The Senate's doors remained tightly closed throughout the First Congress, but the battle to pry them open was brewing.

Once the ground rules for the Senate and House were laid, the House turned its attention to financing the new government. Upstairs, however, the Senate still floundered over questions of etiquette, matters it considered of equal importance to the concerns before the House. The arrival of Vice President Adams raised a number of procedural questions. “Bonny Johnny Adams,” as 0029 11 Maclay satirically called him, was fresh from nine years abroad as American minister, chiefly to England. Many felt that the experience had undermined his native republican simplicity. With the House of Lords in mind, Adams wanted a Senate sergeant at arms who would be called the Usher of the Black Rod. Senators must, he believed, be called “Right Honorable” in the minutes. But Adams' greatest story had to do with his own role. Surveying the Senate, he was much distressed. Maclay recorded Adams' plaintive speech:

Gentlemen, I feel great difficulty how to act. I am possessed of two separate powers.... I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything. But I am president also of the Senate. When the President comes into the Senate, what shall I be? I cannot be [president] then. No, gentlemen, I can not, I can not. I wish gentlemen to think what I shall be.

Maclay described the scene:

Here, as if oppressed with a sense of his distressed situation, he threw himself back in his chair. A solemn silence ensued. God forgive me, for it was involuntary, but the profane muscles of my face were in tune for laughter in spite of my indisposition. 28

Next, Adams turned his attention to a title for the president. He and several senators felt that “President of the United States” was too humble an appellation. After all, there were presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs. The senators finally hit upon a title the majority liked—“His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of Their Liberties”—and hoped the House would go along. The House would not. “President,” its members argued, was good enough. Several members, not wishing to appear reluctant in the distribution of appropriate titles, devised one for the portly vice president. Adams, who wore a side-curling wig on his balding head, was thereafter lampooned as “His Rotundity.” 29

While this bickering was going on, the president-elect was making his way to New York for the inauguration, set for April 30 in the Senate chamber. The senators assembled that morning to await the arrival of the House and the new chief executive. Everyone was a bit nervous and confused—not the least being Adams. Minutes before Washington was to arrive, the vice president again sought help from the senators:

Gentlemen, I wish for the direction of the Senate. The President will, I suppose, address the Congress. How shall I behave? How shall we receive it? Shall it be sitting or standing? 30

In the midst of the discussion that followed, the representatives arrived at the door. This raised the question as to how they were to be received. While the senators were trying to decide what to do, the representatives filed in and unceremoniously took their seats. Finally, preceded by drums and bagpipes, George Washington arrived and was escorted out onto the balcony where he took his oath of office. He then returned to the Senate chamber and delivered his inaugural address.

With this ceremony finished, Maclay rejoiced that at last the Senate could get down to the business of government, but it was not yet to be. Washington had hardly left the chamber when Adams brought up the matter of how the Senate should respond to the president's address. Their patience by then thoroughly tried, the senators agreed that it would be best for them to prepare a reply which they would deliver to the president at his residence. 31

After several weeks of heated deliberation, senators agreed on the text of their response. On May 18, they traveled by carriage to Washington's house on Cherry Street. Maclay grumbled all the way but left us a good description of what followed:

0030 12

We made our bows as we entered, and the Vice-President, having made a bow, began to read an address. He was much confused. The paper trembled in his hand, though he had the aid of both by resting it on his hat, which he held in his left hand. He read very badly all that was on the front page. The turning of the page seemed to restore him, and he read the rest with more propriety.

The President took his reply out of his coatpocket. He had his spectacles in his jacket-pocket, having his hat in his left hand and the paper in his right. He had too many objects for his hands.... Having adjusted his spectacles, which was not very easy, considering the engagements on his hands, he read the reply with tolerable exactness and without emotion. 32

On the surface, it may seem that the Senate was merely frittering away precious time in fussing over its relations with the president, but, as historian Forrest McDonald in his Presidency of George Washington noted:

Beneath all this nonsensical ostentation and formality... lay some deadly serious jockeying for power.... The exaggerated deference toward the president was designed, at least in part, to ensure that if court politics developed, the senators would have first rank as courtiers. The exaggerated insistence on formality, on the other hand, was part of a design by the senators to protect their prerogatives against executive encroachment. 33

One might conclude that the Senate's persistent claims to superiority over the House resulted in such bitterness that their interactions were suffused with mutual rancor, but that was generally not the case. Relations between the Senate and House during the First Congress were usually friendly. Joint committees, exchanged information, visits to each other's chambers, and social contacts all helped to promote good will. Nor is it true that the Senate spent the whole First Congress arguing over etiquette and form. Despite its foibles, the first Senate left behind a record of solid achievement, as we shall see.

When Washington replied to the Senate's response to his inaugural address, he told the members that he was ready and eager to join with them “in the arduous but pleasing task of attempting to make a nation happy.” Both houses of Congress, dominated by strong Federalist majorities, set about this task with optimism.

The first order of substantive business in putting the machinery of the national government to work was the raising of the revenue to run it. In mid-May, the House passed a revenue-producing tariff bill and sent it to the Senate. The Senate added numerous amendments and sent the measure back to the House, which rejected nearly every one of them. In conference, a bill acceptable to both houses was finally hammered out and passed. This may sound routine to us, accustomed as we are to such negotiations. But imagine what it was like in 1789 to be truly feeling your way along—without precedent, without previous experience between these two houses—to face your colleagues in the very first bargaining session, where you felt the whole weight of the Senate's prestige at stake in your compromises.

With the promise of revenue, the House and Senate set up various executive departments. The first three were the Departments of Foreign Affairs (afterwards named the Department of State), Treasury, and War. Washington selected Thomas Jefferson as the first secretary of state, thirty-five-year-old Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, and General Henry Knox, who weighed three hundred pounds, as secretary of war.

Next, the Congress set salaries for everyone from the president down to the clerks of the departments. Washington had suggested, as was his arrangement during the Revolution, that he not be paid a salary. He was willing to be reimbursed only for expenses incurred in the line of duty. Many senators, however, recalled that those bills had been rather high and might go higher. Washington's liquor bill alone, for 1789, totaled 0031 13 almost $2,000. How much would that amount to in these days of high inflation? They decided to allot him $25,000 a year. The vice president received $5,000; the chief justice $4,000; associate justices of the Supreme Court and the secretaries of state and the treasury earned $3,500; the secretary of war was given $3,000; other judges, the attorney general, and the postmaster general were compensated at $1,500. 34

Throughout the summer of 1789, the House and Senate struggled to agree on a set of amendments to the Constitution. These were intended to eliminate the misgivings of states, such as Virginia, which were already in the Union, as well as North Carolina and Rhode Island, which had refused to ratify the Constitution. In September, twelve amendments were submitted to the states. By December 1791, the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the ten amendments that became known as the Bill of Rights.

As the first session of the First Congress drew to a close in September, it was clear that much of the legislation it had produced had been initiated by the House and fine-tuned by the Senate. The Senate worked over House bills with great diligence. In the case of a bill regulating coastal trade, the Senate made 169 amendments. This was largely how the framers of the Constitution had viewed the Senate's role. But the Senate also made two major contributions of its own to the session. The first was the Senate's efforts to establish its “advice and consent” prerogatives. The second contribution was embodied in the Judiciary Act, which created the third branch of the government.

I think it would be well if senators in our day would go back and read the history of the Senate's efforts in that first session to establish its own advice and consent prerogatives. Perhaps we would be more clearly assured that the constitutional provision regarding advice and consent is not a pro forma requirement and that the Senate has a responsibility not to rubber-stamp the nominees of any president. It is a serious responsibility which gives the people of the United States, acting through their elected representatives in the Senate, the opportunity to reach a judgment on the basis of the merits and qualifications of each nominee as to whether that nominee should be confirmed or rejected.

The framers of the Constitution envisioned the Senate as an executive council to advise and restrain the president, particularly in the areas of appointments and treaty-making. Before the Senate had been in session two months, its powers were put to the test. In June, acting as temporary secretary of state until Thomas Jefferson could return from France where he was the United States minister, John Jay appeared before the senators to explain that President Washington desired their advice and consent to the appointment of William Short to replace Jefferson in Paris. 35

The question seemed only to require a simple yes or no vote, but a controversy arose as to whether this should be by voice vote or by secret ballot. Maclay vehemently supported the secret ballot. A senator who openly voted against the president, he argued, would surely lose his place in the presidential sunshine or, conversely, might vote against his conscience to win the president's warmth. Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut argued that secret ballots were the devices of, at best, the bashful and, at worst, the most “bad and unprincipled” men. Maclay's forces won, and by secret ballot, the senators declared their advice and consent to Short's appointment. This was but the first of several sparring matches between the president and the Senate in which the latter sought to make clear that its prerogatives were not to be trifled with by the former. 36

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In August, the question of voting methods arose again in regard to treaty approval. Washington notified the senators that he was coming to their chamber to seek their advice and consent to some Indian treaties. This time, despite objections, the senators voted that they would record their positions by voice vote. On Saturday, August 22, Washington and General Knox entered the chamber carrying the treaties which Vice President Adams read aloud to the assembled senators. “Carriages were driving past,” reported Maclay, “and such a noise, I could tell it was something about ‘Indians,’ but was not a master of one sentence of it. Signs were made to the doorkeeper to shut down the sashes.”

Adams asked the senators to give their advice and consent to the first article, but Senator Morris said it was so noisy that he hadn't heard the article and asked for a rereading. Adams obliged, but when he again asked for the senators' verdict, Maclay reports, “there was a dead pause.” The senators had not been able to digest the material that quickly but were so in awe of having the president in their midst that they hesitated to ask him questions. Another reading was requested, but still the senators couldn't vote. Growing more bold, they voted to postpone their decision, and, finally, Morris moved that the treaties be referred to committee. Seeing “no chance of a fair investigation of subjects while the President of the United States sat there, with his Secretary of War, to support his opinions and overawe the timid and neutral part of the Senate,” Maclay seconded the motion.

“As I sat down,” Maclay noted, “the President of the United States started up in a violent fret. ‘ This defeats every purpose of my coming here’ were the first words that he said.” Indeed, George Washington was right. The confrontation between the president and the senators had significance. This episode ended forever the idea that obtaining the Senate's advice and consent was merely a formality. 37

Though the senators approved the treaties two days later, they had vigorously asserted their independence from the executive. Washington was deeply insulted. His first visit to the Senate was his last, establishing the precedent of presidential communications by written message.

While the importance of the Senate's treaty powers became more and more clear as years passed, the significance of the Judiciary Act was evident at once. The act was largely the work of three senators: Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, Caleb Strong of Massachusetts, and William Paterson of New Jersey. By coincidence, all three men were forty-four years old. Although Ellsworth was known for his copious use of snuff and his disconcerting habit of talking to himself, many of his colleagues regarded him as one of the shrewdest members of the Senate. In 1796, Washington would acknowledge the Connecticut senator's political and legal acumen by naming him chief justice of the United States. Paterson had led the fight of the small states at the Constitutional Convention. The year after the Judiciary Act passed, he resigned from the Senate to become governor of New Jersey. Three years later, Washington named him an associate justice of the Supreme Court he helped to create. Strong was another able lawyer whose seriously impaired eyesight, the result of smallpox, did not prevent him from rising to the top of Massachusetts' political ladder. 38

The leading Antifederalists in the Senate, notably Lee and Grayson of Virginia, greatly feared a system of strong federal courts, viewing them as a threat to state sovereignty and the people's rights. Though staunch Federalists, Ellsworth, Paterson, and Strong could see the validity of such fears and 0033 15 steered a middle course. They devised an intricate system of federal and state courts which shared judicial sovereignty and allayed Antifederalist fears. Their ingenious bill passed the Senate on July 17 and became law on September 24. Two days later, John Jay of New York was confirmed as the first chief justice of the United States. 39

Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, an architect of the Judiciary Act, later became chief justice of the United States. Library of Congress

The second session of the First Congress convened on January 4, 1790. Four days later, Washington stood before a joint session in the Senate chamber to deliver his annual message which contained a long shopping list of proposals for legislation. Among them were a uniform system of weights and measures, procedures for naturalizing new citizens, and action on the proposals of the treasury secretary. Secretary Hamilton's proposals would occupy the Congress throughout the session, generate the bitterest debates thus far, and expose the first scandal to touch the House and Senate.

The tempest grew out of two of Hamilton's recommendations. The first was that the certificates of the Continental Congress, originally issued to soldiers and farmers who had supplied the army with goods, be redeemed at par value by a new issue of stock. Second, Hamilton proposed that state debts be assumed by the federal government in the same way.

The old certificates had long since depreciated to as low as fifteen cents on the dollar and, at that rate, most had been assigned to speculators by the impoverished soldiers and farmers. When Hamilton permitted advance information of his scheme to leak out, the rate quickly rose to fifty cents on the dollar. Suddenly, three swift ships set sail from New York's harbor carrying speculators to the South to buy up as many certificates as possible at the former price before the news reached the backcountry.

It was whispered that among the owners of these ships were members of Congress. Representative James Jackson of Georgia thundered from the House floor, “My soul rises indignant at the avaricious and moral turpitude displayed.” So also rose the souls of his fellow citizens who had parted with their certificates for fifteen cents on the dollar! It was reported that the already wealthy Senator Robert Morris stood to make eighteen million dollars from the scheme. Maclay, always ready to believe the worst of his colleagues, confided in his diary, “I really fear the members of Congress are deeper in this business than any others.” 40

Maclay wrote that the Senate, having nothing else to do while the House was arguing over the certificate issue, adjourned early each day so that its members might go below and watch the heated debates. After almost a week of debate, led by pro-Hamilton Federalists, 0034 16 James Madison of Virginia offered what he felt was a just compromise which permitted both the speculators and the original certificate holders to earn a reasonable profit.

Maclay applauded Madison's proposal but lamented, “The opposition are governed by principle, but I fear in this case interest will outweigh principle.” He was right; Hamilton's original funding measure passed the House and the Senate. In the months that followed, it was revealed that almost forty of the measure's most vocal supporters stood to profit from its passage. In the Senate, these included Robert Morris, Caleb Strong, John Langdon, Oliver Ellsworth, Pierce Butler, Rufus King, and Philip Schuyler, Hamilton's own father-in-law.

When Congress turned its attention to the problem of state debts, it immediately stumbled upon another hornet's nest. These also had been largely bought up by speculators—Senator Morris, for example, owning most of the outstanding debt of Virginia. In addition, mostly southern states with smaller obligations failed to see the justice of being taxed for the benefit of northern states with large debts. Hamilton and his forces encountered heated opposition which threatened to tie up the entire session.

Aid came to the Federalists from an unlikely quarter—Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the opposition. Jefferson later claimed that resolution of the impasse resulted from a deal he struck with Hamilton over dinner. Jefferson promised to use his influence to induce the southern states to support assumption in return for a promise that the nation's permanent capital would be placed somewhere along the Potomac. Recent scholarship has challenged Jefferson's memory and revealed a story far more complicated. Nevertheless, during June and July of 1790, several votes were changed, and Hamilton's assumption bill passed.

As important as assumption was, the other half of the compromise of 1790 was equally significant and represents the Senate's chief contribution to the second session of the First Congress. For a detailed discussion of the incredible behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that led up to the decision on the capital's permanent home, I am indebted to Kenneth Bowling, whose doctoral dissertation “Politics in the First Congress” contains an excellent chapter on the subject. 41

Senators arrived in New York knowing that the residence question would likely be the most divisive issue to come before the First Congress. In the length of time it was before them; in the politicking it engendered off the floor; and in the number of seemingly unrelated areas, like assumption, into which it intruded, the residence issue surpassed all others. In a nation so aware of its sectional differences that it seriously speculated about the best place to divide itself into two countries, the problem had been a plague since 1783 and almost prevented the adoption of the resolution calling the new government into being in the summer of 1788.

Of course, the outcome of the months of bitter arguing and complex sectional maneuvering was the decision to move the capital to a site along the Potomac. But it came only after dozens of alternatives were discarded. Senator Morris ceaselessly lobbied for a site near Trenton on the Delaware River where, his enemies pointed out, he happened to own a large tract of land. As part of the final deal, while the new southern capital was made ready, Congress would move to Philadelphia for ten years beginning with the First Congress' third session.

Congress adjourned on August 12, 1790, and bade good-bye to New York City. Senator Maclay, always grumbling, was one of the very few senators who had found the city inhospitable. He claimed that in six months, he had not received a single invitation 0035 17 from a citizen of that city. More convivial members of Congress, however, were overwhelmed with attention.

Sectional politics, not the city's hospitality, were the prime factors in the Congress' decision to move on. When the members reconvened for their third session on December 6, 1790, they found that the influx of so many government officials had overtaxed Philadelphia's housing facilities. There were the usual complaints about high prices, but thrifty Maclay paid only three dollars per week for room and board, a dollar less than in New York.

In his opening message to the third session, President Washington mentioned the military expedition of General Josiah Harmar to quell the Indians in the Northwest Territory. Although his audience did not yet know that Harmar's forces had met with disaster, they were briefly upset by what they considered a waging of war without a declaration by Congress. Soon, however, they became too preoccupied with two new economic reports from Hamilton to worry about Harmar and the Indians. The first called for chartering a national bank. The second recommended, among other levies, a tax on the producers of “spiritous liquors” which, though it passed, would set to brewing the discontent that later erupted into the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

The national bank bill occupied most of the third session. To the extreme annoyance of Secretary of State Jefferson and the Antifederalists, Hamilton openly managed his supporters in the House and Senate. The bill's enemies argued that not only would the bill benefit northern commercial interests and the wealthy but it might also be unconstitutional. Despite these objections, the Federalist majorities in both houses carried the day. The measure's critics, however, succeeded briefly in raising doubts in Washington's mind about the bill. Faced with Hamilton's masterful rebuttal and the veiled threats of northern senators to reopen the issue of a southern capital, the president signed the measure.

Amidst the soft glow of candles and increasing factionalism exhibited by the debates over the bank bill, the First Congress came to an end on March 3, 1791. As the senators prepared to return to their homes, they could look back with satisfaction. Despite the peccadilloes of Adams and their own concern with proper etiquette, they had gotten a new nation on its feet and under way. They had witnessed the counting of the first electoral votes and the inauguration of the nation's first president. They made certain that the president understood that their constitutional powers could not be trifled with and had established precedents at every turn. They had set up the executive Departments of War, State, and the Treasury. While the senators had fine-tuned bills sent to them from the House, they had also initiated such major legislation as the Judiciary Act and hoped that they had finally resolved the residence question.

In addition to major legislation, the Senate considered many bills of a routine nature among the 144 measures that it received or initiated during the First Congress. Incidentally, of that number, the Senate passed 118 bills, of which 94 became public law. The very first public law was signed on June 1, 1789, and it provided for the administration of oaths to public officials in support of the Constitution. Other acts provided for the custody of the nation's official seal; construction of lighthouses; registration of sailing vessels; patents and copyrights; and the enumeration of the nation's population.

That first census, by the way, counted slightly under four million inhabitants, including approximately 700,000 men and women held in chattel slavery. The census revealed that Philadelphia was then our largest 0036 18

Remodeled in 1789 by Pierre L'Enfant to provide an elegant meeting place for Congress, Federal Hall, in lower Manhattan, housed the Senate on the second floor and the House on the first. New York Public Library

0037 19 city and that the center of population lay twenty-three miles east of Baltimore. Based on the 1790 census, each member of the House would represent a district of approximately 33,000 persons (compared with an average of 515,000 as a result of the 1980 census). At the same time, the size of states represented by senators ranged from 59,000 in Delaware to 692,000 in Virginia, the nation's most populous state.

Mr. President, I shall conclude these remarks with a discussion of the chambers that housed the Senate of the First Congress. For a description of the first Senate chamber, in which members finally achieved their quorum, again I am most grateful to Dr. Kenneth Bowling of George Washington University's First Federal Congress Project for much of the information presented here.

The original Senate chamber was located on the second floor of New York's Federal Hall. Situated in lower Manhattan at Wall and Nassau streets, the building was originally constructed between 1699 and 1704. It had been remodeled in 1763. Although the structure had previously served primarily as New York's city hall, it had been used by other official bodies, including the court that tried John Peter Zenger in 1735, the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, and the Confederation Congress from 1785 to 1789.

Immediately after the Confederation Congress' decision on September 18, 1788, that the First Congress would convene at New York, the city's common council chose Pierre L'Enfant to oversee conversion of the building into an elegant meeting place for Congress. He made rapid progress, although he was not quite finished by April 6. During the Senate's first days, members had to accommodate themselves to the inconvenience of last minute cleanup work. Financed by lotteries and a special local tax, the conversion cost about sixty-five thousand dollars, excluding interest on private loans.

As reconstructed, Federal Hall measured 95 feet in width and 145 feet at its deepest point. From the front hall, one entered a central three-story vestibule which had a marble floor and an ornamented skylight under a cupola. Off this vestibule stood the House of Representatives chamber, a two-story, handsomely decorated room. Access to the upper floors was gained by two stairways in the vestibule, one of them reserved for members. The Wall Street side of the second floor consisted of a richly carpeted 40-by-30-foot, two-story Senate chamber and several smaller rooms connected to it.

The Senate chamber's most striking features were its high arched ceiling, tall windows curtained in crimson damask, fireplace mantels in beautifully polished marble, and a presiding officer's chair elevated three feet from the floor and placed under a crimson canopy. The ceiling was adorned in the center with a sun and—expressing optimism that North Carolina and Rhode Island would soon join the Union—thirteen stars. Noticeably absent from this ornate chamber was a spectators' gallery, as there was no intention that Senate proceedings would be open to the public.

The smaller adjacent rooms included the “machinery room” used to display models of inventions, the secretary of the Senate's office, and Senate committee rooms. Also on this side of the second floor was the balcony on which George Washington took his oath of office as president on April 30, 1789. At the back of the second floor were the two public galleries overhanging the House chamber. Little is known about the third floor, except that it contained several small rooms, one of which housed the New York Society Library. Federal Hall was torn down in 1812. In 1842, the U.S. government constructed on that site the Greek Revival building which today is known as the Federal Hall National Memorial.

0038 20

While the new capital city of Washington was being built, Philadelphia became the temporary seat of government, and the second meeting place of Congress. There, on December 6, 1790, the First Congress assembled for its third session in the recently completed Philadelphia County Court House.

Built of red brick in the Georgian tradition, the Court House was two stories tall with a large bay window in the rear. A single large courtroom occupied the first floor, with a small courtroom and two other rooms on the floor above. While the House of Representatives met on the first floor, the Senate met in the smaller, but more elegantly furnished second-story chamber. Two smaller rooms, flanking the second-floor hallway, were fitted up as a Senate committee room and an office for the secretary of the Senate.

The most prominent feature of the chamber was the individual desks, constructed by Thomas Affleck, a local carpenter. At the dais, the vice president presided from a red leather chair beneath an impressive crimson damask canopy, lined with green silk. Adding more color were the vice president's table, covered with tassled green silk, lavish crimson curtains, and a beautiful carpet.

Unlike New York's Federal Hall, which was razed over a century and a half ago, I am happy to report that Congress Hall, as the Court House came to be known, still stands. It is beautifully restored and has become an important part of Independence National Historical Park.

Volume I of Documentary History of the First Federal Congress offers an excellent overview of the earliest Senate, which enables us to put its work into perspective and even further enhances my respect for our predecessors who met for the very first time 192 years ago. I close with this quote:

The First Federal Congress convened in a time of national crisis. The first nation to win independence from a European colonial empire and a new nation less than a decade removed from its Revolution, the United States faced real dangers of falling into anarchy or despotism. In fact, the First Congress confronted in one form or another almost every problem that would rise to plague or threaten the Union of the States in the future: secession... States' rights, constitutional amendment, admission of new states, threat of war, military preparedness, inflation, depression, unfavorable trade balance and tariff reform, taxation, speculation, sectionalism, slavery, Indian affairs, veterans' pensions, congressional salaries, election irregularities, government support of science, government patronage of the arts, administration of public lands, and many others. Some of the problems it solved; some it merely postponed. Yet, despite its difficulties, the Congress survived, leaving to the future a sturdy foundation on which a great nation could build. 42

June 4, 1981 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, the United States Senate is a political institution. Political parties and political issues are the very substance of our daily existence. The center aisle of this chamber divides the members of the two parties, and in the rear of the chamber are the entrances to two cloakrooms, one for Republicans and one for Democrats. This is a natural division, and we accept it as the normal way of operating in the Senate. Historically, however, the founders of this government, the authors of our Constitution, and the first members of this body did not anticipate or accept political parties and partisan divisions. Despite their resistance, such divisions grew quickly and, one might say, inevitably within the first decade of the government's existence.

As we know, men of good faith simply do not think alike on all issues. One's economic, social, or geographical situation predisposes an individual to interpret events differently and to see different solutions to the same problems. Personal jealousies, rivalries, antagonisms, and ambitions also contribute to the division of society into political factions, based on ideological or even irrational differences; and so it was during the first decade of the history of the United States Senate.

This was a tumultuous decade, which saw the first senator expelled from this body and the first to be denied a seat. At one point, war with Britain seemed inevitable; then war with the nation's closest ally, France, seemed certain. The ratification of the Jay Treaty gave the Senate the opportunity to exercise one of its most important constitutional powers, that of advice and consent, but, in the process, the debate nearly tore apart the young nation. The debate over the Jay Treaty, as with so many other explosive issues during the years from 1791 to 1800, revealed the birth of political parties as permanent institutions in the new Republic. The Federalists and Antifederalists, who had fought over the ratification of the new Constitution, now faced each other in the halls of Congress. This was the beginning of party politics in the United States.

When the Second Congress convened in Philadelphia's Congress Hall on Monday, October 24, 1791, many familiar faces from the First Congress were missing. Of the senators who had drawn the short term, several 0040 22 had not been reelected by their state legislatures. Among them was William Maclay, whose bluntness had offended Pennsylvania's legislators once too often. Another was Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton's father-in-law, New York Senator Philip Schuyler, who had been replaced by the charismatic and ambitious young lawyer, Aaron Burr. In Massachusetts, Tristram Dalton was defeated by another rock-ribbed Federalist, George Cabot. New Jersey's Jonathan Elmer had accepted a judgeship and was replaced by Federalist John Rutherfurd. William S. Johnson of Connecticut had resigned over the summer to devote his full attention to the presidency of Columbia College, and Roger Sherman moved up from the House to replace him. A tremendous boost to the Antifederalist ranks was provided by the outspoken member from Virginia, James Monroe. Though he lost his first bid for election to the First Congress, he had been elected in December 1790 to fill the last few months of the term of William Grayson, the first senator to die in office. Monroe arrived in Philadelphia in October 1791, fresh from his election for a full six-year term and soon was consulting closely with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and House member James Madison to plan Antifederalist strategy.

The admission of Vermont as the fourteenth state of the Union had raised the number of senators from twenty-six to twenty-eight. Vermont's first two senators, Moses Robinson and Stephen Bradley, had both been soldiers in the Revolutionary War and active in Vermont's bid for statehood. Robinson, though not a lawyer, became the first chief justice of Vermont's supreme court and later governor. Bradley was one of the Green Mountain Boys who successfully wrenched the state away from the territorial claims of New York. Though defeated for reelection in 1794, Bradley returned to the Senate from 1801 to 1813, serving as president pro tempore in 1802, 1803, and 1808. During his first term in the Senate, he introduced the bill establishing a national flag of fifteen stripes and fifteen stars which flew over the land from 1795 until 1818. 1

The commonwealth of Kentucky, having been carved out of Virginia in 1792, provided the reason for the fifteen-star flag. Kentucky's first two senators were John Edwards and John Brown. Edwards had helped guide Kentucky on its tortuous course toward statehood. As a reward, he was unanimously elected to the Senate, but rarely spoke and took little part in the deliberations in Philadelphia. Brown served under both Washington and Lafayette during the Revolution. During his twelve years in the Senate, serving as president pro tempore in 1803 and 1804, Brown actively represented his state's interests. 2

Thirteen incumbents and four freshmen senators were present at the opening of the Second Congress, over which John Adams presided as vice president. Though he complained that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he managed to cast twenty-two tie-breaking votes during his eight years in office, more than any vice president since. 3 The closeness of those votes suggests a rise in factionalism that the framers of the Constitution had hoped would be subordinated to an overriding interest in the national welfare. But a division into two combative political groups was now clearly evident.

There was growing distrust between those sympathetic to agricultural interests led by Jefferson, who feared a trend toward centralized, aristocratic government, and those of mercantile-financial sympathies led by Hamilton, who feared an excess of democracy. Staunch Federalist Paine Wingate of New 0041 23 Hampshire had foreseen difficult days ahead for the Senate even during the First Congress. Drawing the battle lines between North and South, he prophesied: “The jarring interests and the different views and habits of the northern and southern members will be the source of many inconveniences and difficulties. Necessity rather than affection will I presume keep us together awhile longer.” 4

A view of Congress Hall, left, on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, where the Senate met from 1790 to 1800. Free Library of Philadelphia.

Factionalism, so dreaded by Washington and the framers of the Constitution, stalked the halls in Philadelphia and could no longer be ignored. It threatened to divide the Congress, the cabinet, and the nation. In the Second Congress, few issues would be unaffected by the growing division. For the moment, the Federalists maintained their control over both the House and the Senate, but their hold was slipping.

The Antifederalists thought they saw their first opportunity to discredit the Federalists in connection with Indian battles on the frontier, which they charged were being conducted without congressional consent. The disastrous defeats of the federal forces at the hands of the Miamis, Shawnees, and Delawares presented the Antifederalists with the 0042 24 opportunity to order an inquiry, which they hoped would pin the blame squarely on Hamilton whose Department of the Treasury was responsible for army supply contracts. The Federalist majority, however, was able to quash the results of this first fishing expedition.

The Antifederalists fared better on the issue of apportionment, which was raised after the first census, dominated the first session of the Second Congress, and ended in the first presidential veto. After seven months of deadlock and acrimonious debate, the Federalist-controlled House and Senate agreed on a compromise bill. But Jefferson, Madison, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph convinced President Washington that the measure was unconstitutional, so he vetoed it. Jefferson reported that when the veto message reached Congress, “a few of the hottest friends of the bill expressed passion,” but were unable to override the veto. 5

At stake in these and the debates to follow, as each side saw it, was not just the issue at hand but the nation's future. The Federalist view was clearly stated in Hamilton's brilliant Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in December 1791. It outlined his plans for transforming the nation from an agricultural country into an industrialized, self-sufficient one. The Report on Manufactures served as a rallying point for Jefferson and his friends in Congress who found its proposals abhorrent.

With factionalism spreading, the first session of the Second Congress adjourned on May 8, 1792. The summer months saw the first clear signs of the storm that had been brewing ever since Hamilton had rammed through his whiskey tax. Protests arose in western Pennsylvania where farmers “reckoned their fluid wealth in Monongahela rye.” Hamilton was quick to equate such resistance to the tax with treason against the national government. Opponents of the tax, led by young Albert Gallatin, saw it as misuse of federal power. For the time being, the result was an uneasy stalemate.

President Washington's first term was ending, and he longed to retire to Mount Vernon, but the schism in his cabinet loomed before him. Both sides begged him to remain at the helm. Secretary of State Jefferson also hoped to retire from the cabinet but could not leave Treasury Secretary Hamilton unchecked. Jefferson's supporters, the Antifederalists, now called themselves Republicans or Democratic-Republicans, to demonstrate their differences from the aristocratic Federalists. While the Republicans supported Washington's reelection, they plotted to unseat Vice President Adams. They had just about decided to support New York Governor George Clinton for the vice-presidency when the situation became confused by a new senator from New York, the ambitious thirty-six-year-old Aaron Burr.

Burr kept his political views a secret in those days and, as a result, was courted and suspected by both sides. Hamilton personally despised him. “As a public man he is one of the worst sort—a friend of nothing but as it suits his interest and ambition.” Though born in New Jersey, grandson of the fiery theologian Jonathan Edwards and son of the first president of Princeton, Aaron Burr chose New York for his political base. His rise was spectacular. His methods, however, appalled more sober men. After one of his victories, a friend wrote that Burr's “twistings, combinations, and maneuvers to accomplish this object are incredible.” 6

When Burr entered the race for the vice-presidency, leaders of the Republican party quietly gathered in Philadelphia to settle the matter. Since many, like James Monroe, doubted Burr's integrity, they were unwilling to entrust him with party leadership. Emerging from one of the first smoke-filled 0043 25 rooms in our political history, they nominated the older, more reliable Clinton as their candidate. Burr acquiesced gracefully in public but complained bitterly in private. He would be heard from again.

When the electoral ballots were tallied on February 13, 1793, Washington emerged with 132 of the possible 136 votes. Adams with 77 beat Clinton's 50, Jefferson's 4, and Burr's 1. In the Senate, the Federalists retained their majority, 17 to 13, but had lost control of the House. On key issues, some 58 of the 106 representatives were likely to vote with the Republicans while 48 generally sided with the administration. Interest blocs would shift from issue to issue, but the stage was set for increasingly partisan battles in the Third Congress.

Shortly before the second session of the Second Congress ended on March 2, 1793, the Republicans had an early taste of victory. Largely at their insistence, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act which required the free states to return any escaped slave who crossed their borders. Though the act would create great controversies in the nation several decades later, it engendered almost no debate at this time, passing the Senate unanimously and the House of Representatives with a lopsided vote of 48 to 7. 7

The elections to the Third Congress, which convened on December 2, 1793, made little difference in party representation. In the House, Theodore Sedgwick, put up for Speaker by the extreme Federalists, was beaten by the Republican-backed candidate, Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania. But all of the staunch Federalist leaders—Langdon of New Hampshire, Strong of Massachusetts, Ellsworth of Connecticut, King of New York, and Morris of Pennsylvania—were returned to the Senate. The Senate's Republicans were rudely reminded that they were still a minority when their most brilliant young newcomer, Pennsylvania Senator Albert Gallatin, who had replaced Maclay, was denied his seat by a strict party vote. The incident immediately focused national attention on the Senate, which had long been overshadowed by the more dramatic actions of the House.

Keenly aware of the Swiss-born, thirty-three-year-old Gallatin's radical Republican sentiments, the Federalist senators were not about to welcome him into their midst. Gallatin had barely taken his oath of office when Vice President Adams laid before the Senate a petition protesting his election on the grounds that he had not been a citizen for the constitutionally required nine years. The petition was referred to a committee composed of five Federalists. In the meantime, Gallatin was allowed to take his seat, where he proceeded to delight Republicans and irritate Federalists by plaguing Treasury Secretary Hamilton with requests for details and information. Not surprisingly, the Federalist-dominated committee reported against Gallatin and the matter was brought before the Senate as a whole.

In those days, the Senate chose to meet behind closed doors, while the House was open for all to attend and observe its debates. For years, Senator James Monroe had been introducing bills to open the Senate's proceedings but, to that point, had been unsuccessful. When he tried again in February 1794 to open the doors for the Gallatin debate, the Senate reversed itself and agreed to admit the public. Despite the lack of a gallery, members of the public crowded into the Senate chamber for seven days to watch such Federalists as Rufus King spar with fellow New York Senator Aaron Burr, speaking for the Republicans.

The Federalists were not merely fighting over the principle of citizenship. They needed every vote in the closely divided Senate, and they wanted to remove an able enemy of Hamilton. At the last minute, Benjamin 0044 26 Hawkins of North Carolina, who had often supported the Republicans and upon whom Gallatin's friends depended, left Philadelphia to avoid casting a vote. The decision now rested on Pennsylvania's other senator, Federalist Robert Morris, who had promised Gallatin he would remain neutral. Party loyalists finally swayed Morris, and, on February 28, he joined his fellow Federalists in unseating Gallatin by a vote of 14 to 12. The young gadfly was gone from the Senate, but not from the government. A year later, he returned to Philadelphia as a member of the House, where he energetically led the Republican majority. 8

For us, the debate over the seating of Albert Gallatin is most important for its opening of the Senate's doors to the public for the first time. As I noted in my earlier talk on the First Congress, the Senate had taken it for granted that its meetings would be closed, just as the debates of the Continental Congress and Congress of the Confederation were closed. Even though conducted behind closed doors, the Senate's proceedings were not entirely hidden from the public. The Constitution requires both houses to keep and publish journals of their proceedings, including votes of members when requested by one-fifth of those present. These early journals have been an invaluable resource in reconstructing the Senate's history. In addition, in 1792, the Senate directed its secretary to furnish a public newspaper with a copy of the Senate Journal at least once a week. Some senators, particularly the Virginians, also felt it was their duty to report about the Senate's activities to their state governments and to the outside world.

Such highly edited glimpses into the Senate chamber were hardly adequate to satisfy the public. Republican papers charged that the Journal was tampered with to suit the Federalist majority. Even if accurate, the Journal only occasionally showed yea and nay votes but never any of the debates, leaving the public to speculate as to a senator's motives. The closed doors of the Senate chamber also fed the suspicions of those who regarded it as a place where clandestine cabals were hatched against the public interest. The closed-door policy, said the Senate's detractors, was part and parcel of an ominous movement, which included efforts to elevate the Senate over the House, to establish aristocracy in America. As one critic sarcastically noted, “The PEERS of America disdain to be seen by vulgar eyes: the music of their voices is harmony only for themselves, and must not vibrate in the ravished ears of an ungraceful and uncourtly multitude.” 9

Albert Gallatin's Swiss birth was used by Federalists to deny the young Pennsylvanian his seat in the Senate in 1794. Library of Congress

0045 27

Those who did not regard the Senate with suspicion often totally ignored it in favor of the House. The debates there could be read in the daily press. The widespread disregard for the Senate is clear in these lines from a newspaper in Carlisle, Pennsylvania:

It matters little to the public who presides in the Senate: They do not choose to let the public know any thing about the reasons of their political conduct; the public may therefore trouble themselves little about them, except [if] it be to watch them with a jealousy and try to get rid of them as soon as possible; it is but little good ever they did, and but little good they can do, but they may do much evil. 10

Why, in view of its negative impact on the Senate's reputation, was the closed-door policy maintained? Opponents of public sessions argued that opening the doors would promote oratorical pyrotechnics for the benefit of the gallery and press and would interfere with the expeditious performance of public business. Sometimes, the Senate's business was interrupted by the noise of clapping, striking of canes on the floor, and cries of “Bravo!” from the House gallery one floor below. Answering the argument that open doors promoted a healthy national dissemination of debates, advocates of continued secrecy noted that press reports of House debates were notoriously inaccurate.

As historian Roy Swanstrom noted in his study of the Senate from 1789 to 1801, there was a close correlation between the closed-door policy and the Federalist belief that government ought to be clothed in a dignified aloofness, responsible to the people but not constantly under their close scrutiny. The issue, however, was not entirely party-inspired, as strong Federalists like Rufus King and Philip Schuyler consistently supported open sessions. The controversy surrounding Albert Gallatin's eligibility presented the opportunity to pry open the Senate's doors, if only temporarily. Gallatin's case placed the Senate in a delicate situation. A state's right to choose its own senator was being questioned. Furthermore, the American people were very sensitive to even the appearance of star chamber proceedings against the rights of any individual. 11 The Federalist majority could ill afford the extreme criticism sure to follow any unseating of Gallatin in secret. Thus, on February 11, 1794, they voted to open their doors—but only for Gallatin's hearing. 12

The doors to the Senate quickly slammed shut after Gallatin's fate was decided, but the motion to shut the doors again was passed by its closest margin, 14 to 13. The affable Senator Stephen Bradley of Vermont saw that the fate of the policy lay in his hands. Though he had previously voted with the Federalists to keep the doors closed, he had no deep convictions about the matter and decided to vote to open them at the next opportunity. Realizing that Bradley's vote would give the open-door senators the victory, four other New England Federalists—Theodore Foster of Rhode Island, John Langdon and Samuel Livermore of New Hampshire, powerful Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, along with Delaware's Senator John Vining—jumped on the bandwagon. On February 20, 1794, the vote to finally open the Senate's doors was 19 to 8. 13 The struggle had been a long and bitter one. After listening to the abuse heaped on some of his Federalist friends, Vice President Adams commented, “What the effect of this measure, which was at last carried by a great majority, will be, I know not; but it cannot produce greater evils than the contest about it, which was made an engine to render unpopular some of the ablest and most independent members.” 14

It would still be almost two years before the Senate galleries could be built and a permanent open-door policy put into effect. No hammers were heard in Congress Hall until 0046 28 the fall of 1795. The galleries were completed for the first session of the Fourth Congress on December 7, 1795, and the public finally admitted.

What was the reaction when the Senate's doors were thrown open? It was not as great as we might suspect. No hordes rushed through to view the senators at work. The sight of two dozen urbane gentlemen courteously discussing the issues of the day could hardly compete with the boisterous eloquence downstairs in the House. Nevertheless, the decision to open the Senate's doors to the public was an important one. It did not bring the Senate into great public favor but removed an irritant that had long alienated the Senate from the public.

Years later, a witness to those early public meetings published a colorful account of the 1796 Senate, which I should like to quote at this point:

Among the thirty Senators of that day there was observed constantly during the debate the most delightful silence, the most beautiful order, gravity, and personal dignity of manner. They all appeared every morning full-powdered and dressed, as age or fancy might suggest, in the richest material. The very atmosphere of the place seemed to inspire wisdom, mildness, and condescension. Should any of them so far forget for a moment as to be the cause of a protracted whisper while another was addressing the Vice-President, three gentle taps with his silver pencilcase upon the table by Mr. Adams immediately restored everything to repose and the most respectful attention, presenting in their courtesy a most striking contrast to the independent loquacity of the Representatives below stairs, some few of whom persisted in wearing, while in their seats and during the debate, their ample cocked hats, placed “fore and aft” upon their heads. 15

With the Gallatin issue settled, the Senate turned its attention to other matters. Hitherto, Congress had concentrated almost entirely on domestic problems, but, with dramatic suddenness, foreign affairs took center stage during the Third Congress. During the nine-month recess that followed Washington's second inauguration, the French Revolution reached its bloody climax. The repercussions were worldwide. In America, the Revolution accentuated the issue of the division of powers between the president and Congress. It also widened the gap between the Republicans, who deplored the execution of the king but supported the French people, and the Federalists, who feared that French radicalism would spread to America.

When war broke out in Europe, the United States found itself in a delicate situation visa-vis the main belligerents: France, its close ally in the American fight for independence; and Britain, whose powerful navy controlled the seas and with whom America had a flourishing trade. President Washington was sufficiently alarmed to return to Philadelphia from Mount Vernon and summon his cabinet. Hamilton, boldly intruding into the area of foreign affairs, drew up a declaration of neutrality for Washington to issue. Secretary of State Jefferson, not a little annoyed by Hamilton's brazenness, claimed that only Congress could constitutionally make such a declaration. Washington decided to steer a middle course, issuing a statement which did not officially declare neutrality but proclaimed friendship to both warring powers. No one, not even Jefferson, thought Congress had to be called into session to approve the proclamation—setting a precedent for executive initiative in foreign relations which Washington and future presidents would increasingly assert.

Notwithstanding the president's declaration of neutrality, pro-French democratic clubs sprang up in many cities. At first, they hailed the arrogant French minister, Citizen Genet, who blatantly fitted out French privateers in American ports and stirred up sentiment against Washington. Eventually, however, Genet's rudeness and meddling in American affairs embarrassed even Jefferson 0047 29 and the Republicans, who acquiesced to Federalist demands for his recall.

By the time the Third Congress convened on December 2, 1793, Jefferson was tired of the political infighting and Washington's preference for Hamilton's opinions over his own and was determined to retire. On January 4, 1794, he finally resigned and rode off to Virginia but, before he left, submitted to Congress his long-awaited report on American commerce. Basically, the report urged favoritism toward France and restrictive trade measures against Britain. His proposals were exactly the opposite of those of Hamilton who fumed that Jefferson “threw this FIREBRAND of discord into the midst of the representatives of the states... and instantly decamped to Monticello.” 16

As Hamilton predicted, Jefferson's report did cause quite a stir in Congress. Republicans embraced it and Federalists denounced it. While the Federalists held on to a majority in both chambers, they worried that a new wave of extreme anti-British sentiment would wipe away their leadership. Though the Senate had as yet no standing committee on foreign affairs, five of the strongest Federalist senators—Ellsworth, King, Strong, Cabot, and Morris—served as an unofficial advisory body to the president on such matters. They urged Washington to send an envoy to England to negotiate a treaty ending the threat of war. 17

Monroe and Virginia's other senator, John Taylor, led the Republicans in the Senate in objecting strenuously, but futilely, to the proposal, particularly to the suggestion that the obviously pro-British Hamilton represent the United States in the bargaining. Hoping to mollify them, Washington selected Chief Justice John Jay for the mission but found that the Republicans distrusted Jay almost as much as they did Hamilton.

After three days of debate, on April 19, 1794, Jay was confirmed by the Senate as envoy extraordinary by a margin of 18 to 8, and soon sailed for England. 18 The Senate had not been consulted as to the instructions he carried with him. Attorney General Edmund Randolph believed this an abridgment of the Senate's rights, following the custom that a treaty negotiated by a nation's representative acting in compliance with his instructions must subsequently be ratified, but his advice was ignored in the cabinet. The Senate's Republicans could only wait for Jay's return and look forward to the battle sure to erupt over any agreement he reached.

The first session of the Third Congress adjourned on June 9, 1794. Over the summer recess, the storm long brewing over Hamilton's whiskey tax finally erupted in western Pennsylvania. Farmers, urged on by the pro-Republican democratic clubs, took their shotguns down from the wall and announced they would resist to the death the infringement of their right to brew and sell what they pleased. Washington and Hamilton agreed that such resistance to the national government was intolerable, and the president ordered up thirteen thousand militia troops to march west to quell the Whiskey Rebellion.

The rebellion evaporated at their approach. Hamilton could round up only twenty suspects, and the two who were finally convicted were eventually pardoned by Washington. This tempest in a teapot outraged the Republicans who believed it was manufactured by Hamilton to demonstrate the need for a standing army and to extend federal authority over the west. Jefferson sarcastically summed up the Republican position, “An insurrection was announced and proclaimed and armed against but could never be found.”

Washington felt compelled to defend his Pennsylvania actions in his fifth annual address to the Congress on November 3, 1794. In the midst of a fairly even-tempered account, 0048 30 he shocked the Republicans by including a strong denunciation of the democratic clubs and other “self-created societies.” The Senate, which had fallen into the subservient habit of replying to presidential messages by repeating their phraseology, balked this time. Burr of New York and Jackson of Georgia moved to expunge Washington's offensive diatribe from the Senate's response.

Though the Federalists overrode Burr's and Jackson's objection, Washington's outburst could not be ignored. As Alvin Josephy has noted in his History of the Congress of the United States, it was no coincidence that the issue of the limit of federal power came to the forefront when it did. It reflected the Federalists' impatience with opposition and their belief in the right of the federal government to take whatever measures it deemed necessary to maintain security. It also confirmed what Republicans had long suspected: that the Federalists were no longer the revolutionaries they had been when they swore in the Declaration of Independence to acknowledge the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” the government if they deemed it oppressive. Now that they were in charge, they had adopted the view that the government had an unrestricted right to squelch any challenge to its continued existence. President Washington, until that time viewed as above criticism, had clearly damaged his carefully nurtured public image by descending from his lofty pinnacle into the partisan fray. 19

The issue that would bring the opposing philosophies of federalism and republicanism to a head was the Jay Treaty. It aroused partisan passions to a more fevered pitch than any other issue of the closing years of the eighteenth century. As the second session of the Third Congress opened, John Jay was still in England. The nation grew uneasy as weeks passed with no word on his progress. Finally, in January 1795, news arrived that he had signed a treaty with the British on November 19, but it was not until March 7, four days after the end of the Third Congress, that the first copy of the treaty finally reached Philadelphia.

The terms of the Jay Treaty were complicated. In the long run, there was much in the treaty that would benefit the nation but even more to anger Republicans and disappoint some Federalists. Partisan newspapers led the attack with column upon column of vitriolic denunciation. Pamphleteers vied with one another in a contest of invective. Names of former heroes were dragged through the mire of public abuse. Copies of the treaty were publicly burned. Jay was hanged in effigy. Speakers were stoned.

President Washington waited just long enough for some friendly senators, newly elected to the Congress, to take their seats before calling the Senate into special session on June 8, 1795, and submitting the treaty for ratification. Washington had kept the terms of the treaty a strict secret. After receiving it, the Senate's Federalist majority defeated two proposals to reveal its terms to the public and debated the treaty behind closed doors. Hamilton was now a private citizen, having resigned from the cabinet in January, but continued to guide the Federalist senators. Burr, speaking for the Republicans, condemned the treaty and moved to reopen negotiations. After two weeks of bitter debate, the Federalists crushed all the Republican maneuvers to defeat the treaty and, finally, on June 24, 1795, by exactly a two-thirds majority, approved the pact. 20

Five days later, Virginia Senator Stevens Mason, the thirty-five-year-old Republican lawyer who had filled Monroe's vacated seat, triggered a national explosion. He gave his copy of the still-secret treaty to the editor of the Aurora, a Republican newspaper, for publication. Though hints of the' treaty's 0049 31 contents had been leaking out ever since it had arrived, the actual text of the treaty confirmed the Republicans' worst fears and touched off furious demonstrations.

John Jay was hanged in effigy throughout the young nation as public outcry over the Jay Treaty mounted. Library of Congress

The printing of the actual treaty unleashed a fury against it which, said Washington, was “like that against a mad dog.” At first, the outrage was directed at Jay, “the arch-traitor,” who had negotiated the “humiliation,” but the senators who had approved it soon received their own share of the obloquy. One handbill claimed, “The Senate have bargained away your blood-bought privileges for less than a mess of pottage.” A mass rally in South Carolina resolved that Jacob Read and the other nineteen who voted for ratification had rendered themselves unworthy of the public trust. There were rumors that the votes of some senators had been bought. According to gossip, Senator James Gunn of Georgia had voted for the treaty in exchange for the ending of a congressional investigation into a Georgia land speculation scandal. Others claimed that Read had been bought off with fifteen hundred British pounds. 21

In some cases, attacks on senators did not stop with just words. At the end of July, an angry mob marched on the Philadelphia home of Pennsylvania Senator William Bingham, burned a copy of the treaty, pelted the house with stones, and broke several windows. In Kentucky, the legislature denounced Senator Humphrey Marshall and called for a constitutional amendment to enable states to recall their senators. Condemnation did not stop there. Marshall, an arrogant Federalist in a strongly Republican state, not only had the temerity to vote for the treaty but also named his eldest son John Jay. He was burned in effigy, vilified in print, and stoned in Frankfort. Only some very fast talking saved him from an ignominious dunking in a muddy river. 22

Meanwhile, the “virtuous and patriotic ten,” who had voted against the treaty, were widely toasted on the Fourth of July for their refusal to sign this “death warrant of America's liberty.” The name most loudly acclaimed, when Republican glasses were raised high, was that of Stevens Mason, the senator who had first revealed to the light of day what had transpired in the dark, secret recesses of the Senate chamber. 23

When Washington, after much hesitation and wavering, finally signed the treaty, he joined Jay and the Senate majority as the object of public vilification. Critics charged that the president and the Senate wished to form an oligarchy bent not only on foisting a disastrous treaty upon the nation, but also 0050 32 on subverting the liberties of the people and making themselves supreme. Washington was portrayed as His Columbian Majesty, with the senators serving as his courtiers.

When the Fourth Congress convened, action on the treaty shifted from the Senate to the House. At that time, the House was attempting to maintain that it had a role in approving any treaty that required the appropriation of funds. This clearly blatant effort to usurp the Senate's treatymaking role came to nothing. The senators were undoubtedly glad to see the spotlight shift. Their endorsement of the Jay Treaty had not only subjected them as individuals to bitter reproach but had also brought the Senate as a whole to a new nadir of unpopularity.

The Fourth Congress opened on December 7, 1795. The doors to the Senate chamber swung open to admit the public to the new gallery. Few took advantage of the new opportunity, as the rousing House debates over possible impeachment of Washington, which took up the entire first session, provided a far greater spectacle. Though Washington's forces rallied at the last minute to save him from public embarrassment, he had had enough of public life. During the summer recess in 1796, he prepared his moving farewell address to the nation, which we read every year in this chamber on the day honoring his birth. In his address, Washington cautioned against permanent foreign alliances and internal divisiveness, but his warning about the latter came too late. Washington's retirement precipitated the first contested presidential election and exacerbated the country's political schism.

The Federalists nominated John Adams and Thomas Pinckney; the Republicans, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The Federalists' slogan was Peace and Prosperity; the Republicans', The Rights of Man. Jefferson, however, foreseeing particularly stormy weather ahead, was uneager for office at this time and did little to promote his candidacy. Adams' victory would have been a foregone conclusion had not Hamilton secretly tried to promote Pinckney from second to first place, thereby splitting the Federalist vote. As a result, Adams beat Jefferson by a narrow margin of three votes. Jefferson, archenemy of the Federalists, gained the second highest number of electoral votes, thus becoming vice president. For the next four years, Jefferson, totally on the outside of the Adams administration, confined himself to his single constitutional duty of presiding over the Senate. After watching the Senate debates occasionally dissolve into chaos before him, Jefferson set about writing a manual on Senate rules. Privately, he gave counsel to the Republicans and bided his time.

The polarization of political life was also reflected in the social life in Philadelphia. As political feuding heated up, hosts and hostesses needed to be careful when drawing up their guest lists to avoid inviting men who might come to blows over the oysters. Despite the pressures which weighed upon the nation in the 1790's, social Philadelphia wore an air of gaiety quite out of keeping with its reputation for Quaker simplicity. Some likened the endless social whirl to “fiddling while Rome was burning.” Others, like Abigail Adams, wife of the vice president, were more impressed. She wrote to her sister that the winter of 1792 was “one continued scene of Parties, upon Parties, Balls and entertainments equal to any European city.” 24

Senators enjoyed a full share of this lavish life—too large a share, according to one New Jersey senator who wrote his wife, “There is more gaiety here, than I wish to partake of—I feel myself in fashion contrary to my own inclination.” 25 Other senators disagreed and did much to make the social whirl even more feverish. Pennsylvania Senators Robert Morris and William Bingham, two of the richest men in the nation, each owned splendid 0051 33 houses in Philadelphia where they entertained in style. Morris lent his four-story city home on High Street to George and Martha Washington. Maryland Senator John Eager Howard's father-in-law, Benjamin Chew, was the scion of one of Philadelphia's leading families and lent Howard his baronial townhouse and country estate for parties. Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina, described by his enemies as a “Democrat but no democrat,” entertained his fellow southern congressmen in the grand house he rented. The wily Aaron Burr also lived and entertained in style. 26

Philadelphia's social elite gathered at their leisure in the State House Garden, 1800. Free Library of Philadelphia

Eventually, party lines became so sharply drawn that even such prominent men as Oliver Ellsworth and James Madison barely saw one another socially. When, as an old man, Madison was asked to recount personal anecdotes about Ellsworth, he replied that “as we happened to be thrown but little into the familiar situations which develop the features of personal and social character, I can say nothing particular as to either.” 27 Some did manage to cross the battle lines. Republican Senator James Monroe was known to dine in the home of the Federalist senator, William Bingham.

0052 34

Since the Federalists' strength was concentrated in the North and the Republicans' in the South, social life took on a sectional as well as factional flavor. Again there were crossovers. When Federalist John Langdon of New Hampshire first came to the Senate in 1789, he shared lodgings with three other New England Federalists. But Langdon gradually began to drift, both socially and politically, into the Republican camp and eventually joined a group of southern Republicans who took their meals together in Philadelphia at Marache's on North Fourth Street. Langdon even became president of the Marache's Club. Meetings were devoted to eating good food and plotting the downfall of the Federalists. 28

One uninvited guest in Philadelphia who cared nothing for party lines was the yellow fever which struck with deadly force three times during the decade the Senate resided in Philadelphia. In 1793, President Washington considered special legislation to move the Congress elsewhere, but cooler weather ended the epidemic. During its next deadly visit in 1797, it was feared that afflicted visitors would fill the galleries and infect the Senate and House. In 1798, the entire East Coast suffered the fever's scourge, which claimed an average of seventy lives a day in Philadelphia.

President Adams managed to avoid the yellow fever as did most of the senators, but they suffered from the nation's patriotic fever, aroused by France's arrogance. Adams thought it best to call the new Fifth Congress into a special session on May 15, 1797. The Fifth Congress was almost evenly divided between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. On most issues, however, the Federalists could muster a slim majority in the House and a broader one in the Senate. Many veterans of earlier battles were gone from the Senate chamber. The New York legislature, again in the control of the Federalists, ousted Burr and returned Philip Schuyler. Two staunch Hamiltonians, Ellsworth of Connecticut—who, like Jay, had become chief justice of the United States—and Strong of Massachusetts were also gone, but Massachusetts' new senator, Theodore Sedgwick, would help lead the Federalists.

Adams informed the special session that he was sending a three-man commission to Paris in an attempt to avoid hostilities. His appointments—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Francis Dana—were quickly confirmed by the Senate. 29 Adams also requested Congress to pass measures necessary for national defense in case negotiations failed. By July 10, when the special session ended, the Federalists in the House and Senate appropriated funds for port and harbor fortifications and three frigates and increased the militia with only feeble opposition from the Republicans.

In the Senate, the most important incident of that special session was the first expulsion of one of its members. Senator William Blount of Tennessee, a signer of the Constitution and a land speculator, had conspired to wrest New Orleans from Spain with the help of the Creeks and Cherokees and turn it over to the British. The evidence was conclusive, and Blount was expelled by a near unanimous vote of 25 to 1, the only nay vote coming from Senator Henry Tazewell of Virginia. 30 The Blount case set many precedents, the most important of which was the Senate's objection to a House effort to impeach Blount. The Senate ruled that its members were not civil officers and thus not impeachable. Blount's expulsion did him no harm in Tennessee, where he was elected speaker of the state senate. A few months later, Blount had the satisfaction of seeing his protégé, Andrew Jackson, seated in the Senate. In September 1797, the tall, young backwoods lawyer, who wore his long hair in a cue tied with an eelskin, was elected to 0053 35 fill the seat vacated by Tennessee Senator William Cocke. 31

When the second session of the Fifth Congress assembled on November 13, 1797, there was no word from the three envoys in Paris. Adams renewed his requests for additional land and sea protection, and both the Senate and House worked along on measures for the public defense until March, when the first dispatches from France arrived. The decoded dispatches told a sordid tale of bribery and insult by three French agents, who became known to the public as X, Y, and Z. Overnight, the nation turned from pacifism to militarism. Crowds took up the reply which Pinckney reputedly gave the French emissaries, “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” Suddenly, in a complete reversal of the political situation of only a year past, to be a Federalist was now patriotic; to be a Republican, treasonous.

The Federalists, smarting under years of Republican invective, were fully prepared to ride the tidal wave of anti-French sentiment into a new era of power for their floundering party. In the changed situation, the Senate enjoyed a new and unfamiliar status of popular esteem. Having allegedly “sold the nation down the river” with the Jay Treaty, the Senate now emerged as the champion of national honor and interest. Its arch-Federalist members—notably Theodore Sedgwick and Benjamin Goodhue of Massachusetts, George Read of South Carolina, and Uriah Tracy of Connecticut—regarded the situation as a heaven-sent opportunity to strike at the French and their American sympathizers.

In 1797, William Blount of Tennessee became the first member to be expelled from the Senate. New York Public Library

Besides pushing through the series of war measures, abrogating the treaty with France, raising an army and enlarging the navy, the Federalists in the Senate also passed four bills of great historical importance, designed to crush all domestic resistance to their policies, which became known collectively as the Alien and Sedition acts. Senators James Hillhouse of Connecticut and James Lloyd of Maryland were the primary instigators behind these sweeping acts which passed the Senate with wide margins. Among their most repressive provisions, the Alien and Sedition acts raised the term of residence necessary for citizenship from five to fourteen years, empowered the president to arrest and deport any alien considered dangerous to “the peace and safety of the United States,” and authorized the imprisonment for up to two years of anyone, citizen or not, convicted of writing, publishing, or speaking anything “false, scandalous, and malicious” against the government. Though they either expired or were repealed within the next four years, these acts were the most intolerant ever passed by the Senate and represented suspicion and division within the nation. By the end of the second session of the Fifth 0054 36 Congress, threats of imprisonment and the futility of protest had reduced the Republican voice in the Senate to a mere whisper. 32

Eight days after George Washington's death at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, Philadelphia mourned him with a procession along High Street. Free Library of Philadelphia

The third session of the Fifth Congress convened on December 3, 1798. To the surprise of many of the lawmakers, war with France had not yet come, but there were wild rumors afloat of French-inspired slave insurrections. There were also visible signs of a split within the Federalist party, between the warhawks and the moderates. President Adams chose to side with the moderates. On February 18, 1799, he made his decision to negotiate rather than fight with France and submitted to the Senate the nomination of the moderate Federalist William Vans Murray to be minister to France. 33 The extreme Federalists were horrified. Overnight, the party split apart. When a delegation of ardent Federalist senators called on Adams to tell him that they would not vote to confirm Murray, Adams sent them fleeing by threatening to resign and turn the presidency over to Vice President Jefferson. In September 1800, Adams got what he wanted: a treaty with France ending the undeclared war and reestablishing friendly relations.

The Fifth Congress ended on March 3, 1799. During the summer, war fever abated, but not so greatly that the nation was ready 0055 37 to forsake the Federalist party it had recently embraced. Adams' handling of the crisis with France had turned many Federalists against him, but when the fall election returns were in, they showed that the Sixth Congress would still be controlled by the Federalists.

When Congress moved from Philadelphia to the new city of Washington in 1800, the Capitol Building was still under construction, forcing both houses to meet in the north wing. Architect of the Capitol

With the threat of war against France lifted, the nation assumed a more tranquil air; yet, deep animosities still divided Republicans and Federalists. The two sides were temporarily brought together at the beginning of the session by the unexpected death of George Washington at Mount Vernon. Partisan bickering was stilled on December 26 when the House and Senate joined in memorial services to honor the first president. Immediately afterwards, the old battles resumed, made more intense by the upcoming fall elections, sure to be bitterly contested.

In June 1800, after the Congress had recessed, clerks packed up the Senate's belongings and prepared for the move with the rest of the government to the new federal city on the Potomac. When the second session of the Sixth Congress convened on November 17, 1800, the senators and representatives found themselves crowded into the Capitol's north wing, the only part of the building that was completed. The tension in the air was almost tangible. The presidential election had been held earlier in the month, but there was as yet no clear winner. The decision lay in the hands of Congress. Would the Federalists maintain their hold on the presidency, which they had controlled for eleven years, or would they have to deal with the Republican Thomas Jefferson in the White House?

These events were of great magnitude to this nation, and I shall speak of them in detail in my next address.

June 15, 1981 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, we have recently undergone a transition of party power in Washington, both in the executive branch and in the United States Senate. In each case, the transition was peaceful, amiable, and dignified, as the public has come to expect. We would be surprised and disappointed if it had been anything less; yet, when we look back over our national history to the first transition of party, we find an entirely different atmosphere—one of tension and intrigue. There were no guarantees that the new nation would survive the transfer of power between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans (a different political organization altogether, I should add, from today's Republican party). This first transition was the greatest test of the fledgling constitutional Republic, and, while the process was by no means smooth and easy, it is stirring to read how successfully our predecessors passed this test, paving the way for the many orderly transitions which would follow during the next two centuries.

Since 1789, the nation had been led by Federalist presidents, George Washington and John Adams, and the Congress controlled by Federalist majorities. For the first six congresses, the Federalists were continually in the majority in the Senate, and only during the Third Congress, from 1793 to 1795, did the Jeffersonians take a majority in the House of Representatives. With the election of 1800, this situation was reversed. The Republicans gained an 18 to 14 majority in the Senate and a 69 to 36 majority in the House. During the next eight years, they would keep and increase these margins sharply, so that during the Tenth Congress (1807–1809), their majority in the Senate was 28 to 6 and in the House, 118 to 24.

As for the presidency, both the Federalists and Republicans nominated their candidates in congressional caucuses, a system which lasted until 1824. The Federalists renominated the incumbent president, John Adams, and chose Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for vice president. The Republicans chose their popular leader, Thomas Jefferson, for president. Following the voting in New York in May 1800 (in those days each state conducted its elections on its own independent schedule), which the Republicans carried largely due to the effective campaigning of 0058 40

The Federalists lost their twelve-year control of the presidency when Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, became president in 1801. In 1856, Thomas Sully painted this famous portrait of Jefferson, which now hangs in the Senate wing of the Capitol. Architect of the Capitol

0059 41 Aaron Burr, the party nominated Burr for vice president. “Burr in 1800 was not some devious plotter,” Professor Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., has written, “but an aggressive, practical party organizer.” 1 Not until December were the last ballots cast. Until then, Jefferson and Adams were tied with sixty-five electoral ballots each. South Carolina determined the victor by casting its eight electoral votes to Jefferson and Burr. But while Jefferson now had seventy-three votes, so did his vice-presidential running mate; the tie vote forced the election into the House of Representatives.

While the Republicans would have the majority in the House as a result of the election, it was the outgoing Federalist-dominated Sixth Congress that would determine the presidential election. Hating Jefferson, the Federalists cast their votes for Burr. For his part, Aaron Burr insisted that he was not in competition with Jefferson but took no action to dissuade Federalist support. The House was then meeting in the newly constructed Senate wing of the Capitol Building, in a room which for many years served as our disbursing office and which has recently become a part of the Republican Leader's suite. Outside that room is a bronze plaque describing the dramatic events which occurred there:

This tablet marks the first meeting place of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. Here—on November 18, 1800—the House of Representatives met for the first time in Washington, remaining through the second session of the Sixth Congress. Here, from February 11 to February 17, 1801, the House cast 36 successive ballots to elect Thomas Jefferson President of the United States in the contest between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. 2

Why the Federalists abandoned Burr's candidacy is still uncertain. Alexander Hamilton strongly recommended voting for Jefferson over Burr on the grounds that Burr's “public principles have no other spring or aim than his own aggrandizement.” The Federalists may also have assumed that the effort was futile and might cause public resentment against them. Further, there appeared to be some backstage assurances from the Jeffersonians on matters of policy and patronage that won over sufficient Federalist votes. In any case, Jefferson was finally selected and was sworn in as president in the Senate chamber less than a month later on March 4.

President Adams left town without attending the inauguration of his successor, but two of Jefferson's chief antagonists were present in the Senate chamber that day (today, the room is commemorated as the old Supreme Court chamber, on the first floor of the Capitol, but from 1800 to 1810, it served as the Senate chamber): Chief Justice John Marshall, who swore in the president; and the new vice president and erstwhile rival, Aaron Burr. What a dramatic picture those three men must have presented to the audience that day. Just before taking his oath, Jefferson addressed the assemblage with these memorable lines:

We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans: we are all Federalists.... I know indeed that some honest men fear that a Republican Government cannot be strong; that this Government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of experiment, abandon a Government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may, by possibility, want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. 3

Once in power, the Jeffersonian Republicans intended to flex their political muscles. They controlled the executive and legislative branches, but the Federalists remained firmly entrenched in the judiciary. Shortly 0060 42 before the end of his term as president, John Adams had signed the Judiciary Act of 1801. Ostensibly, this act was designed to relieve the burdens of Supreme Court justices who spent several months a year in the saddle, tiding circuit. The Judiciary Act created a special circuit court and new district judgeships to assume these duties; however, President Adams immediately filled the new positions with Federalist judges. The act also provided that the Supreme Court bench would be reduced by attrition from six to five justices, thereby postponing Jefferson's ability to nominate new Republican justices to the Court. Jefferson and his supporters in Congress were determined to repeal this offending act.

In his annual message on December 8, 1801, Jefferson called for a reexamination of the judicial system, and, on January 6, 1802, Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky moved for repeal of the Judiciary Act. Breckinridge argued that the law was both unnecessary and improper and that the courts and judgeships created by it should be abolished. 4 The Senate debated the issue for the rest of the month and, on January 26, voted 15 to 15 on the motion to repeal. Vice President Burr then cast the deciding vote in favor of repeal. 5

The following day, however, Federalist Senator Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey proposed that the Senate reconsider its action and refer the issue to a special committee which would look at revision of the entire judiciary system. Dayton had made the same motion the day before and had been defeated by only one vote. He now argued that his motion had “not been perfectly heard and understood by one of the gentlemen who voted against it,” and moved again to refer it to committee. Again the vote was 15 to 15, but this time Vice President Burr cast his vote with the Federalists. Burr explained that he had no reason to question the sincerity of those wishing to refer the bill to committee to render it more acceptable to the Senate. But the Jeffersonians were outraged over what they considered Burr's duplicity and political maneuvering. Dayton, a Federalist, was known as a lifelong friend of Burr's and one of the leaders in his abortive challenge to Jefferson's election. 6

Even today, historians disagree over what motivated Aaron Burr. We may never fully understand this man who, some would aver, preferred to walk a crooked mile even when a straight path was available. In a letter to a friend the next day, Burr expressed his concern over “depriving the twenty-six judges of office and pay.” 7 Some of Burr's supporters argued that he was merely acceding to a desire among half the members of the Senate to have a committee appraise the legislation, and that, with the return of the absent Vermont senator, Stephen Bradley, the Republicans would have the necessary votes to discharge the bill and pass it—which is exactly what happened on February 3, 1802. But Burr's action had been the final straw for congressional Republicans. They were sure that he was plotting to win friends among the Federalists for a future challenge to the Jefferson administration. There was no hope that Burr would win renomination from the Republicans for vice president or advance further in his party's ranks, and he began to conceive of bolder plans.

Reading through the Annals of Congress, the forerunner of our Congressional Record, one finds many landmarks in American history during the Jeffersonian era. On January 31, 1803, for instance, the Senate received a petition from William Marbury and several others. This was less than a month before the Supreme Court would hand down its monumental ruling in Marbury v. Madison in which, for the first time, it declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. Marbury, as constitutional scholars will recall, had been appointed 0061 43 ed a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia as one of the last acts of President John Adams. Adams, however, had left office before the commission could be delivered to Marbury, and the new secretary of state, James Madison, refused to deliver the commission. Marbury went to court but also petitioned the Senate to obtain copies of the Senate's proceedings for March 2 and 3, 1801, relating to his nomination.

Now, in those days—and until 1929—most discussions of nominations and related executive business of the Senate were held in secret, closed-door executive sessions. Senator Breckinridge spoke for the majority of the Senate when he expressed the opinion that “the Executive Journal is kept only for the private use of the Senate and there is an express rule that extracts should not be given without the order of the House.” He considered that the president was a party to the business in the Executive Journal and should give his consent before its materials were opened. Senator Aaron Ogden of New Jersey argued in Marbury's behalf that, although executive business was conducted behind closed doors, there was no Senate rule that the Journal must be kept secret. Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania took the position that since Marbury had a case before the high court and the material was necessary for that case, the Senate had no justification for withholding it. “It is a public record,” said Ross, “of which any person interested has a right to demand a copy.” The Senate, however, voted 15 to 13 to deny Marbury and the others the Executive Journal extracts they had requested. 8

On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court dismissed Marbury's suit on the grounds that the Court lacked jurisdiction. Chief Justice Marshall declared that section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 had empowered the Court to issue writs of mandamus in such cases, but that this was in violation of the Constitution and, therefore, the Court held the law null and void. This was an incredibly shrewd maneuver on Marshall's part since he had given the immediate victory to President Jefferson against Marbury and, yet, had also established the principle of judicial review—a power which the Constitution did not specifically provide for and one which has significantly affected relations between Congress and the Court ever since.

Also in February 1803, the Senate was preoccupied with the Mississippi question. Residents of three-eighths of the territory of the United States living in the lands west of the Alleghenies shipped their produce down the Mississippi River to market. But Spain controlled the city of New Orleans and, therefore, could interfere with American trade at will. America had enjoyed freedom of transit on the Mississippi since the 1795 Pinckney Treaty with Spain, in which Spain promised free navigation of the river and the right to deposit goods at New Orleans before shipment elsewhere.

In October 1802, the Spanish governor of New Orleans suddenly revoked the right to deposit goods in that city duty-free. Outraged Americans in Tennessee, Kentucky, and other affected states talked of going to war to seize New Orleans. President Jefferson dispatched James Monroe to France and Spain as minister extraordinary. Monroe's mission was to reopen the Mississippi and to prevent France from regaining control of New Orleans from Spain.

The French leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, was also concerned with the American reaction to the closing of New Orleans and sought to avoid driving the United States into an alliance with his enemy, Great Britain. Abandoning his colonial ambitions, Napoleon decided to sell the entire Louisiana territory with the city of New Orleans to the United States, thereby raising money for France's impending war with Britain.

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In the Senate wing of the Capitol, Constantino Brumidi depicted negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase. James Monroe, center, is flanked by the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, left, and Robert Livingston, right. Architect of the Capitol

All of these negotiations were being conducted in secret, and there was great concern over their progress inside the Senate. On February 14, Federalist Senator James Ross rose to say that his constituents were greatly alarmed over the “unjustifiable, oppressive conduct of the officers of the Spanish Government at New Orleans.” Ross was aware of Monroe's mission but wanted a statement of support from the Senate. The United States should expel the wrongdoers, Ross proclaimed. “Plant yourselves on the river, fortify the banks, invite those who have an interest at stake to defend it; do justice to yourselves when your adversaries deny it; and leave the event to Him who controls the fate of nations.” When Ross turned to discuss the rumors that Jefferson had authorized Monroe to purchase Louisiana, he was cut off from speaking until the galleries could be cleared. “I will never speak upon this subject, sir,” said Ross, “with closed doors.” Vice President Burr ruled that the doors could be closed at the request of any senator and could be opened again only by the vote of the Senate. The doors were shut. Two days later, Ross again rose in public session to introduce his resolutions “That the President be authorized to take immediate possession of such place or places, in the said... territories, as he may deem fit and convenient.” The president should also be authorized to call up the militia in the western states, and some $5 million should be appropriated to support the war effort. 9

After long debate, on February 25, 1803, the Ross resolution was defeated, 11 to 15, and, shortly afterwards, the Seventh Congress adjourned. In April, French Foreign Minister Talleyrand broached the question 0063 45 of how much the United States was willing to pay for Louisiana, and by the end of the month, the treaty of cession had been signed. For $15 million the United States purchased enough land to double the size of the country—the whole central portion of the continental United States today, from the Mississippi River in the east to Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico in the west; from Louisiana in the south to Minnesota in the north. It was ironic that Thomas Jefferson, a strict constructionist and a believer in limited government, had taken this bold move; however, if Jefferson was inconsistent in expanding the power of the presidency, the Federalists were equally inconsistent in opposing him.

President Jefferson called the Eighth Congress into session two months earlier than scheduled in order to approve the treaty he had negotiated with France. On October 22, 1803, Senator Breckinridge offered a bill to enable the president to take possession of the vast territory ceded from France, and the bill passed easily by a vote of 26 to 6. (Among the dissenters was the new senator from Massachusetts, John Quincy Adams.) On November 1, Senator James Jackson of Georgia reported from committee a bill authorizing $11,250,000 for implementing the treaty. It was this authorization, rather than the treaty itself, which caused the intense debate that dominated the Senate during the first session of the Eighth Congress. 10

The Federalists, long identified with a strong presidency and central government, now argued that President Jefferson had acted unconstitutionally in signing the treaty with France, and that the Senate had no authority to approve the purchase of new territory. In addition, they objected to delegating power to the president to determine whether the French government had fully complied with its end of the treaty. Indeed, they had serious doubts that the Spanish government would willingly abandon the city of New Orleans which it had so profitably occupied, French treaty or not. Said Senator Samuel White of Delaware, the treaty would be simply the “buying [from] France authority to make war upon Spain.” 11

Finally, the Federalists rejected the theory then being advanced that the new land west of the Mississippi could be preserved for the Indian population, which could be induced to leave their lands in the east. “To every man acquainted with the adventurous, roving, and enterprising temper of our people, and with the manner in which our Western country has been settled,” said Senator White, “such an idea must be chimerical. The inducements will be so strong that it will be impossible to restrain our citizens from crossing the river.”

Of course, White was absolutely correct on that point; however, he went on to warn that those who went west would be separated by “the immense distance of two or three thousand miles from the capital of the Union where they will scarcely ever feel the rays of the General Government; their affections will become alienated.” 12 In the light of recent reports about the disaffection of western states with the federal government, it would seem that Senator White's prediction in 1803 turned out exactly in reverse. The western states complain that they feel the rays of government far more strongly than they would like.

In response to these Federalist accusations, the Republicans, who had traditionally supported limited government and reduced executive authority, strongly defended the president's bold move. Although the Constitution did not specify the purchase of territory from foreign governments, Article IV, section 3, did give Congress power to regulate the territories of the United States, thereby implying the right to obtain such territories. Senator Breckinridge of the then 0064 46 far western state of Kentucky dismissed fears that migration to the west would weaken the loyalty of the pioneers, noting that “the people of the Western States are as sincerely attached to the Confederacy, and to the true principles of the Constitution, as any other quarter of the Union.” The vote on authorization of funds was 26 to 5, with John Quincy Adams switching his vote from negative to affirmative on the grounds that, having approved the treaty, the Senate had an obligation to implement it. 13

Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky often acted as President Jefferson's spokesman in the Senate. Library of Congress

Mr. President, in discussing the repeal of the Judiciary Act and the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, I have several times mentioned the role of Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, and it is appropriate to devote some special attention to that remarkable gentleman. We have eighteen new senators in the Ninety-seventh Congress who are learning the rules and procedures of the Senate and are perhaps feeling some of the frustrations that a lack of seniority inevitably causes. I think they might find some interest in the career of John Breckinridge, who became his party's most effective spokesman and legislative leader in the Senate while serving in his first term. Admittedly, the party structures were only forming in those days, and seniority was not a significant issue since the standing committees had not yet been organized; nevertheless, Breckinridge's immediate rise to leadership was a testament to his considerable abilities.

A farmer, lawyer, and statesman from Kentucky, John Breckinridge had migrated to that fertile state from a war-torn section of Virginia after the American Revolution. Building a magnificent estate near Lexington and a profitable law practice, Breckinridge was elected to the state legislature. There, he helped to write and sponsor the famous Kentucky Resolutions—with the aid of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—in protest to the Alien and Sedition acts. In 1800, Breckinridge won election to the Senate and arrived here in March 1801, where he quickly became the leading spokesman for the new Jefferson administration and for the new western states. He was eloquent in debate, as the National Intelligencer noted in reporting that his opening speech on repeal of the Judiciary Act was noteworthy for its “conciseness, for comprehensiveness, for dignity, for appropriate language, and for sound inference.” In 1805, President Jefferson appointed Senator Breckinridge as attorney general. This, as Breckinridge biographer Lowell Harrison has judged, was a great mistake. Breckinridge was admirably qualified for the job, but his departure from the legislative branch meant that “there was not a Senator in the Ninth Congress who was competent to manage a 0065 47 difficult measure for the administration as Breckinridge had done with a much smaller majority behind him.... Breckinridge's greatest services on the national scene ended the day he left the Senate chamber for the last time.” 14

Tragically, Breckinridge's life was cut short by typhus fever at the age of forty-six, just a year after leaving the Senate. Had he lived, he might well have become president, but his family carried on his tradition of public service. Two of his grandsons served as representatives from Kentucky, and one of them, John Cabell Breckinridge, became a senator and vice president (under James Buchanan) and, later, a general in the Confederate army. Breckinridge's great-grandson, Clifton Rhodes Breckinridge, served as a representative from Arkansas in the late 1890's, and, more recently, his great-great grandson, John Bayne Breckinridge, represented Kentucky in the House in the 1970's. 15

Having opened with the monumental debate over the Louisiana Purchase, the Eighth Congress concluded its business with the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Once again, the Jeffersonian Republicans sought to influence the courts by removing an eloquent and intemperate Federalist judge. The Republicans had taken heart from the House's impeachment of a Federalist district judge from New Hampshire, John Pickering, in January 1804. But Pickering, charged with malfeasance, loose morals, and intemperate habits, was clearly insane, and so the political issue was muted. On March 12, 1804, the day the Senate acted to remove Judge Pickering, the House of Representatives voted 73 to 32 to impeach Justice Chase, who had been a Revolutionary War leader and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The House accused him of biased conduct on the bench and a partisan (that is, antirepublican) harangue to a grand jury in Baltimore. Were Chase to be removed from the Court solely because of congressional disapproval of his opinions, it was widely believed that Chief Justice Marshall would become the next target.

In the Senate, the Republicans needed 23 of the 34 votes to convict Justice Chase, which was exactly their party's margin over the Federalists. In preparation for the trial, the Senate chamber was hung with crimson drapery, and a special gallery was constructed to accommodate the many ladies of the city who were expected to attend. On February 4, 1805, the trial began with the erratic John Randolph of Virginia presenting the House's arguments against Chase. Adding to the drama was the appearance of Vice President Aaron Burr to preside over the trial. The previous July, Burr had shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehauken, New Jersey, and had fled warrants for his arrest. He appeared in Washington to preside over the Senate as if nothing had happened. While some were outraged over his behavior, the Republicans received him warmly, with the hope that he would lean to their side while presiding over the Chase trial. But Burr, that great enigma, did “himself, the Senate & the nation honor by the dignified manner in which he has presided,” according to Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, and his impartiality was praised by both sides. 16

The impeachment trial filled over six hundred pages of the Annals of Congress for the Eighth Congress, second session, and still makes fascinating reading today. On March 1, the trial ended with the Senate failing to convict Chase on a single count. Despite their two-thirds majority, the largest margin the Republicans could muster was a vote of 19 to 15. As I said earlier this year in my remarks welcoming Vice President Bush to this chamber, the Senate exercised in that fine 0066 48 moment of drama the kind of independence, impartiality, fairness, and courage that, from time to time over the years, it has brought to bear upon the great issues of our country.

In his emotional farewell speech, Aaron Burr described the Senate as “a sanctuary.” Library of Congress

Two days after the Chase trial, Vice President Burr bid adieu to the Senate, stepping down to make way for the new vice president, George Clinton, who had been elected to serve during Jefferson's second term. Burr's farewell speech, according to those who heard it, was received with such emotion that senators were brought to tears and stopped their business for a full half hour.

It is truly one of the great speeches in the Senate's history. “This House,” said Burr that day, “is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.” 17

Mr. President, here at midpoint in the Jeffersonian era, I should like to make some observations concerning the role of the Senate vis-à-vis the House in those years. In 1804, when New York Congressman Samuel Mitchill was elected to the Senate, he wrote to his wife: “Henceforth you will read little of me in the Gazettes. Senators are less exposed to public view than Representatives. Nor have they near so much hard work and drudgery to perform.”

As I have mentioned in earlier addresses, the popularly elected House was far more active than the Senate in those early days and, therefore, drew far more public attention. Sessions in the House generally lasted longer than those in the Senate. As Professor Noble Cunningham has pointed out in his study, The Process of Government Under Jefferson, House members originated more bills and demanded more roll-call votes than did senators. Much of their activity was devoted to originating revenue bills as the Constitution provided; however, this did not mean that the Senate was not the “upper body.” Movement from one house to the other was consistently from the House to the Senate and rarely in reverse. Samuel Mitchill described himself as no longer a “Representative of the People” but one of the “Senators of the Nation,” a member of “the supreme executive Council of the Nation.” 18

The Senate had not yet evolved into its Golden Age of Debate, as it would in the next few decades, and descriptions of its proceedings in those first years in Washington do not sound all that foreign from our proceedings today. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire wrote to his son in 1806 0067 49 that “in general by the time a senator has been speaking ten minutes it is rare that there is a quorum within the Bar—and many of those that are there, are either writing letters or reading newspapers. At the fire side a majority is seated, and often in a private conversation the question under debate is there settled by a free interchange of opinions.” 19

When the Ninth Congress convened in December 1805, foreign policy became the chief concern of senators. On December 20, Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania, a close friend and ally of President Jefferson, introduced a resolution to suspend commercial trade between the United States and the French island of Santo Domingo, today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. American merchants had been trading with the black population of that island who were in revolt against France, which was clearly a violation of American neutrality. The Republicans believed such trade would draw the United States into a war with France and proposed ending all trade with the island, a solution vigorously opposed by the Federalists, especially those who represented the trading states of New England. Senator John Quincy Adams expressed his belief that “no needless interference of the Government with the regular course of commercial transactions ought ever to be countenanced.” To assist in resolving this controversy, the Senate requested that the president send them all documents, papers, and any other information relative to complaints by the French government against United States trade with Santo Domingo. Jefferson then provided them with notes from the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, and the ambassador, Louis Turreau, protesting the Santo Domingo trade. On February 20, the Senate voted 21 to 7 to suspend the trade and preserve American neutrality. 20

Of course, settling the issue in the case of Santo Domingo did not solve the neutrality problem, which grew much graver during Jefferson's second term. Reading through the Annals of Cangress, one sees the frequent references to British interference with American shipping. Great Britain, as we recall, was at war with Napoleonic France, and the powerful British navy sought to halt American commerce with France—as, indeed, the French would also have done against trade with Britain, had their navy been the equal of the British navy. A particularly noxious side to this interference was the impressment of American seamen into the British navy. While many of these seamen had once served in the British navy, they were now American citizens, and public sentiment was outraged by their capture. Senator Robert Wright of Maryland pointed to the “present degraded state of impressed American seamen, thousands of whom have been pressed on board the British ships of war, and compelled, by whips and scourges, to work like galley slaves.” 21

On January 25, 1806, the Senate received from Secretary of State James Madison a report on the “unjustifiable British violations” of American neutrality rights. The Senate unanimously responded with a resolution declaring the British actions “an unprovoked aggression upon the property of the citizens of these United States, a violation of their neutrality rights, and an encroachment upon their national independence.” 22 As a means of punishing Great Britain, the resolution recommended prohibiting the importation of numerous goods manufactured in Great Britain, ranging from woolens and linens to mirrors, boots, shoes, and rum. This eventually became the NonImportation Act of 1806, enacted that April, the first step on the road to Jefferson's embargo. The Federalists argued that the president and Senate had no such right to interfere with United States trade, but they fought a losing battle.

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The Non-Importation Act was due to go into effect by November 14, 1807, but long before then it was clear that it would not influence British policy, which, if anything, was becoming even more aggressive and restrictive. On December 18, Jefferson sent Congress a warning about the “increasing dangers with which our vessels, our seamen, and merchandise, are threatened on the high seas” and recommended a complete embargo on all United States overseas trade. The overwhelmingly Republican Senate suspended its rules and passed the measure that same day, 22 to 6. 23 During the next few months, however, evidence became unmistakable that American smugglers were successfully circumventing the Embargo Act, particularly by carrying goods across the Canadian border, and so the embargo had little effect on the British economy. On the contrary, it was having its most adverse effect on the old and predominantly Federalist merchant class in New England and New York, whose normal foreign trade had been officially severed.

When the second session of the Tenth Congress convened in November 1808, the embargo was the subject of bitter debate. Senator James Hillhouse of Connecticut complained that the Republican notion that a cutoff of American food products would starve Britain was “a farce, an idle farce.” Instead of affecting the nations that had violated American neutrality fights, Hillhouse charged that it was “fraught with evils and privations to the people of the United States. They were the sufferers.” It reminds me of the recently imposed, and subsequently lifted, embargo by President Carter on grain to the Soviet Union. There were those who said that the American farmers—not the Soviet Union—were the sufferers.

The Republicans conceded the weaknesses of the embargo but argued that its alternatives were submission or war. The Senate then debated the Enforcement of the Embargo Act, which, on December 21, passed by a vote of 20 to 7. These enforcement provisions established stern penalties for violations of the embargo, a highly unpopular move in mercantile New England where the Federalists made strong gains in local and congressional elections. Outcry was so great that, on February 22, 1809, the Senate voted 21 to 12 to repeal the embargo and to pass in its stead the Non-Intercourse Act, reopening all sea trade except with England and France. 24 Thomas Jefferson admitted defeat on his controversial embargo but, to his dying day, maintained that the measure would have worked had it been given sufficient time. 25 Time, however, had run out for Jefferson, and on Saturday, March 4, 1809, the Senate of the Eleventh Congress convened in special session to witness the inauguration of his successor, James Madison.

In telling the story of the Senate during the Jeffersonian era, it is fitting to conclude with the mysterious figure with whom we began: Aaron Burr. In these eight years, Burr contested with Jefferson for the presidency, served as vice president, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, and then was tried for treasonous conspiracy. After leaving the vice-presidency, Burr first tried to persuade President Jefferson to appoint him to a high government post. Failing that, he headed west to rebuild his personal and political fortunes. Soon, rumors began drifting east to Washington that Burr was seeking to separate the new western territories to create an independent state, with himself as its ruler. It was said that he was plotting with the British and the Spanish and with the American military governor of Louisiana, James Wilkinson.

Undercover agents pursued Burr and collected evidence against him. On January 22, 1807, Jefferson sent a remarkable message to the Senate warning its members of Burr's activities. 26 The next month, Burr surrendered 0069 51 to authorities in Mississippi, and a trial was set for him in the federal circuit court in Richmond, Virginia. Presiding over this trial was Jefferson's other nemesis, Chief Justice John Marshall. Burr's trial lasted from August 3 to September 1 and resulted in his acquittal. Shortly afterward, Aaron Burr went into exile in Europe. Dissatisfied with the results of the trial, President Jefferson sent Congress the transcripts to examine for possible defects in the law, to protect the nation from treason. But Congress was preoccupied with the embargo and offered no resolution to the problem. The transcripts of the debates and proceedings during that dramatic trial are preserved for us today in the Annals of Congress, Tenth Congress, First Session.

The Senate remained aloof from the Burr trial but could not ignore the involvement of one of its own members, Senator John Smith of Ohio, who was indicted for conspiracy along with Burr. Smith was accused of having entered into the conspiracy in 1804, when President Jefferson had sent him on a special mission to Louisiana and Florida. A special Senate committee, chaired by John Quincy Adams, reported on December 31, 1807, a resolution “That John Smith, a Senator from the State of Ohio, by his participation in the conspiracy of Aaron Burr against the peace, union, and liberties, of the people of the United States, has been guilty of conduct incompatible with his duty and station as a Senator of the United States. And that he be therefore, and hereby is, expelled from the Senate of the United States.” Smith responded with a ninety-six-page defense of his action. 27

When Burr had been acquitted, the government had dropped charges against Senator Smith, but the Republican members of the Senate felt the evidence against him warranted pursuing the case, even though he was a member of their own party. Smith denied all the charges of conspiracy and said that he had no desire to separate off the western territories or participate in a military rebellion against the government. His only fault, he insisted, was in opening his doors hospitably to Aaron Burr. Senator James Bayard of Delaware led much of Smith's defense in the Senate, which was particularly crucial to the case. Bayard, as a member of the House, had been one of the managers of the impeachment proceedings against Senator William Blount, who was expelled in 1797, a case which provided most of the precedents for the Smith proceedings. Bayard fully believed that Burr had conspired against the country, adding that “scarcely a man in the United States doubts it”; yet, he would find no evidence to substantiate the charges against Smith. 28 It is, indeed, a painful task for members of the Senate to try one of their colleagues for possible censure or expulsion, and the Senate debate moved slowly and deliberately from December through the following April, filling page after page of the Annals. At last, on Saturday, April 9, 1808, the Senate voted 18 to 10 to expel Smith; however, this was less than the necessary two-thirds margin, several Republicans having found it impossible to vote against their colleague. The matter was settled later that month when Smith resigned from the Senate at the urging of the Ohio legislature. 29

Mr. President, the events in the history of the United States Senate between 1800 and 1808 were certainly dramatic and crowded ones. 30 These events were faced by a Senate of thirty-four members representing seventeen states; yet, in the eight years I have been discussing, there were eighty-four different senators serving in this body. Only three senators served consistently from the Seventh to the Tenth congresses: James Hillhouse of Connecticut, Samuel White of Delaware, and Jesse Franklin of North Carolina.

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One of the chief reasons for this high turnover was the change in party structure in the United States. The Republican party became the predominant party, and the Federalist party began to fade from the scene. The Senate in the Jeffersonian era was also growing younger, with the average age of senators falling from 44.4 years in 1800 to 40.6 in 1810. This, in fact, is the lowest average age in the history of the Senate. (For the Ninety-seventh Congress, the average age of senators is 52.5 years.)

The youngest member of the Senate in this era was an ambitious politician named Henry Clay from Kentucky, of whom I will have considerably more to say in later addresses. Clay was elected by the Kentucky legislature to fill a vacancy in November 1806 and took his oath on December 29, 1806, when he was twenty-nine years, eight months, and seventeen days old, a little over three months younger than the constitutionally provided thirty years of minimum age for a senator. The Annals of Congress does not show anyone challenging Clay for his unconstitutional act, although legend has it that, when asked by a fellow senator, he responded, “I hope my colleague will propound that question to my constituents,” and let the matter drop there. 31 Clay filled out the remainder of the term until March 3, 1807, when he left the Senate, still a month shy of his thirtieth birthday. He served another partial term from 1810 to 1811, but his major service in the Senate did not begin until 1831 and continued intermittently until his death in 1852.

These young senators served a young nation—the average age of which was only sixteen years old—but it was a growing nation in size and population. Between the censuses of 1800 and 1810, the population of the United States increased 36 percent, from 5.3 million to 7.2 million; while the physical size of the nation doubled from 865,000 square miles to 1,682,000 square miles as a result of the addition of the Louisiana Purchase. With a doubling of the land area, the number of people per square mile declined from 6.1 to 4.3. This last statistic illustrates graphically that the United States was predominantly a rural, agricultural nation. Only a half million Americans lived in cities and towns with populations over 2,500 in 1810, while 6.7 million lived in areas with less than 2,500 people. It was to this rural, agricultural, westwardly moving population that the Jeffersonian Republicans appealed and why the party prospered to the point of wiping out the very existence of its opposition. In just a few short years, the United States would move into a unique era of single party politics, which we refer to rather wistfully as the Era of Good Feelings. The truth, as usual, was more complex, as I will be discussing in a future address on the history of the United States Senate.

July 8, 1981 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, let me describe a scene almost too terrible to contemplate: enemy soldiers landing on American shores; a pitched battle ending with the defeat of United States armed forces; enemy troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.; the Capitol, the White House, and other government buildings ablaze. Such a great national tragedy may seem inconceivable; yet, that is precisely what did happen here in the summer of 1814 when British troops broke through the American lines at the Battle of Bladensburg, marched down Maryland Avenue, and burned much of this city. How this calamity occurred, and the role of the United States Senate in the War of 1812, will be the subjects of my remarks today.

In my last address, I discussed the Senate during the era of Thomas Jefferson, concluding with the election of his successor, James Madison. On January 23, 1808, Madison was chosen as his party's presidential candidate by a Republican congressional caucus. According to the diary of John Quincy Adams, who was then a senator from Massachusetts, it was Vermont Senator Stephen Bradley who called the caucus together. Bradley claimed to have received authority to summon such a conclave by the Republican caucus four years earlier and so sent circulars announcing the meeting to all Republican members of the House and Senate. In fact, because party lines were so indistinct in those days, he sent notices to all but five members of the Senate and twenty-two members of the House, excluding them only on the grounds that they “have never been in the habit of acting with us.” Madison won by a vote of 83 to 6, indicating his strong popularity with congressional Republicans; however, this margin is somewhat deceiving since some sixty supporters of James Monroe of Virginia and George Clinton of New York boycotted the caucus. One who boldly attended the caucus and paid the price for it was Senator John Quincy Adams, whose father, former President John Adams, Jefferson had defeated for the presidency in 1800. The younger Adams' conversion to Republicanism cost him his Senate seat that year when the Massachusetts legislature, outraged over Jefferson's embargo, elected James Lloyd over Adams. President Jefferson, however, repaid his political debt to 0072 54 Adams by appointing him minister to Russia. 1

As Professor Marshall Smelser pointed out in his masterful synthesis of this period, The Democratic Republic: 1801–1815, Madison's election by the caucus would affect his entire administration: “As the creation of the caucus, Madison could never dominate his makers.” 2 Following after the strong presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Madison became a relatively weak president. This, of course, is not to denigrate his considerable achievements in public life: as one of the leaders of the Constitutional Convention of 1787; as author, with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, of the Federalist papers; as leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives; and as secretary of state under Jefferson. But James Madison simply did not measure up to the demands of executive leadership in those troubled times.

The paramount national issue when Madison became president was the United States' relations with England and France. In a previous address, I discussed President Jefferson's efforts towards neutrality and his ill-fated embargo. Madison's administration began with a brief honeymoon even rosier than that accorded to most administrations. Relations with Great Britain improved steadily as a result of negotiations with the British minister to the United States, David Erskine. An agreement was reached by which the British would lift their odious Orders in Council, interfering with American trade, and the United States would respond by repealing its Non-Importation Act. President Madison called Congress into special session in May 1809, and, in his first presidential message, urged Congress to pass implementing legislation. This was an immensely popular act which won the new president great public acclaim from both the Republicans and the Federalists. On June 19, the Senate unanimously approved legislation lifting the ban on trade. Once differences with the House version could be settled, the Senate passed the amended version on June 28 and then adjourned. 3 Tragically, the national jubilation was soon shattered by news that the British cabinet had repudiated Erskine's agreement. Once again, trade restrictions were imposed and relations between the United States and Britain grew more strained.

Leaving the Senate for the “turbulence” of the House, young Henry Clay was promptly elected Speaker. Architect of the Capitol

An examination of the proceedings of the first short session of the Eleventh Congress reveals marked differences between the Senate and the House. In the Senate, there was little debate over Madison's proposal. Sessions appear to have been quite brief, with only a few speeches made by supporters of the bill (although I should add that not 0073 55 all remarks on the floor were transcribed in those days). The entire transcript of the five-week session fills only fifty pages in the Annals of Congress.

In contrast, the House of Representatives was far more active with longer sessions, lengthier speeches, more heated debate, and a willingness to take up a far greater range of subjects. (The House was still relatively small in number then and its rules were not as restrictive of debate as they are today.) For that same first session of the Eleventh Congress, the transcripts of the House proceedings run to 420 pages. For the second session, the Senate debates fill 100 pages while the House debates fill 1,400. This disparity helps to explain why the youthful Henry Clay of Kentucky decided to quit his seat in the Senate to stand for election to the House. As Clay wrote to James Monroe, “Accustomed to the popular branch of a Legislature, and prefer[r]ing the turbulence (if I may be allowed the term) of a numerous body to the solemn stillness of the Senate Chamber, it was a mere matter of taste that led me, perhaps injudiciously, to change my station.” 4

Henry Clay did not fare too badly in the House—he was elected Speaker on his first day in that body! One of his biographers, Clement Eaton, has called Henry Clay “the boldest and most decisive” and “one of the best and most powerful Speakers that the House of Representatives has ever had.” 5 Clay has also been described as the “most powerful man in the nation from 1811 to 1825.” 6 Another historian has speculated that, when one considers Clay's conspicuous opposition to the policies of Presidents Madison and Monroe, he was perhaps “the leader of an anti-administration faction within the Republican party, rather than the leader of the party itself.” 7 I mention this to indicate that, while the Federalist party was still in existence during the Madison era, the differences inside the majority Republican party were perhaps growing more significant than those between the two parties.

In the House, Harry of the West, as Clay was affectionately called by his supporters, became the leader of a young band of warhawks. Representing the western and southern states primarily, they spoke out loudly for war with Britain to avenge the nation's honor, to protect their western states from British-provoked Indian attacks, to annex Canada, and to expand the United States territorially. One of the most interesting side-notes about the warhawks was that many of the most hot-tempered among them shared the same boardinghouse on Capitol Hill: Clay and George Bibb of Kentucky; and John C. Calhoun, William Lowndes, and Langdon Cheves of South Carolina all roomed at Mrs. Dowson's boardinghouse.

The significance of patterns of residence in early Washington was first uncovered by Professor James Sterling Young of Columbia University in his fascinating book, The Washington Community: 1800–1828, published in 1966. By examining the early Congressional Directories, Professor Young found that members of Congress were listed not by their states or parties but by the boardinghouses and hotels in which they lived. Furthermore, he found a high correlation between boardinghouse residency and patterns of voting in the Senate and House. In choosing places of temporary residence in the capital city, members of Congress naturally congregated according to their political and regional interests. How one voted helped to determine with whom he lived, and, perhaps, vice versa.

Washington, D.C., during those early years, was not a city of monuments, museums, parks, and broad avenues. It was a roughhewn wilderness settlement with muddy streets, a few taverns, and a handful of boardinghouses. Foreign diplomats considered it a hardship post, and members of Congress found it equally inhospitable, an 0074 56 extra inducement for keeping sessions of Congress as short as possible. Because of the acute shortage of housing and the great problems of transportation in those days, most senators and representatives left their families at home. Few could afford the luxury of building or buying a private home in the capital—and, indeed, until modern times, there was a definite political stigma to owning a home in Washington, for it seemed to symbolize a politician's alienation from his constituents; so, members of Congress lived in boardinghouses on Capitol Hill and down Pennsylvania Avenue as far as Georgetown. Their rooms served as offices for handling correspondence and other legislative business off the floors of the Senate and House chambers, and we can be sure that politics and legislative tactics were prime subjects of conversation in their dining rooms and around their fireplaces each evening.

Every election year we hear much talk about the “mess in Washington,” and so it is amusing to read in the early Congressional Directories that in 1809 there was a “Washington Mess” at Mrs. Wilson's boardinghouse, where seventeen senators and representatives roomed. The “mess” was not a reference to the physical condition of the boardinghouse or its lodgers, but to the practice of eating meals together regularly, as in a military mess hall. One can also find references to a “War Mess” of warhawks and to “Dowson's crowd” and “Coyle's family,” referring to the members of the Dowson and Coyle boardinghouses. If we had been members of the Senate in 1809, we might have taken rooms at Mrs. Hamilton's, Mrs. Frost's, Miss Regan's, or Mr. Claxton's on Capitol Hill. There were also lodgings available at Mrs. Suter's on F Street, Mr. Huddleston's on Pennsylvania Avenue, or Mr. Crawford's in Georgetown. Some of these appear to have been clusters of houses as, for instance, Mrs. Dowson's of Capitol Hill, where members were listed as staying at the “House in which she resides,” the “House next door,” and the “House opposite side of the way.” 8 Parenthetically, boardinghouses have not disappeared entirely from Capitol Hill in our own day. A number of them still stretch down East Capitol Street and its environs.

I have been talking about Henry Clay and the warhawks in the House of Representatives, to whom historians have devoted much of their attention during this period. My purpose is really to focus on the Senate. There, the leader of the majority Republican party, and also the leading war advocate, was Senator William Branch Giles of Virginia. Giles was forty-two years old when he was elected to the Senate in 1804 but had already established himself in national politics. A graduate of Princeton University, he had also studied law under George Wythe at the College of William and Mary. About half the members of the Senate during this era were college graduates—far out of proportion to the national average—and Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary were the colleges most members had attended. 9

William Branch Giles entered the House of Representatives in 1790 at the age of twenty-eight. There, he became the most outspoken opponent of Alexander Hamilton's financial program and also of the Jay Treaty. He also denounced what he considered to be the adulation of President George Washington. Giles was a leader of the Republicans in the House, until ill health forced him to resign in 1802. Two years later, he joined the more sedate Senate, where he quickly assumed leadership of the Jeffersonian forces during the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase. 10

John Randolph, another Republican leader in the House, considered Giles “the most accomplished debater which his country [has] ever seen.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton, in his monumental memoir of Congress, Thirty 0075 57 Years' View, left us this studied description: “Mr. Giles neither read nor studied, but talked incessantly with able men, rather debating with them all the while: and drew from this source of information, and from the ready powers of his mind, the ample means of speaking on every subject with the fulness which the occasion required, the quickness which confounds an adversary, and the effect which a lick in time always produces.” 11

Virginia Senator William B. Giles supported Jefferson but found Madison a threat to republicanism. National Cyclopedia of American Biography

During Jefferson's presidency, Giles was one of the administration's chief advocates in the Senate, but once James Madison entered the White House, Senator Giles' pugilistic tendencies reemerged. Attempting to explain his break with his party's standard-bearer, Giles wrote to a friend that he had nothing but the “warmest friendship and the most affectionate regards” for Madison before he became president but came to see the new president as the “spirit and support of the most unprincipled parasites, and dupe of the most wretched intrigues.” Of Madison, he now said, “republicanism was not safe in his hands.” 12 Giles was particularly galled by Madison's strong reliance on Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, a man for whom he had no use at all. Giles led a successful movement in the Senate to block Gallatin's promotion to secretary of state in Madison's cabinet. But Giles was not the only Republican to show independence of the White House. In January 1809, sixteen Republican senators joined with five Federalists in voting to order all armed vessels into active naval service, in an attempt to force the administration to prepare for war with Great Britain. 13

Not all of the political fighting took place within the Republican ranks. The diminishing Federalist party still offered convenient targets for fire. In December 1809, for example, the arch-Federalist Timothy Pickering, senator from Massachusetts, rose in the Senate to denounce what he considered the unconstitutional seizure of West Florida from Spain. Madison had justified this move on the grounds that the territory was included within the Louisiana Purchase, but Pickering read from a letter by French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, dated December 21, 1804, arguing that the Louisiana Purchase included no territory east of the Mississippi. As Pickering finished this reading, Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland (brother of Madison's Secretary of State Robert Smith) rose to ask whether the document was still secret. Pickering, himself a former secretary of state, realized that he had violated the Senate's rules by reading a confidential document without the permission of the Senate. He tried to defend his action by arguing that 0076 58 sufficient time had elapsed to remove any need for secrecy, but his enemies jumped on the chance to embarrass him. On a motion of Henry Clay, then still a senator from Kentucky, the galleries were cleared, and the Senate moved to censure Pickering for breach of confidence; thus, Timothy Pickerlng became the first member of the Senate ever to be censured. In the 172 years since then, the Senate has censured only seven of its members. In most cases, the effect was both personally and politically devastating, and, indeed, Pickering shortly afterwards resigned his seat. 14

The drums of war sounded loudly in 1810. Senator Giles was chairman of a committee appointed to respond to President Madison's military proposals and, in January 1810, he reported a bill from this committee for “fitting out, officering, and manning [of] the frigates belonging to the United States.” While the Republican party had long been philosophically opposed to a large navy or any other sign of a strong central government, Giles now argued that the navy was not a threat to individual liberty, but would secure liberty for the American people. In a remarkable address in the Senate on January 23, 1810, Giles dissected the history of the two political parties. He argued that the takeover of the federal government by the Republican party had led them to “run into the opposite extreme” from the Federalists' efforts towards centralization. The Republicans had so relaxed the powers of the government as to “impair or destroy its efficacy in resisting foreign aggressions.” Senator Giles declared that he opposed both of these extremes and wanted to find a middle way in which individual liberties could be protected while the nation armed itself for its own protection. Claiming that he did not want war, Giles wanted the nation prepared in case war came. And he added that, should war with Britain arise, the United States would be justified in annexing nearby British territory, by which he was clearly referring to Canada. Giles' bill passed the Senate by a vote of 25 to 6 but died in a House committee. As Giles' first biographer, Dice Anderson, has written, the War of 1812, “if Giles had had his way, would have been the war of 1810.” 15

As this legislation showed, the collapse of Madison's diplomatic initiatives was leading Congress to take matters into its own hands. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Nathaniel Macon had introduced a bill, known as “Macon's Bill Number One,” which embodied the administration's proposals for limiting all shipping of British and French imports to only American ships. Objections to this bill in the Senate had led to significant revisions, and, in 1810, Congress passed what became known as “Macon's Bill Number Two.” This pivotal piece of legislation provided that the United States would trade with both Britain and France, but if one of these nations lifted its trade restrictions, then the United States would terminate all trade with the other. Initially, this legislation reopened American trade with Europe, and commerce flourished. But then the crafty French leader Napoleon acted to make it appear as though France was lifting its trade restrictions. Under Macon's bill, the United States had no alternative but to suspend its trade with Britain. President Madison issued a new proclamation of non-intercourse with Britain, which Congress affirmed in February 1811. 16

The Twelfth Congress, which met at the call of President Madison a month earlier than scheduled, was a war Congress. Tempers had risen, and American foreign policy was in a sorry state. Trade with Britain was cut off; and yet, evidence was emerging that, in truth, France had not suspended its own trade restrictions. British naval supremacy in the Atlantic was also galling to the young American Republic, so proud of its independence 0077 59 from Great Britain. Not only were the British disrupting American commerce but they were also conscripting American seamen. When the warhawks in the House voted to expand the size of the army by ten thousand men, the Senate raised the ante to twenty-five thousand. As we might expect, William Branch Giles took the lead on this issue. The United States had enjoyed a long course of prosperity, Giles told his colleagues in the Senate, “but we ought not to calculate upon perpetual exemption from the common calamities of nations. When days of adversity shall arrive, we should meet them with becoming fortitude and energy.” 17

The “days of adversity” were closer at hand than Giles anticipated. President Madison and his new secretary of state, James Monroe, had become convinced of the inevitability of war. On April 1, 1812, Madison sent Congress a secret message asking for an extension of the embargo for sixty days to protect American ships as war approached. According to Joseph Gales, publisher of the National Intelligencer and one of the first reporters of congressional debates, a delegation of members of Congress led by Speaker Clay called upon the president to assure him that a majority was ready to vote for a declaration of war, if he requested it. On June 1, 1812, Madison sent Congress his declaration of war, charging Britain with seizing American seamen; violating the nation's neutral rights and territorial waters; blockading United States ports; and continuing their official restrictions on United States trade. “We behold... on the side of the United States, a state of peace toward Great Britain,” wrote Madison. “Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events,... is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government.” 18

On June 5, 1812, the House of Representatives voted 79 to 49 for war. In the Senate, Federalists from New England and the mid-Atlantic maritime states worked to delay a vote. Realizing that the Republican ranks were divided, that some Republicans favored total war with Britain while others wanted war with both Britain and France or limited war or continued delay, the Federalists loaded the war resolution with numerous amendments to provide a cover and an inducement for Republicans to vote against the war. This strategy slowed down the war movement but could not prevent final passage of the resolution. One of the key votes was cast by Senator William Giles, who alternated between prowar and antiwar votes. According to Giles' most recent biographer, Dr. Mary Giunta of the National Historical Publications and Record Commission, Giles believed that both Britain and France were guilty of outrages against the United States, but to war on both of them simultaneously would be folly. He finally concluded that Britain posed the greater threat, since she was based in Canada and controlled the Atlantic. His final vote for war, therefore, was cast out of a “psychological fear of dominance by Great Britain.” On June 17, 1812, the Senate voted 19 to 13 for war. 19

Some of Madison's critics have charged that he capitulated to congressional pressures in return for his renomination to the office of president. This charge appears groundless, since Madison's renomination was made certain as early as March 1812 when the Pennsylvania legislature elected a solid slate of electors committed to him. In May, Madison was renominated by the Republican caucus in a vote of 82 to 0, although again with several abstentions. 20 President Madison did not buy his renomination with a declaration of war. He was as convinced as 0078 60 were the warhawks that war was both necessary and inevitable, and we may assume that the national war fever did not damage Madison's chances for reelection that November. Vice President George Clinton having died in office, the caucus nominated Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts for vice president. Today, we still associate Gerry's name with political redistricting— gerrymandering.

William H. Powell's famous painting, The Battle of Lake Erie, hangs outside the Senate chamber. Architect of the Capitol

Mr. President, as we have been made so painfully aware in recent years, wars are not so easily fought on the battlefields as they are in the cabinet room or the congressional hearing room. Martial spirit and expectations of quick and easy victory in the eyes of those who declare war cannot be quickly translated into military performance. Even with Great Britain's preoccupation with its conflict with Napoleon on the European continent, the war in North America went very badly for the United States. The gallant young men who marched off to battle met with ignominious defeats. In the summer of 1812, the United States launched a disastrous attack on British Canada, an attack which ended with the city of Detroit occupied by the British, the American garrison at the site of present-day Chicago massacred, and with control of Lake Erie firmly in the hands of the British navy. In November, General Henry Dearborn led a large American force to Canada, but the state militias refused to follow him across the border, and the expedition was forced to turn back. These events exposed the weakness of the state militias and the need for a strong regular army, and 0079 61 also caused President Madison to reorganize the War Department. The only bright notes were the naval victories of the U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) and Captain Stephen Decatur, who captured the British warship Macedonian and towed it back to New London, Connecticut.

The second session of the Twelfth Congress opened on November 2, 1812, in a much more subdued mood. Members heard a message from President Madison calling for enlargement of the navy and higher pay for the army and authorization of a $20 million loan to pay the costs of the war. The Senate and House responded favorably with far less opposition than Madison had received during his first term. The only significant opposition to the president in the Senate came over his plan to add twenty more regiments of infantry to the army, and there the opposition centered on lengthening the time of enlistment from one year to upwards of five years. 21

During 1813, the war situation grew bleaker. The British navy blockaded the entrances to the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, eventually extending their blockade from New England to the Georgia coast. The blockade was extremely effective, causing scarcities of goods along the East Coast, high inflation, and a drastic reduction in government revenues on customs which brought the government to the verge of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the Americans again moved to gain control over the Great Lakes. In April, a force of 1,600 Americans under General Dearborn seized the British naval fleet at York, the present-day city of Toronto. The mission ended with the destruction of two British ships under construction, but at the cost of 320 American lives; and the control of the Great Lakes remained in British hands.

The American forces were also accused of having burned government buildings as they left York, an act which would stimulate a terrible revenge; however, we should note that General Dearborn, in a letter to Senator Joseph Varnum, insisted that his troops neither burned nor destroyed any public or private buildings in York with the exception of two blockhouses and a few sheds belonging to the naval yard. It was the British, themselves, who set ablaze a frigate under construction and a large storehouse of naval equipment to keep them from falling into the Americans' hands. As General Dearborn explained, “Several of the most valuable public buildings, connected with their principal military positions, were destroyed by the explosion of their magazine, which proved so fatal to our troops; and although there were strong provocations for burning or destroying the town, nothing of the kind took place.” 22

In June, the British captured the American warship Chesapeake thirty miles outside of Boston harbor, an event we remember today for the dying words of its thirty-two-year-old captain James Lawrence, “Don't give up the ship!” An even younger captain, twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Hazard Perry, inscribed the words on his flagship Lawrence, which played an important role in the greatest American naval victory of the war. On September 10, 1813, the Americans won a decisive victory over the British on Lake Erie, during which the Lawrence was so badly damaged that Perry was forced to move to another ship in his fleet. My colleagues may recognize, from my description of this event, the twenty-by-thirty-foot depiction of the battle which hangs over the east staircase of the Senate wing, just outside my office. This most impressive painting, by which we all pass many times during the day, was added to the Senate's artistic collection in 1873. In the carved wooden ribbon, which is part of the painting's massive frame, is the message that Perry sent to General William 0080 62 Henry Harrison after the battle, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

British soldiers set fire to the Capitol, forcing the Congress to seek another meeting place. Architect of the Capitol

Through the efforts of the American minister to Russia, former Senator John Quincy Adams, the tsar of Russia offered to mediate between the United States and Britain. President Madison quickly acted to appoint a peace commission composed of Adams, House Speaker Clay, who had supported the war, Senator James Bayard of Delaware, who had opposed the war, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. The Senate quickly confirmed the nominations of all but Gallatin. Federalist Senator Rufus King of New York challenged Gallatin's nomination, asking who would perform his duties at the treasury while he was absent in Europe. Anti-administration Republicans, led again by William Giles, joined forces with the Federalists to oppose the nomination which was defeated 17 to 18. Despite the lack of confirmation, however, Gallatin sailed for Russia as the president's emissary. The whole issue was made moot by the British decision to reject the tsar's offer; however, the British did agree to enter into direct negotiations with the Americans. Since Gallatin was already overseas, he resigned his secretaryship on February 9, 1814, and joined the new negotiations. On the same day, the Senate at last confirmed his appointment to the peace commission, which would meet in the Belgian city of Ghent. 23

The negotiations proceeded slowly, and in April, after the abdication of Napoleon, the British decided to prosecute the war with new attention rather than settle their differences diplomatically. Most of the fighting 0081 63 continued to concentrate around the Canadian border and the Great Lakes, but the stalemate continued. The British bombarded American forces at Fort Erie, but their attack against Fort Plattsburg on Lake Champlain proved a complete failure. As a diversionary tactic to reduce pressure on the Canadian front, the British launched a force of four thousand men to attack the mid-Atlantic seacoast, and the city of Washington became their prime target.

In mid-August 1814, the British fleet sailed into Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Patuxent River. British troops disembarked and marched overland to Marlboro, Maryland, where they were met by the combined American militia and naval forces under General William Winder and navy captain—later commodore—Joshua Barney. The two sides fought on the fields of Bladensburg near the infamous old dueling grounds. Despite the American advantage of more numerous troops fighting on their own territory and defending their capital city, the British broke through the lines at Bladensburg and proceeded towards Washington. Needless to say, the city was filled with panic and its citizens fled.

Here is the account of Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the National Intelligencer's founder Samuel Harrison Smith. Having observed the cheerful readiness of the American militia, Mrs. Smith had no doubts concerning their eventual victory over the British, but then one night her family was awakened by a loud knocking on their door:

Willie Bradley called to us, “The enemy are advancing, our own troops are giving way on all sides and are retreating to the city. Go, for God's sake go.” He spoke in a voice of agony, and then flew to his horse and was out of sight in a moment. We immediately rose, the carriage and horses were soon ready, we loaded a wagon with what goods remained and about three o'clock left our house with all our servants, the women we sent to some private farm houses at a safe distance, while we pursued our course.

Margaret Bayard Smith's letters recorded the British invasion of Washington in 1814. U.S. Senate Curator's Office

The next morning, the Smith family received the sad news that “our city was taken, the bridges and public buildings burnt, our troops flying in every direction. Our little army totally dispersed.” The British had marched into the city and destroyed first the navy yard and then the Capitol. “They had great difficulty in firing the Capitol,” Mrs. Smith reported, “several houses on the hill were burnt by cinders from the Capitol, but none by design.” 24

As a symbol of the government, the Senate and House wings of the uncompleted building were slated for destruction by the British, who piled up books from the Library of Congress, along with documents and furnishings, to set fire to the chambers. Capitol Architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe later 0082 64 wrote that “great efforts were made to destroy the Supreme Court room, which was built with uncommon solidarity, by collecting into it, and setting fire to, the furniture of the adjacent rooms. By this means the columns were cracked exceedingly.” Upstairs in the Senate chamber, Latrobe found the damage extensive. The fire “burnt the marble column to lime” and “cracked every thing which was of freestone.” 25 The interior of the Capitol was totally destroyed, and the exterior was saved only by a fierce thunderstorm and heavy wind of the type we so often experience during Washington summers. As we know, the British also badly damaged the White House, forcing President Madison to flee to Virginia. While most of the White House art and furnishings were destroyed, Dolley Madison did order the staff to save the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, which hangs in the White House to this day. It was after the destruction of Washington that the British moved to Baltimore, where the firing upon Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Because so many of the staff of the Senate and House were called to duty in the militia to guard the city, the records of the Congress were left in the Capitol Building until the last moment. As a result, many House documents were destroyed in the fire. The Senate, already in some disarray following the recent death of its secretary, Samuel A. Otis, was fortunate to have a quick-witted clerk named Lewis Machen, who commandeered a farmer's cart and loaded up the Senate's records to carry them to safety in the Virginia countryside.

When the members of the Thirteenth Congress returned to Washington in September 1814, they found the Capitol a smoke-stained ruins with windows broken, chambers and furnishings destroyed, and the library in ashes. Congress convened on September 19 at Blodgett's Hotel in downtown Washington. At that time, the building was being used as the Patent Office and had been spared destruction only when Dr. William Thornton (the original designer of the Capitol Building) stood in its doorway and told the British officer in charge that “to burn what would be useful for all mankind would be as barbarous as formerly to burn the Alexandrian Library, for which the Turks have since been condemned by all enlightened nations.” 26

The Senate and House met in these cramped quarters for several months until the citizens of Washington built them a temporary meeting hall, known as the Brick Capitol, on the site of the present-day Supreme Court building. This act of generosity on the part of Washington citizens was motivated by a desire to prevent the federal government from moving to another location; indeed, Philadelphia was making overtures to attract the government back to that former site. Another generous offer came from the Georgetown booksellers, Richards and Mailory, who offered the use of their books to members of Congress during that session, since the volumes of the Library of Congress had been destroyed. 27

It was in connection with the destruction of the Library of Congress in the Capitol that former President Thomas Jefferson wrote Senator Samuel Smith on September 21, 1814, “I learn from the newspapers that the Vandalism of our enemy has triumphed at Washington, over science as well as the arts, by the destruction of the noble edifice in which it was deposited.”

To replace the Library of Congress' burned copies, Jefferson offered his own magnificent collection which he had spent fifty years putting together, having “spared no pains, opportunity, or expense, to make it what it now is.” Jefferson's library contained 6,487 volumes of politics, history, science, law, literature, 0083 65 fine arts, and philosophy. It is somewhat stunning to read that some members of Congress objected that Jefferson's collection was “too philosophical, had too many books in foreign languages, was too costly, and was too large for the wants of Congress.” Fortunately, on January 26, 1815, Congress authorized $23,950 to purchase the library. According to a recent publication, “The Jefferson Library forms the nucleus around which the present collections of the Library of Congress have been assembled.” Many of the volumes in Jefferson's library were subsequently destroyed in a fire in 1851, but other volumes remain and have been assembled as a unit in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the library. 28

For several months following the destruction of the Capitol, Congress met at Blodgett's Hotel. Library of Congress

The War of 1812 ended with great irony. The Treaty of Ghent, concluding the war, was signed on Christmas Eve of 1814. The peace treaty made no reference to the issues of impressment of American seamen, naval blockades, or the disputed boundary with Canada, which had caused the war in the first place. It merely restored conditions to the way they had been before the war broke out. In those days, news traveled slowly, and word of the treaty did not reach American shores until February 11, 1815. By then, the Americans had already received news of the great victory of General and former Senator Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Regular troops and frontier riflemen under Jackson's command had inflicted appalling casualties on the British line, killing or wounding over two thousand British soldiers at a cost of only twenty-one American casualties! This great victory was actually won after the peace treaty was signed, but, because it reached the public before the news of the Treaty of Ghent, it appeared that the United States had won the final victory. This event came as a great boost to the young nation's pride and self-esteem and made General 0084 66 Jackson a symbol for an age, carrying him eventually to the White House.

On February 13, 1815, Senator Giles reported a resolution honoring General Jackson and the men who served under his command for their “most signal and complete victory over the enemy.” A gold medal was struck in commemoration and presented to General Jackson. Two days later, on February 15, President Madison transmitted to the Senate the Treaty of Ghent. The following day, the Senate, with obvious relief, voted unanimously to approve ratification of the peace treaty. 29

The Senate of the third session of the Thirteenth Congress and of the subsequent Fourteenth Congress was very different in attitude from that of the Eleventh Congress at the start of the Madison administration. The Republicans were still the majority party, and the Federalists had committed suicide as a party through their ill-timed Hartford Convention with its overtures of secession from the Union, which they called on the very eve of peace with Great Britain. Within a few years, the Federalist party would be but a memory, and all members of Congress would identify themselves as Republicans. But these Republicans had been sobered by the difficult war which had seen so many military defeats, the burning of the Capitol, and the bankruptcy of the federal treasury. They now turned to passing nationalist legislation dealing with a national bank, protective tariffs, direct taxation, and internal improvements. All of these measures were far more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian in nature.

To take one of these as a case study: That the Republican majority would charter the Second Bank of the United States during the administration of James Madison is quite amazing when one considers that the Jeffersonian Republicans had bitterly fought against Hamilton's original bank in the 1790's, and that Madison himself had led the fight against the bank while a member of the House. The charter for the first bank had expired in 1811. At that time, Georgia Senator William H. Crawford had led the administration forces in an effort to renew the charter, while William Branch Giles led the “Old Republicans” determined to defeat the bank. Giles and others saw in the bank the last vestiges of federalism, as well as an unconstitutional institution. On February 20, 1811, the Senate voted 20 to 7.0 on the bank issue, which was then decided in the negative by Vice President George Clinton. Clinton explained his action by saying that the “tendency to consolidation” seemed to him a “just and serious cause of alarm.” 30

The United States went through the difficult War of 1812 without a national bank, and its finances fell into disarray. The war made the need for a central banking institution all the more apparent to the new treasury secretary, Alexander Dallas, who recommended chartering a second bank in 1814. Congress, however, passed a much watered-down version, which President Madison chose to veto in January 1815 on the grounds that it was inadequate for the purposes of restoring the public credit, creating a national currency, and guaranteeing the public a means of obtaining durable loans. 31

Again in his message to the Fourteenth Congress in December 1815, Madison revived the issue of a national bank. In the House, this measure was supported by three remarkable young congressmen, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, who, collectively and individually, would shape American political life over the next thirty years, and about whom I shall have much to say in the future. In the Senate, the Committee on Finance reported the bill on March 25, 1816. Chairman George Washington Campbell admitted that he considered the bill defective, but that the members had been in 0085 67 too much disagreement to decide upon appropriate amendments. Senator William Hill Wells of Delaware spoke out forcefully against the bill, arguing that “the disease, it is said, under which the people labor, is the banking fever of the States; and this is to be cured by giving them the banking fever of the United States.” Despite such protestations, the Senate passed the bank bill by a vote of 22 to 12 on April 3, 1816. Capitalized at $35 million, the Bank of the United States had its central office in Philadelphia and as many as twenty-five branches around the country. Although the Republicans had abandoned much of their heritage to support the bank in a burst of postwar nationalism and realism, the controversies surrounding it were far from over and would surface again within the coming decades to significantly alter American political history. 32

Before bringing this account to a close, I should like to discuss one other piece of postwar legislation, certainly not as significant as the Second Bank of the United States, but one which my colleagues might find most interesting. This was the Compensation Act of 1816 which, for the first time, provided members of Congress with an annual salary. The furor which this bill aroused demonstrates very aptly that the subject of congressional pay has been a most controversial one from the earliest days of our republic. Prior to 1816, members of Congress had been paid six dollars a day for every day the Congress was in session. Wartime inflation had reduced buying power significantly enough that the legislators were prepared to tackle the “peculiar delicacy of the subject.” Some members who were independently wealthy were opposed to the whole concept of salaries for legislative services. Others believed that more adequate compensation would attract more competent men to government service. On March 13, 1816, the Senate followed the lead of the House of Representatives and voted 22 to 11 (with thirteen Republicans and nine Federalists voting in favor of the bill, and eight Republicans and three Federalists opposing it) to establish an annual salary. 33

Niles' Weekly Register, a popular national periodical of the time which focused much attention on the Congress, estimated that, for the past eight years, the Congress had met for an average of 165¼ days each year, amounting to payment of $991.50 to each member of Congress, exclusive of travel payments. To raise the salary to $1,500 would mean an increase of $508.50 a year per member, totaling some $400,000 in additional federal expenditures. Niles' noted that the state legislatures of New Hampshire (Republican) and Rhode Island (Federalist) had already passed resolutions condemning the annual salary and demanding that it be rescinded, and that the bill had aroused intense public disapproval in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio, and Kentucky. Niles' contended, however, that

if six dollars per day, for the compensation of a member of congress, leaving his home and his business to attend to the affairs of the public, was not too much when the law first allowed it, it is a great deal too little now; for within those two periods the normal average value of every article of food and clothing has been doubled—and certainly, 1500 dollars a year can be no object to a gentleman possessed of talents sufficient to represent an enlightened people in congress.

Despite these words of support, in the next election two-thirds of the members of the House were defeated. Several senators were also defeated and others resigned rather than stand for reelection. The next year, Congress repealed the Compensation Act. 34

Mr. President, I have today recounted a story of national passion: a sense of injustice over our treatment by stronger powers; a war for national honor, for freedom of commerce, 0086 68 and for territorial expansion. I have described the British assault on the nation's capital, including the very building in which we meet today, and finally the rebuilding of the nation with a new emphasis on internal improvements and westward migration. The first political era of Federalists versus Republicans was drawing to a close, and a new one-party era was emerging. The programs of the two parties were merging, and the heirs of Thomas Jefferson were enacting such Hamiltonian programs as the Second Bank of the United States. It is significant to note that, after this great national catastrophe, the War of 1812, the political parties reevaluated their positions, swallowed hard, and adopted new measures necessary for a new era. This pattern has been repeated often in our history, and it has generally involved the federal government's assumption of far more power and responsibility than previously anticipated.

October 20, 1981 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, in the fall of 1816, a caucus of Senate and House Republicans picked as its presidential candidate Secretary of State and former Virginia Senator James Monroe to succeed James Madison. Grudgingly acknowledging that the party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had run its course, the Federalists made no serious attempt to organize a campaign. Their candidate was that party's longtime standard-bearer, Senator Rufus King of New York. King was the only senator left in Congress who had been a framer of the Constitution and was respected even by his enemies. But he suffered under no illusions; King knew that he would not become president. Monroe, by an electoral vote of 183 to 34, would be the first former senator and fourth Virginian to hold the office. Not that Monroe was a magnetic figure; on the contrary, he appeared amiable but colorless. As King later noted of his opponent, “He had the zealous support of nobody, and he was exempt from the hostility of Everybody.” 1

Rufus King was the last Federalist presidential candidate. His half-hearted campaign marked the end of an era. Federalism would survive only locally and in the careers of a few men like King, who remained its most eloquent spokesman in the Senate for nine more years. 2

Shortly after his inauguration, Monroe made a good-will tour through New England offering reconciliation. Afterwards, the Federalist Columbian Centinel of Boston reported: “During the late Presidential Jubilee many persons have met at festive boards, in pleasant converse, whom party politics had long severed. We recur with pleasure to all the circumstances which attended the demonstration of good feelings.” 3

The article was entitled “Era of Good Feelings.” While the editors probably did not intend to speak for more than Boston, the phrase grew in popularity until it became synonymous with the administration of James Monroe. Feelings of one kind or another, indeed, ran high during this era, but, beneath the happy surface, they were invariably not good.

In Congress, the Era of Good Feelings got off to an unfriendly start. The House and Senate continued to meet in the temporary Brick Capitol while repairs were being made 0088 70 to the Capitol. The Senate met on the first floor and the House on the second. When it came time to make preparations for the inauguration of Monroe, an irresolvable quarrel over whose chamber should be used broke out between the representatives and senators. Finally, as inauguration day drew near, a wooden platform was erected outside the hall. Fortunately, the day was mild when Monroe delivered his inaugural address to a crowd of eight thousand.

No sooner had the Fifteenth Congress gotten underway when the troublesome question of compensation for members came up. During the Fourteenth Congress, the Senate and House had voted themselves an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars—a significant increase over the six dollars per diem for days Congress was in session, which they had received up until then. The furor that erupted across the nation over what many considered exorbitant remuneration had led to the defeat of several members of Congress the previous autumn. Chastened and fearful for their own seats should the people's anger not abate over the next two years, the congressmen sought to rectify the situation.

During January 1818, the Senate and House sought a just compensation. Many supported returning to a per diem salary, but at a rate of ten dollars rather than six dollars. Though this would have meant a considerable reduction in pay from fifteen hundred dollars annually, many constituents were not appeased. One indignant reader of Niles' Weekly Register took that journal to task for supporting the ten dollar figure:

Can you seriously contend for ten dollars per diem to the members of congress, as a reasonable compensation! It would appear from your remarks, that you think this necessary to induce a man of talents to attend, and enable him to live at “Washington as a gentleman.” Ah! what a fascinating epithet! Is it not to be feared, that the efforts making to enable our members to live like gentlemen, will, in the end, destroy the morals, and ruin the republican institutions of our happy country?... Ten dollars per day may be necessary to support a gambler, or a prodigal, but neither of them are even conterminous to a gentleman.

The letter-writer angrily went on:

... in many parts of the United States six dollars a day was sufficient to produce great competitions for seats in congress.... at the old allowance we shall never be at loss to find members, and such as are best qualified to serve us. Your high minded, dashing, loquacious men are by no means the safest and surest representatives of a republican people. 4

Efforts to gain a ten dollar per diem were defeated, and the bill which the House passed on to the Senate provided for an eight dollar daily fee. Senators James Wilson and Mahlon Dickerson, both of New Jersey, sought to lower it further to the old six dollar rate but were defeated. Finally, on January 13, 1818, the Senate voted to return to the eight dollar per day rate. So hot an issue was congressional pay that the rate remained unchanged for almost forty years! From 1818 until 1855, regardless of inflation and depression, boom and bust, senators and representatives received eight dollars each day Congress was in session. 5

After his inauguration, Monroe and the House and Senate settled down to business. The confrontation between the president and Congress with regard to their respective authority in the area of internal improvements was instantly renewed. In his first annual address to Congress, Monroe made it clear that, while roads and canals were necessary, he agreed with his predecessor that Congress had no right to appropriate public money for such things. To enable Congress to do so, he believed, would require an amendment to the Constitution. That was a long and tedious process.

When the whole matter bogged down in detail, it was dropped temporarily. Monroe 0089 71 turned his attention to foreign affairs, but the growing number of senators and representatives from the new western states would soon be heard from again.

The Brick Capitol served as a temporary meeting place of Congress from 1815 to 1819, and later became a prison during the Civil War. National Archives

Monroe's secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, was trying to negotiate with Spain for the peaceful cession of Florida to the United States. Negotiations were proceeding nicely when extremely unsettling news began to reach Washington about the exploits of Andrew Jackson, the gangling young man from Tennessee who had served an undistinguished two-year term in the Senate two decades earlier. Jackson had made quite a name for himself in the intervening years. He had captured the nation's imagination and risen to fame as the supreme military hero of the War of 1812, the victor of the Battle of New Orleans.

In 1817, however, Jackson's excessive zeal as commander of the southern division was bringing the United States to the brink of war with Spain. He had been sent south to punish the Seminole Indians who had been marauding in Georgia. He had orders to pursue them into Spanish territory, if necessary, 0090 72 to break up their bands. The overly enthusiastic general sent a secret letter to Monroe, offering to reduce the whole of Florida in sixty days if the president wished. Monroe, who was sick in bed, never read the letter. Taking silence for consent, Jackson proceeded to make good his offer. In the midst of its negotiations with Spain, the State Department was horrified to learn that Jackson was busily capturing town after town in the very territory for which the government was negotiating. Before Jackson could be stopped, he had seized the Fort of St. Mark's, hanged two Indian leaders, courtmartialed and hanged two British adventurers, bombarded the fort at Barrances, and taken the city of Pensacola. 6

Not surprisingly, Spain, the president, the secretary of state, and the Congress were furious. Monroe's chagrined report to Congress on Jackson's exploits was referred to agitated House and Senate committees. If Monroe, despite his protests to the contrary, had actually authorized Jackson's expedition, he had grossly usurped Congress' power. And if Jackson had not been so authorized, then he had wronged Congress. The final House report on the issue, however, vindicated the general. In the Senate, the report condemned Jackson. 7

The announcement of the unexpected success of Secretary of State Adams' diplomacy made the whole matter a dead issue. Adams had negotiated a treaty with Spain which transferred Florida to the United States in return for the relinquishment of a dubious American claim to Texas. On February 24, 1819, the Senate unanimously approved the treaty. 8 The year before, the government had signed an agreement with England establishing the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary between the United States and Canada and sanctioning the joint occupation of the Oregon country. The nation was expanding rapidly. It was this expansion that precipitated the most bitterly fought crisis of the decade.

Since the War of 1812, four new states had joined the Union: Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, and Alabama in 1819. The country to the east of the Mississippi River was filling up. Towns replaced forests in the North, and cotton fields were spreading out across the flatlands of the South. Men were moving beyond the Mississippi. Daniel Boone had been one of the first, when he moved west in 1798 to escape civilized Kentucky, but now a host of hardy pioneers followed. Hitherto, by an unspoken agreement in Congress, northern and southem states had been admitted in pairs as was the case with Indiana and Mississippi, as well as Illinois and Alabama. By 1819, all the land east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of the Michigan Territory, was divided by the Potomac and Ohio rivers into two equal groups of eleven slave and free states.

Which trans-Mississippi state would be the first to seek admission to the Union? Would it be slave or free? The answer to the first question came swiftly. Late in December 1818, Missouri made its bid for statehood. But the process of arriving at an answer to the second question would violently split apart the Senate, the House, and the nation, and leave a wound that refused to heal.

The enabling act for statehood was drawn up in the House and mentioned nothing about slavery. The issue was not raised until February 13, 1819, when Representative James Tallmadge of New York arose and offered amendments prohibiting the further introduction of slaves into Missouri and emancipating, at age twenty-five, all slaves thereafter born in the state. Tallmadge's specific motives in offering his explosive amendment remain unknown, but its effect was immediate. The battle over slavery had 0091 73 begun. Though he would not live to see his grisly prophecy come true, Representative Thomas Cobb of Georgia was correct when he shouted at Tallmadge, “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.” 9

Tallmadge's amendments made sense to antislavery northerners. The Northwest Ordinance banned slavery in any state created from territory north of the Ohio River. Missouri, however, had been settled mainly by southerners, many of whom had brought their slaves with them. The slaveholders argued that it was unconstitutional for Congress to place restrictions on citizens of a state as a condition of admittance. The antislavery forces, however, had the votes in the House. The Tallmadge amendments were adopted by a strictly sectional vote on February 16, 1819, and the amended enabling bill was sent to the Senate. In the Senate, the southerners had the votes and, on February 27, by votes of 31 to 7 and 22 to 16, they struck out the amendments and returned the bill to the House in its original form. 10

At that point, the Fifteenth Congress had only three days remaining. The House restored the antislavery amendments, and the bill returned to the Senate. Again, the Senate struck them out and sent the bill back to the House. The House refused to concur in the Senate's action; the Senate remained obdurate. And so, on March 4, 1819, at the close of the Fifteenth Congress, the Missouri enabling bill died.

While the enabling bill had been set aside, the awful paradox that slavery could have a legal existence in a land of free men was now fully open to inspection. In northern cities, citizens declared themselves astonished and horrified at the thought that the institution of slavery could travel westward across the Mississippi, though it had been doing so for many years. Southern pamphleteers were equally outraged at the suggestion that slavery could be prevented from ranging over the whole Louisiana Purchase.

During three crucial events in America's early history—the framing of the Constitution, the Aaron Burr conspiracy, and the War of 1812—the tinder in the anomaly of slavery in a democratic republic had threatened to burst into flame. Now that it had flared into the open, Americans no longer asked themselves whether the fire could be extinguished but whether the fire could be banked.

As the historian George Dangerfield noted in his informative book The Era of Good Feelings, the Tallmadge amendments and the series of town meetings, pamphlets, editorials, and debates they excited, summoned the South into being. Prior to the Tallmadge amendments,

those who dwelt south of the Mason-Dixon line might have been said to have, perhaps, a kind of climatic fellowship. They had the same long hot summers, the violent storms and unpredictable droughts; their winters were always severe, their up-country rivers froze solid from bank to bank. . . . Such weather raised their ceilings and proliferated their piazzas and balconies; encouraged the growing of staple crops, even while the rains and heat defertilized the soil; and it slowed down the pace of their life. But no generalization could absorb their differences—at least, no generalization based upon climate. The Southern states were a patchwork of political and social distinctions: distinctions between the old South and new Southwest, between small farmers and planters, between merchants and manufacturers. Valley warred with mountain, country with town, the Atlantic with the Gulf. . . .Everywhere there were contradictions and incompatibilities. . . .And yet all were loosely bound together—the Creole aristocrat of New Orleans, the liberal nationalist of South Carolina, the parvenu cotton-planter of Georgia, the hemp grower of Kentucky, the tobacco magnate of Virginia—all were bound together by the institution of slavery. The Tallmadge Amendment, like a powerful spell, conjured this loose bondage into a tightness and coherence it was never afterwards to lose. 11

0092 74

Everyone knew that when Congress reconvened, the fight over Missouri would be renewed. But, by the time the Sixteenth Congress met on Monday, December 6, 1819, compromise seemed possible. With the consent of Massachusetts, of which it was then a part, the state of Maine had been organized, and, in the fall of 1819, it applied for admission to the Union. This offered an opportunity to revert to the old system of admitting free and slave states in pairs. The fire was further stoked, however, when another move was made, this time in the Senate by Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania, to forbid the importation of slaves into Missouri.

The Senate debate that followed raged for three weeks. It took place back in familiar territory. The Capitol, its scarred freestone gleaming with fresh white paint, was habitable for the first time since the British had put it to the torch in 1814. The new galleries over flowed with spectators. Vice President Daniel Tompkins graciously permitted several ladies onto the Senate floor. Indignant House members visiting the chamber found the ladies' voluminous skirts billowing over the sofas and chairs usually reserved for them.

The Senate debates on the Missouri question began on January 13, 1820. The air was charged with acrimonious electricity. Senator James Barbour of Virginia announced that the subject under discussion was an ignited spark which would produce an explosion shaking the Union to its center. Senator Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts pointedly replied that the pine forests of Maine, if set afire, would burn with as fierce a flame as the grasslands of Missouri. These innuendos, followed by certain remarks regarding the dubious behavior of New Englanders during the War of 1812, were hardly calculated to restore harmony to the chamber. When Pennsylvania's Jonathan Roberts invoked the Declaration of Independence and urged his fellow senators not to admit Missouri “with her features marred as if the fingers of Lucifer had been drawn across them,” any chance of peaceful discussion within the chamber of the United States Senate seemed to have vanished forever. 12

At first, the southern forces were led by William Pinkney of Maryland who, wearing elegant ruffled sleeves and tinted gloves, was the picture of leisure-class ease. Rufus King, then sixty-five, led the northern fight for Roberts' amendments. Debate initially focused on constitutional issues. Here, the southern senators were on stable ground. They seemed unusually adept at interpreting the Constitution and could do so in a dignified way. When northerners began to argue that slavery was morally wrong, however, the southerners were thrown off guard. Their attempts to refute this charge led them into sinister extravagances.

The new twist in southern logic could first be detected in late January. Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was its chief spokesman. Macon praised southern gentility and gradually began to paint a picture of bucolic plantation life. Macon lauded the South and its institutions and told his colleagues, “I sincerely wish that he [Senator James Burrill of Rhode Island, an antislavery senator] and the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Senator Roberts] would go home with me, or with some other southern member, and witness the meeting between the slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands.” Macon declared that “the old ones [slaves] are better taken care of than any poor in the world, and treated with decent respect by all their white acquaintances.” He argued that “the owner can make more free in conversation with his slave, and be more easy in his company, than the rich man, where there is no slave, with the white hireling who drives his carriage.” 13

0093 75

Here were the beginnings of a systematic defense of slavery—not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good. Macon's new theme was elaborately embroidered by other southern senators. On January 26, Senator William Smith of South Carolina made a speech that Senator Benjamin Ruggles of Ohio characterized as “going farther than he had ever heard any gentleman go before.” 14 Smith was a strict Jeffersonian with a bitter and sarcastic tongue. His speech is a landmark in the history of the Senate because it was the first open and impassioned justification of slavery ever made in the chamber. In his long harangue, Smith set out to prove that slavery was a system blessed by the Lord. “This,” said Smith, referring to slavery, “was the law given by the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. . . . Christ himself gave a sanction to slavery.” 15 No other senators had ever gone so far. Now there would be no turning back. 16

In February 1820, Rufus King replied to Smith in two speeches that were masterful but devoid of the fiery rhetoric the spectators in the galleries loved. Some southern senators understood King to have said that he felt himself degraded at having to sit in the same chamber with men who owned slaves, and they hated him for it. What King had really said was that he felt inferior because “the citizens of the states where slavery prevails possess a greater portion of political power, than the citizens of states in which slavery is excluded,” and that he did not wish to increase the humiliation by extending slavery. 17

King's actual words hit as sensitive a nerve as his perceived words. What was at stake in the Missouri question was more than slavery. It was a question of political power. The Senate stood evenly balanced, eleven northern states and eleven southern states. If both Maine and Missouri were admitted as free states, the South and its “peculiar institution” would surely be overpowered. From the South's perspective, it was a fight for survival. Missouri must be a slave state.

Rufus King of New York represented antislavery sentiment during debates on the Missouri Compromise. Independence National Historical Park

The southerners in the Senate were better organized, more learned, and more supple in debate than their northern colleagues. Even Rufus King had to confess that the northern senators “fight Militia against Regulars.” 18 On February 17, an amendment, proposed by Senator Jesse B. Thomas from the new state of Illinois, passed the Senate by a vote of 34 to 10, and, with an enormous sigh of relief, the proposed compromise was sent off to the House. 19

The press had begun to call the deliberations on the Missouri question “the Misery Debate.” After a week of bitter day and 0094 76 night sessions in the House, a conference committee worked out a two-part compromise that included the Thomas amendment and admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. The measure passed both houses and received President Monroe's signature on March 3, 1820.

With the passing of the Missouri Compromise, many naively thought that the slavery question was settled forever. In fact, it remained settled only until the next session of Congress, when Missouri presented its new state constitution to the House and Senate for approval. The delegates to Missouri's constitutional convention had copied the constitution of the state of Kentucky almost verbatim—almost, but not quite. There were two clauses unique to the Missouri Constitution that outraged antislavery congressmen. One forbade the state legislature from interfering with slavery in any manner, and the other prevented “free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this state, under any pretext whatsoever.” In view of the fact that there were several states in which blacks were free men and citizens, the latter clause seemed a gross violation of the federal Constitution's guarantee that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states.”

The Senate avoided the difficult issues posed by the Missouri Constitution by adding only one proviso and passing it on to the House. The proviso, offered by Senator John Eaton of Tennessee, stated, “That nothing herein contained shall be so construed as giving the assent of Congress to so much of the constitution of the State of Missouri . . . as may be repugnant to that provision of the Constitution of the United States which prescribes that ‘the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several States.’” 20 Eaton's proviso was intentionally toothless. Basically, it allowed Congress to admit a state to the Union and, at the same time, withhold its assent from that state's constitution. It adroitly avoided the crucial question: Could the people of Missouri prohibit the citizens of another state—for example, Massachusetts—from crossing their borders? 21 In the House, a southern motion to accept the Missouri Constitution was defeated, 79 to 93, on December 13, 1820. The action touched off six weeks of wild and angry debate. 22

The Missouri question was still unsettled in February 1821 and threw into pandemonium efforts to count the electoral ballots. During the fall of 1820, almost incidentally, a presidential election had been held. Monroe, who had managed to stay out of the Missouri controversy, was the only serious candidate. Monroe received the vote of every elector in the nation except that of former Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, who thought that George Washington should be the only president honored by a unanimous election. Plumer cast his vote for John Quincy Adams. 23

On February 14, 1821, in the midst of the Missouri debates, the Senate proceeded to the House chamber for the formal counting of the electoral votes. All went quietly until the vote of Missouri, the statehood of which was still being contested. It was instantly challenged. Half a dozen representatives leaped to their feet. Others joined in and soon the whole House was in an uproar. Amid the hubbub, a senator was heard calling out that the Senate ought to withdraw. Vice President Tompkins quickly put the barely audible motion, declared it carried, and led the retreat of the Senate from the disgraceful scene. Later in the afternoon, after the candles in the chamber had been lit and the tumult had finally died down, the senators returned. As soon as the vice president started to announce the electoral result, 0095 77 a shouting match broke out again. The Speaker managed to keep order long enough for the vice president to make the announcement of Monroe's victory in the prescribed form, after which the Senate again hastily withdrew. 24

With two weeks left in the Sixteenth Congress to settle the Missouri question, Henry Clay, who had recently stepped down as Speaker of the House, put together a special joint Senate and House committee of twenty-three members to try to work out a compromise. The committee reported out a recommendation almost identical to Eaton's earlier proviso. Missouri would be admitted under an obligation to respect “the rights and privileges of all citizens of the United States.” Most realized that this clause was not likely to be enforced to protect a single free black who should venture over Missouri's borders, but the recommendation was accepted nonetheless.

Missouri, with its offensive constitution, had at last become a state. The nation breathed easier, once again believing that the issue of slavery had been put to rest for good. The aged Thomas Jefferson, home at Monticello, saw the compromise for what it truly was, “a fire bell in the night.” The Missouri Compromise bought the nation only a nine-year respite from the bitter, divisive contest over slavery before the bell would toll again.

After the stormy sessions of the Sixteenth Congress, the senators welcomed the quiet, routine sessions of the Seventeenth Congress. The years 1821 and 1822 were far from dull, but political maneuvering was more evident outside the chamber in the corridors of the Capitol and in private homes, where plots were laid over dinners and brandy.

With the final disappearance of the Federalists in 1820, when they failed to nominate a presidential candidate, many idealists thought they saw the end of the whole party system and the coming of a Utopia where leaders would be chosen purely on the basis of merit. Monroe happily predicted, “Surely our government may get on and prosper without the existence of parties.” Thomas Jefferson, however, did not share his fellow Virginian's optimism. “You are told, indeed,” he wrote to Albert Gallatin, then in France, “that there are no longer parties among us; that they are all now amalgamated; the lion and the lamb lie down together in peace. Do not believe a word of it.” 25

Events proved Jefferson correct. The collapse of the Federalists was the prelude to the breaking up of the Republican party into many factions that once had been tenuously united by opposition to a common foe. Monroe had barely been inaugurated a second time before each of these factions began to groom one of its own as his successor. By the time the Seventeenth Congress met in December 1821, each of the three leading cabinet members, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, as well as Henry Clay, temporarily retired from the Congress, had a group of ardent supporters working on his behalf. These four men, with Andrew Jackson as a possible dark-horse, were open candidates three years before the next election! So much for the Era of Good Feelings!

The second session of the Seventeenth Congress was overshadowed by the pre-presidential cabals. The Crawford faction seemed to have an edge, but its hopes dimmed in the summer of 1823 when the nerve-wracking campaign took its toll. Crawford, tall, handsome, and only fifty-one years old, suffered a paralyzing stroke which left him nearly blind and only in partial possession of his mental faculties. Monroe kept Crawford on as secretary of the treasury for the next year, but all treasury documents bore a facsimile stamp of his signature, which his daughter helped him press to the 0096 78 papers. Meanwhile, Crawford's partisans minimized the seriousness of his condition and zealously continued their campaign to make him president. 26

Earlier, in the spring of 1822, death carried off one of the Senate's most prominent orators and dandies, William Pinkney of Maryland, only fifty-eight. His last speech on the floor had been his masterful reply to Rufus King on the Missouri question. Fittingly, a new senator who would soon also win fame as a brilliant orator, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, offered a moving eulogy. Pinkney, who had died in Washington away from his home and family, fell, said Benton, “like the warrior, in the plentitude of his strength, and on the field of his fame.” 27

William Pinkney was truly a remarkable man. At the age of thirteen, he was forced to drop out of school when his father's property was confiscated due to the latter's loyalist sentiments. According to legend, young Pinkney favored the colonists' cause and often eluded parental vigilance to mount guard with the Continental soldiers. After the Revolutionary War ended, Pinkney's oratorical skill came to the attention of Justice Samuel Chase who took him in hand and steered Pinkney to a career in law.

Pinkney spent the remainder of his life working to overcome the consequences of his interrupted education. While stationed in London as a United States claims commissioner, he deliberately attended parliamentary and court sessions in an effort to absorb the erudition displayed there. He studied Latin and Greek and developed a lifelong passion for reading dictionaries. The effort was not wasted. His skillful oratory and mental agility aided Pinkney's rapid rise to commissioner, minister to Great Britain, and attorney general in 1811.

Writing under the pseudonym Publius, Pinkney vigorously supported the War of 1812, and, as a major in the Maryland militia, commanded a battalion of riflemen and was seriously wounded in the arm. Following the war, he served briefly in the House before his appointment as minister to Russia. Pinkney returned from Russia in 1818 and entered the Senate in 1819. It was during his years in the Senate that Pinkney achieved his reputation as a major interpreter of the Constitution.

The self-taught William Pinkney was respected as a knowledgeable interpreter of the Constitution. Library of Congress

While he ably represented the southern interests in the Missouri debates in the Senate chamber on the Capitol's second floor, it was in the Supreme Court chamber below that he performed his greatest work in arguing cases at the bar. He was counsel in seventy-two Supreme Court cases and acquired one of the most lucrative practices of his time. In both the Senate and the Court, 0097 79 Pinkney's years of self-improvement paid off handsomely. After one of his speeches, Justice Joseph Story wrote, “I never, in my whole life heard a greater speech; it was worth a trip from Salem to hear it . . . his eloquence was overwhelming.”

During these years in the Senate and before the Court, Pinkney's affected, extravagant rhetoric made him a vivid figure. Ladies crowded into the gallery to hear him speak. Excessively vain, he sought their approval as keenly as that of his colleagues. Though he toiled ceaselessly to polish his style and check his facts, Pinkney liked to create the impression that his wealth of knowledge was little but offhand recollections. But woe to those who challenged him. Pinkney was insolent and arrogant and only narrowly escaped a duel with a lawyer he had openly insulted in court. For frequent discourtesies to Daniel Webster, the latter boasted of extorting an apology under threat of a beating.

Pinkney was as vain about his appearance as about his eloquence. He had square shoulders, an erect carriage, and intense blue eyes, but most conspicuous were the deep furrows in his face and the heavy circles under his eyes which he sought to conceal with cosmetics. He wore corsets to diminish his bulk.

Pinkney's demise on February 25, 1822, was almost turned into a burlesque by the eccentric John Randolph, a representative and, later, senator from Virginia. Two years earlier, Randolph had made himself indecorously conspicuous at the funeral of Commodore Stephen Decatur, killed in a duel in Washington, by causing his horse to prance about the grave. By prematurely announcing Pinkney's death, Randolph led the House to declare a day of mourning for the senator while he was still alive.

Volumes of eulogy attested to Pinkney's fame, once he was actually dead. Chief Justice John Marshall proclaimed him “the greatest man I ever saw in a Court of Justice.” Thirty years after Pinkney's death, Chief Justice Roger Taney could still say, “I have heard almost all the great advocates of the United States, both of the past and present generation, but I have seen none equal to Pinkney.” 28

Being a senator in the early 1800's was hazardous duty. This eight-year period under investigation, the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth congresses, witnessed the deaths of six other senators besides Pinkney. Two were still in their thirties. Pinkney's predecessor, the aggressive Federalist editor Alexander Hanson of Maryland, was only thirty-three when he died on April 23, 1819, after two years in the Senate. Ill health prevented Hanson from taking an active part in the Senate's business. During the War of 1812, he had been badly beaten by a Baltimore mob, who were enraged at the anti-administration, pro-English stand of his newspaper, the Federal Republican. William Trimble of Ohio, who had distinguished himself for gallantry during the War of 1812, was only thirty-five when he died in 1821 after two years in the Senate. 29

Like Trimble, James Burrill of Rhode Island died in Washington, far away from home and loved ones. Burrill, forty-eight, was given a memorable funeral in the old Senate chamber down the hall. Nicholas Ware of Georgia had been in the Senate for three years when he died in 1824 at age fifty-five. Elijah Boardman of Connecticut had enlisted in the Revolutionary army at age seventeen. He died in 1823, at age sixty-three, during his second year in the Senate, while on a visit to Boardman, Ohio, a town he had founded. 30

The oldest and most prominent senator who died in office during this period was John Taylor of Virginia, who was seventy years old when he passed away during the recess in the summer of 1824. He, like Senator 0098 80 Boardman, was one of the last of the handful of Revolutionary soldiers (having fought under Lafayette) still serving in the Senate. Taylor had just been returned to the Senate for the third time by the Virginia legislature after a long absence. His first term in the Senate had begun in 1792 during George Washington's first administration, when he filled the post vacated by the illness of Richard Henry Lee. An early supporter of Jeffersonian Republicanism, through his writings Taylor became one of the foremost philosophers of agrarian liberalism. 31

The opening of the Eighteenth Congress was a memorable one. On its second day, December 2, 1823, the senators and representatives received the most important presidential message in many years, in which President Monroe spelled out the farsighted principles of the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, largely the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, was specifically aimed at Russia's expansionist designs on the Pacific Northwest and at threats by the Holy Alliance to appropriate Spanish possessions in Latin America. But, more generally, Monroe used the doctrine to proclaim to all the world that the American continents were henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers, and that European intervention in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as a “manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.” 32

Among the new and able senators in the Eighteenth Congress was Robert Hayne of South Carolina, the magnificent orator destined to cross swords with Webster in one of the most memorable congressional debates of the century. Back in the Senate after long absences were John Taylor of Virginia, who had left in disgust over the Sedition acts, and James Lloyd of Massachusetts.

Also back in the Senate, but difficult to recognize as the backwoodsman of twenty-five years earlier who had sat in the Senate when it still met in Philadelphia, was the “Hero of New Orleans,” Andrew Jackson. Let us look more dosely at the route that led the lean, unsmiling Jackson to the Senate a second time, and at his early experiences in Washington, for, in many ways, they are typical of the hardships and joys experienced by his colleagues.

Although Jackson had “retired” to his Tennessee estate with his beloved wife, Rachel, after brilliant military maneuvers in New Orleans and Florida, the nation was alive with speculation that he would be the next president of the United States. His friends energetically fanned the fires of popular support while Jackson's enemies—and he had made many—worked equally hard to stamp them out.

The first test of Jackson's strength was whether or not he could unseat Tennessee's senior senator, John Williams, in 1823. Many of the general's supporters urged him not to attempt it, as a failure could be disastrous, but, although Williams had a clear head start, Jackson plunged ahead. When the state legislature convened, on the morning of October 1, 1823, to choose a senator, Jackson's forces made a desperate attempt to obtain a two-day postponement to solidify their position; but the famed frontiersman Davy Crockett, then a member of the state legislature and soon to become a representative, was a lifelong enemy of the general and successfully fought the delay. Crockett's colleagues were confronted with the choice of reneging on their pledges to Williams, a power in eastern Tennessee, or repudiating the gray-haired hero. When the roll call ended, Andrew Jackson had triumphed over John Williams, 35 to 25. 33

After notification of his victory, Jackson wrote a friend: “I have been elected senator, a circumstance which I regret more than any other in my life. . . .To leave . . . Mrs. 0099 81 Jackson . . . fills me, as well as her, with much regret.” Jackson was undoubtedly sorry to part from Rachel but, as Marquis James notes in his biography The Life of Andrew Jackson, Jackson was personally gratified by his victory and not loath to be the focus of the national limelight once again. He was, however, totally unprepared to leave home that November. It was cotton ginning time, a planter's busiest season, when expenses were greatest and debts heaviest. Jackson had to accept a loan from a friend to defray the cost of the journey. 34

Andrew Jackson, fifty-six years old, set out on the 860-mile journey to Washington on horseback, accompanied by John Eaton, thirty-three, his good friend and Tennessee's other senator. Except for one day, when a mailcoach afforded refuge from the rain, the two senators remained in the saddle all the way to Staunton, Virginia. At Fredericksburg, they boarded a steamboat which arrived in Washington just after dawn on December 3, 1823.

Like most of his colleagues in the Senate, Jackson was reluctant to subject his wife to the rigors of travel to the far-off capital. At each stop along the way to Washington, however, he wrote anxious letters back to Rachel. I would like to read just a few words from these letters of a senator to his wife, because I think they show a tender side of the general, whose statue, in cold bronze, here in the Capitol's rotunda, looks so strong and stern. From Staunton, on November 28, 1823, Jackson wrote home:

My Love

I have been greeted by the people wherever I have halted. . . .This through Virginia [a Crawford stronghold] I did not calculate on. . . .Were you only, with me I could be satisfied—But should providence once more permit us to meet, I am solemnly resolved, with the permission of heaven, never to separate, or be separated from you in this world.

The day he arrived in Washington, Jackson wrote Rachel:

My Love

I have not heard from you . . . [and] am anxious to receive a letter. . . .I have been treated with marked attention. . . .Altho this is gratifying . . . my heart is with you & fixed on Domestic Life. . . .Without you this will be a Tedious and unpleasant winter. . . .write me often and believe me to be your affectionate husband. 35

Like most other senators, General Jackson took up lodgings in one of Washington's many boardinghouses. Along with Senator Eaton, he took modest rooms at the house run by Major William O'Neale. It was there that he met the major's pretty daughter, Peggy, who, when she married Senator Eaton, would nearly wreck Jackson's first administration as cabinet members, urged on by their wives, took sides on the question of Peggy's virtue.

Though Jackson claimed he wished to live inconspicuously in Washington, he quickly became the most sought-after man in town. He complained to Rachel, “There is nothing done here but visiting and carding. ” Eaton had to help Jackson with his voluminous correspondence, even writing to Mrs. Jackson when the general was extremely busy. Shortly after settling into their rooms, Eaton wrote her, “The general is in very fine health, and just as good spirits. . . .He is constantly in motion to some Dinner party or other, and tonight stands engaged at a large Dancing party at General Brown's.” 36

Despite his grumblings, Jackson always liked to have people around him and enjoyed the Washington social whirl. For evening wear, he even ordered a pair of fine black cashmere pantaloons and had his dress coat spruced up with new silk-covered buttons. 37 While he enjoyed the company of friends, Jackson was not oblivious to the fact that his social appearances did no harm to his cause as a candidate.

0100 82

On the frontier, Andrew Jackson had made his reputation by methods that were uncompromising and direct. Now, as a senator, Old Hickory found himself on a stage which called for more subtle skills of diplomacy and negotiation. In his younger days, Jackson had been involved in numerous duels. He still carried, buried deep in his shoulder, a bullet put there in 1813 at the climax of an argument with two brothers from the state of Missouri, one of whom was now his Senate colleague, Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was an enormous man. He was also vain, arrogant, and pugnacious, but he was an able senator, a spellbinding orator, and the West's most articulate spokesman.

Jackson took his seat on the Senate floor only to notice that the adjoining chair was occupied by his old enemy, Benton. Perceiving the situation, several senators offered to exchange places with either man, but both refused—just as they refused to recognize each other's existence. A few days later, Jackson was named chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs and Benton was named a member of the same committee. One day, as a meeting of the committee broke up, Benton exchanged civilities with the chairman and asked about Mrs. Jackson's health. In the old days, Benton had been a favorite of Rachel Jackson's. Shortly thereafter, the two men found themselves face to face at the executive mansion. Benton bowed and Jackson held out his hand. 38

From these signs, Speaker Henry Clay, also estranged from the general, concluded that Jackson had “resolved upon a general amnesty” and soon found that conciliation was held out to him, too. These events damaged the widely circulated stories of Jackson's bitter hatreds and frontier etiquette. “It will afford you great pleasure to know,” Eaton wrote Mrs. Jackson, “that all his old quarrels have been settled. . . . The General . . . is in harmony and good understanding with everybody.” A surprised Daniel Webster wrote his brother: “General Jackson's manners are more presidential than those of any of the candidates. He is grave, mild and reserved. My wife is decidedly for him.” Senator Elijah Mills of Massachusetts, who had violently opposed Jackson on the Florida question, considering “him little advanced in civilization over the Indians with whom he made war,” confessed to Mrs. Mills that “these opinions [were] unfounded. . . . He is exactly the man with whom you would be delighted.” 39

Though busy cultivating his presidential prospects, Jackson did not neglect his Senate duties. No senator was more faithful in his attendance than he. He listened carefully but rarely spoke. In his first six months in the Senate, Jackson took the floor only four times and, altogether, spoke less than twenty minutes: once, to recommend a New Orleans veteran for a pension; twice, to urge construction of military roads; and once, to support a bill to purchase armaments. Though rarely addressing the Senate, Jackson voted on every important piece of legislation, consistently supporting internal improvement bills, until the time of his resignation in October 1825 for financial reasons. 40

Another senator of the Eighteenth Congress was the wily Martin Van Buren of New York, who had been a freshman senator with Benton in 1821. Van Buren's fortunes would soon become intricately linked with those of the Hero of New Orleans. It would be difficult to imagine greater contrasts between a state's two senators than those between New York's senior senator, Rufus King, and Martin Van Buren. King was then sixty-eight years old; Van Buren was forty-one. King represented the last stand of the Federalist party. Van Buren, a Republican, would preside over the birth of the Democratic party that would propel him into the White House. Van Buren arrived in Washington 0101 83

Andrew Jackson, the daring hero of the Battle of New Orleans, had ardent partisans and bitter enemies in the Senate. The portrait, by Samuel L. Waldo, was painted a few years after the famous battle. Historic New Orleans Collection

0102 84 well in control of his state's party apparatus. By judicious use of the spoils system, he had cunningly built an extremely powerful New York political machine to rival that of his enemy, Governor DeWitt Clinton. Van Buren's political dexterity had earned him the well-deserved nicknames of the Red Fox of Kinderhook (his home town) and the Little Magician. 41

As the members of the Eighteenth Congress sought to deal with the implications of the Monroe Doctrine and new tariff legislation, the frenetic presidential campaigning was foremost in their thoughts. All of the candidates were aware of a growing anticaucus sentiment in the nation. Instead of the congressional caucus method of selecting a presidential nominee, a larger and larger number of voters urged that the state legislatures, or even the people themselves, be permitted to instruct the electors.

In an effort to head off this popular movement, 66 of the 261 senators and representatives called a caucus on the evening of February 14, 1824, and nominated the enfeebled Crawford and Albert Gallatin as the regular Republican party candidates. The result was obviously useless, since a clear majority of the Congress supported other candidates. Indeed, the farcical caucus caused such an outcry that it was the last one held to nominate a presidential candidate. 42

With the majority of the Congress and his own ill health against him, Crawford's chances for victory looked slim indeed. Hoping to insure his foe's defeat, Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois, who had recently been appointed minister to Mexico, just before leaving to take his post, sent a letter to Speaker Clay accusing Crawford of malfeasance in office. Crawford's supporters took up the challenge, and the House sergeant at arms was dispatched to bring Edwards, who was already on his way to Mexico, back to testify. Edwards' pursuer had to travel fifteen hundred miles before he overtook the former senator, but overtake him he did. Once back in Washington, however, Edwards failed miserably to substantiate his charges. 43

Though the paralyzed secretary of the treasury had the satisfaction of knowing that his reputation remained unblemished, when there was no sign of his recovery, the election tide continued to turn against him. Among his opponents, Adams controlled New England and, more tenuously, New York; Jackson had the support of Pennsylvania and parts of the South; Clay's following outside Kentucky was uncertain; Calhoun, foreseeing failure, withdrew, accepting the vice-presidential position from both Adams and Jackson. The twenty-four states voted at various times during the fall of 1824. In eighteen states, the voters, rather than the legislatures, instructed the electors for which of the four nominees they were to vote.

Soon after the second session of the Eighteenth Congress convened on December 6, 1824, it was clear that no candidate had a majority of votes. Jackson ran first with ninety-nine electoral votes; Adams had eighty-four; the ailing Crawford, forty-two; and Clay, thirty-seven. Instead of withdrawing in favor of Jackson, Adams decided to stay in the contest, and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, as it had been in 1801. 44

Henry Clay, if he could not be president, could now be presidentmaker by throwing his influence to either Jackson or Adams. All other business of Congress ground to a halt as bargaining and intrigue reached new heights. At last, Clay announced that he would support Adams. No sooner had he done so, however, than rumors began to fly that Clay had entered into an “unholy bargain” with Adams who, in return for Clay's votes, had allegedly promised to name him secretary of state. While the rumors were 0103 85 never substantiated, Adams, elected president on February 9, 1825, did little to allay them when he actually did name Clay to the post. Jackson's supporters, rightly claiming that their candidate had been the choice of the people, kept the vicious innuendos alive and bided their time for the next four years.

The contested election overshadowed all other issues during the last days of the Eighteenth Congress. Whatever good feelings remained from the happy aura that enveloped the beginning of Monroe's administrations eight years earlier, evaporated entirely in the new spirit of factionalism and acrimony.

The triumphant return to America of General Lafayette, after an absence of forty years, temporarily restored good feelings at the end of 1824. He and his son, George Washington Lafayette, arrived at the government's invitation in August. Thomas Hart Benton described the general's successful journey:

He was received with unbounded honor, affection, and gratitude by the American people. To the survivors of the Revolution, it was the return of a brother; to the new generation, born since that time, it was the apparition of an historical character, familiar from the cradle; and combining all the titles to love, admiration, gratitude, enthusiasm, which could act upon the heart and the imagination of the young and the ardent. He visited every State in the Union, doubled in number since, as the friend and pupil of Washington, he had spilt his blood, and lavished his fortune, for their independence. His progress through the States was a triumphal procession, such as no Roman ever led up—a procession not through a city, but over a continent—followed, not by captives in chains of iron, but by a nation in the bonds of affection. 45

The general's tour brought him to Washington in December 1824. On December 9, at one o'clock, an important precedent was set in the Senate. General Lafayette became the first foreign dignitary to be accorded the privileges of the floor. In accordance with a prearranged plan, the general was escorted into the chamber by a special committee and introduced by Senator James Barbour of Virginia, the committee's chairman. The senators arose from their seats and remained standing until the general was seated in a chair to the right of Vice President Daniel Tompkins. Then, the Senate adjourned by unanimous consent so that the senators might individually pay their respects to their honored visitor. 46

Among those senators who stepped forward to greet Lafayette were four who felt a special bond, having served with him in the Revolutionary War. They were Senators Rufus King of New York, James DeWolf of Rhode Island, Samuel Smith of Maryland, and John Chandler of Maine, the latter two of whom had gone on to attain the rank of general. 47

A few days later, while Lafayette continued his tour, the Senate took up the question of an appropriate gift from the nation to the general to show the love and gratitude of the American people. The special committee to examine the question, chaired by Senator Hayne, suggested that the sum of $200,000 and a township of land, 24,000 acres, would be a suitable gift. 48 Immediately, objections were raised. Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina reluctantly rose to object, not to the amount but to the principle behind the gift. Macon said he yielded to no one in his love and admiration of Lafayette but considered the general as having been, during the Revolution, a son adopted into the family, taken into the household, and placed, in every respect, on the same footing with the other sons of the same family. . . . That General Lafayette made great sacrifices, and spent much of his money in the service of this country. . . . I as firmly believe as I do any other thing under the sun. . . . but this was equally the case with all the sons of the family. Many native Americans spent their all, made great sacrifices, and devoted their lives in the same cause. 49

0104 86

When put to a vote, the measure passed the Senate by a tally of 37 to 7 and was sent to the House where it was passed. Before he sailed for France in September, Lafayette was presented with these tangible proofs of the nation's thanks. 50

Despite the lingering bitterness the election had engendered, the Eighteenth Congress ended on a visionary note. Monroe's last message to the Congress stressed the importance of America's Pacific Coast interests, in danger of being usurped by the British, and recommended the establishment of a fort at the mouth of the Columbia River. Senator Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey pointed out that Oregon could never conceivably become a state because its representatives, even if traveling twenty miles a day, would need 350 days to get to Washington and back. The territory was separated from the United States, Dickerson told his colleagues, by virtually impassable deserts and mountains. Its occupation was useless and impractical.

Not so, cried Thomas Hart Benton, the West's champion. “I answer, the advantages will be— . . . In securing . . . the fur trade of the Rocky Mountains, the Upper Missouri, and the Columbia . . . preventing the British and Russians from acquiring the control of the Indians on the waters of the Columbia . . . a naval station on the coast of the Pacific [and] . . . communication between the Valley of the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean.... But the greatest of all advantages to be derived from the occupation of this country, is in the exclusion of foreign powers from it.” Impractical and useless? Benton cried. Nonsense, he told his colleagues and forecast, “Within a century from this day, a population, greater than that of the present United States, will exist on the West side of the Rocky Mountains.” 51

At such wild talk, the other senators shook their heads. This westerner must be mad. The station at the mouth of the Columbia was disapproved. Time, however, proved the prophetic Benton, rather than the scoffing Dickerson, accurate. Though neither Benton nor any other senator who listened to his forecast in the Senate chamber in 1825 lived to see it, his prediction came true right on schedule. The census of 1820 revealed a nation of 9,638,000 inhabitants. A century later in 1920, as Benton foretold, the population of the western states alone stood at 9,214,000. In the years that followed his defense of the fort on the Columbia, both Benton and the West would become forces to be reckoned with. 52

October 30, 1981 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, my most recent statement on the Senate's history concluded with the year 1825. The so-called Era of Good Feelings, along with the second administration of James Monroe, had just ended on a decidedly sour note. Any remaining good will among statesmen had been drained away by the presidential election of 1824, a contest so close that it had to be resolved in the House of Representatives. Today, I would like to examine the Nineteenth and Twentieth congresses, covering the period 1825–1829.

The hard-won Missouri Compromise brought senators and representatives a respite from the nagging problem of slavery in the territories that had plagued the Congress throughout the preceding decade. All, however, was far from tranquil. New crises arose that threatened to dissolve the Union. Unlike the beginning of Monroe's eight years in the presidency, there was no honeymoon between the new president and the Congress. John Quincy Adams' administration got off to an extremely inauspicious start.

Adams was elected president by the House of Representatives on February 9, 1825. In the end, he owed his victory to Alexander Hamilton's brother-in-law, the elderly Federalist, New York Representative Stephen Van Rensselaer, who cast the deciding vote with the crucial New York delegation. The last of the great Hudson River patroons, Van Rensselaer was reportedly undecided between candidates Andrew Jackson, then a senator from Tennessee, and William Crawford, former senator and secretary of the treasury. As he shared a boardinghouse with the persuasive Senator Martin Van Buren of New York and other Crawford partisans, it was assumed that his vote would finally go to Crawford.

On the morning of February 9, Van Rensselaer assured his fellow lodgers over breakfast that nothing could induce him to vote for Adams. But when he arrived at the Capitol, he was set upon by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who suggested strongly that a victory for anyone but Adams would have grave consequences for the security of Van Rensselaer's own property. In his autobiography, Van Buren described what happened next:

He [Van Rensselaer] took his seat fully resolved to vote for Mr. Crawford, but before the box reached him, he dropped his head upon the edge of his desk 0106 88 and made a brief appeal to his Maker for his guidance in the matter—a practice he frequently observed on great emergencies—and when he removed his hand from his eyes he saw on the floor directly below him a ticket bearing the name of John Quincy Adams. This occurrence, at a moment of great excitement and anxiety, he was led to regard as an answer to his appeal, and taking up the ticket he put it in the box. 1

When Daniel Webster and John Randolph announced the results, the latter remarked loudly: “It is impossible to win the game, gentlemen. The cards were packed.” Soon, both Webster and Randolph would move from the House to the Senate, and the new president would have no peace from either of them.

To be indirectly elected by the House of Representatives was not the happiest way of becoming president. While Adams, of course, accepted the close decision, in private he confided that the election had not taken place in a “manner satisfactory to pride or to just desire; not by the unequivocal suffrage of a majority of the people; with perhaps two-thirds of the whole people adverse to the actual result.” 2

This shaky beginning did not augur well for the new administration. When Adams soon afterwards named Speaker of the House Clay to be secretary of state, Jackson men, who branded Clay as the Judas of the West, vowed revenge. The charge of “corrupt bargain,” though repeatedly denied by Adams and Clay, irreparably hurt both men. It tarnished Adams' administration and haunted Clay all his life, following him into the Senate and crippling his many attempts to win the presidency for himself.

In his relations with Congress, Adams was doomed from the start. Clay was of some help to him in the House, but the president seemed friendless in the Senate. Part of his problem was not of his own making but due to the changing stature of the Senate. For the first time, this body was beginning to challenge the House as the principal legislative forum of the nation.

Owing to the increase in population and the admission of new states, the membership of the House rose to more than two hundred with the 1820 census. 3 The burgeoning of membership forced the House to adopt rules that inhibited opportunities for debate and showmanship; however, in the Senate, by 1821, membership had grown to forty-eight, making it a more lively and rewarding forum for those who wanted to be seen and heard. In addition, the equality of state representation in the Senate and the increasing concern over the importance of divisions between slave and free states, underscored by the Missouri dilemma, heightened the Senate's role as an arena where southerners could block the actions of a hostile House majority. As Webster, on the verge of leaving the House for the Senate chamber, said of it, the Senate was “a body of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence.” 4

The Senate soon set out to prove Webster right on his point of absolute independence. Prior to 1823, Senate committees had been named by ballot, but in that year the chamber conferred the authority on its presiding officer; thus, Vice President John C. Calhoun, in the first of what Adams construed as his many acts of treachery, assumed the right to name committees and their chairmen. So brazenly did Calhoun pack the committees with the president's foes, “Jackson men,” that, at last, the Senate in disgust voted to strip the vice president of his appointing power and of his supervision over the Senate Journal. 5 The action was not due to the fact that the Senate loved Adams more, but that, at the time, it loved Calhoun's highhandedness much less. Though Calhoun's plan backfired, it made clear to all that the supporters of Jackson, some of them in Adams' own cabinet, were conspiring to 0107 89 insure that the president would serve only one term.

Perhaps no vice president of that era presided over the Senate with more dignity, poise, and courtesy than John C. Calhoun, but it is clear that no man ever more successfully tortured two presidential administrations—Adams' and Jackson's—than he did.

As early as 1826, Calhoun wrote a colleague that, if he and his friends did not openly support Adams, they would be denounced as in opposition. “We must pledge support to Mr. Adams' re-election, and recommend all of those principles for which we have ever contended.” Yet, almost simultaneously, he was writing of the administration he served that, “ because of the way it came to power . . . [it] must be defeated at all hazards, regardless of its measures.” 6

That Calhoun was deep in intrigue, many senators suspected. His very presence as presiding officer was proof. Since the days of Aaron Burr, vice presidents had frequently not even come to Washington during the sessions of Congress, much less making themselves outstanding personalities in the Senate chamber. Calhoun piously protested that he could not accept his pay without fulfilling the duties of his office, but his driving ambition was too well known for that explanation to satisfy. This was a man who was sowing the seeds for his own political future.

In the face of an antagonistic vice president, an emergent Senate, and his own uncertain mandate, President Adams sent to Congress in December 1825 an annual message that one historian has characterized as “suicide by manifesto.” It was the violent reaction to this first presidential message that hinted at the extent of the president's troubles with the Senate. Though written with the purest of motives, it was interpreted as concealing the most devious of plans. Adams' message stressed the importance of internal improvements, the advocacy of which, as he had said in his inaugural address, was to constitute the main policy of his administration.

He recommended the building of public roads and canals, establishment of a national university, and the building of an astronomical observatory—a “lighthouse of the skies.” Even Henry Clay, the champion of internal improvements, shuddered. It was not the idea of improvements, however, that gave Clay pause, but it was in Adams' enumeration of the purposes of the improvements and the powers of Congress that he saw the gravest danger. He “approved of the general principles, but scrupled great part of the details.” 7

Indeed, it was hardly tactful of Adams to warn the senators and representatives against being “palsied by the will of our constituents,” when a great many of their constituents already believed their own will had been palsied by Adams' election. Nor was it politic of the president to warn senators and representatives, some of whom had fought in the Revolution, that failure to do as he wished amounted to “treachery to the most sacred of trusts,” when many believed that the most sacred of trusts consisted in curbing the powers of the federal government. Nor were many in his audience, particularly the Democrats and Revolutionary patriots, impressed by Adams' argument that the monarchical governments of Europe were far ahead of the United States in internal improvements. 8

Reaction to Adams' message was swift and dreadful. In the Senate, the most vehement assault upon the principles it set forth came on March 30, 1826. The speaker was John Randolph of Roaneke, and the speech was characteristic of his tirades—wandering, but brutal. Though he spent most of his political career in the House, during his two years in the Senate, Randolph left an indelible mark. Indeed, he was one of the most brilliant, deranged, 0108 90 arrogant, and pathetic men of his age. Like his contemporaries, who were mesmerized and terrorized by Randolph, I am fascinated still by this lean, haughty Virginian who used to stride into the old Senate chamber down the hall, trailed by his yipping hounds, flicking a riding crop against his boot with one hand while grasping a cup of porter in the other. 9

Randolph was born into a wealthy Virginia planter family in 1773. About to enter public life in his twenties, he added “Roanoke” to his name to distinguish himself from a hated relative. He was described as “a tall, gawky-looking, flaxen haired, stripling . . . with a complexion of a good parchment color, beardless chin, and as much assumed self-consequence as any two footed animal.” So youthful did Randolph look that, at twenty-six, when it was time for him to be sworn in for his first term in the House, the Speaker reportedly asked him whether he was old enough to serve. “Ask my constituents,” came the sarcastic reply. 10

After several terms in the House, Randolph moved into the Senate in 1825 to fill a vacancy left when James Barbour became secretary of war. By the time he arrived in the Senate, the insanity that he anticipated and dreaded was gaining on him. He had been, as he liked to say, “dying, sir, dying” for the past fifteen years, but he remained far more alive than his enemies wished. Randolph was still an electrifying speaker and brought to his task a great deal of genius as well as a measure of madness. His hate-filled words were punctuated by the slap of his whip on leather and pauses to sip from the jug held by his young slave. Such arrogant behavior was guaranteed not to win friends among northern senators when it came, as it did, from a man who owned nearly four hundred slaves.

Even if his behavior in the chamber had been less eccentric, Randolph's costumes would have brought him notice. He varied his garb from blue riding coat and buckskin breeches to a “full suit of heavy, drab-colored English broadcloth, the high rolling collar . . . almost concealing his head,” and the skirts swinging about the white leather tops of his boots. Sometimes he wore a red hunting shirt or an overcoat which dragged behind him along the carpet. Once, it was reported, he wore six or seven overcoats which he peeled off, one by one, upon his arrival in the Senate chamber, tossing them in a heap on the floor. 11

John Randolph of Virginia often strode into the Senate chamber followed by his hounds. U. S. Senate Curator's Office

Tall and slim, from a distance, even at fifty-two, Randolph appeared boyish. Some unknown disease of his youth had left him impotent, beardless, and with a voice like a shrill flute. On closer inspection, his parchment 0109 91 face was creased with a thousand fine wrinkles. At times, he resembled an ancient mummy animated by some demon. Drink, drugs, and disease had had their way with him. A friend described him as “more like a disembodied spirit than a man adequately clothed in flesh and blood.” In the midst of his most demonic harangues, however, there would shine forth some passage of such terrible invective, some paragraph of such exquisite construction, or some phrase so brilliantly apt, that his colleagues were reminded that, though on the brink of madness, he had not lost total control. It was for these glimpses of brilliance that visitors flocked to the galleries to hear him, and senators, apprehensive lest his bitter arrows be aimed at them, remained in their seats. 12

That Randolph was intoxicated by his own rhetoric is beyond doubt. On occasion, he would begin one of his outbursts at four in the afternoon and continue unabated until ten, the chamber gradually emptying as hunger drew off his colleagues. Vice President Calhoun alone would retain his seat, seldom even changing his position, as Randolph leaped from subject to subject. In thirty minutes, he might discuss the superiority of the Church of England compared to the Episcopal Church of America, the “revolting racial issues” in Othello, the military mistakes of William the Conqueror, and the “adulterous intercourse between the Dowager Princess of Wales and the Earl of Bute.” Then, he might veer off course to launch a missile of evil words at a colleague. Even fellow southerner Calhoun was not immune. In one of his outbursts, Randolph addressed him as “Mr. Vice-President, and would-be Mr. President of the United States, which God in his infinite mercy prevent.” Calhoun remained utterly impassive, as one newspaper noted, “without once noticing the indecorum to himself or others.” 13 Randolph was a tormented man whom neither his friends nor his enemies understood—so clever, so cruel, so bewildered. He lived his whole life in the flickering light of what he conceived to be the truth. And it was Randolph's perception of the truth that led to his vicious attack on Adams in the Senate. 14

For Randolph, truth was the Old Republicanism of his youth. But his was the Old Republicanism filtered through clouded eyes. He passionately claimed allegiance to the Jeffersonian tenets of states' rights, human liberty, and resistance to centralized power. Naturally, Adams' first annual message struck him as a mass of dangerous and threatening proposals. But Randolph was also motivated to speak out on the Senate floor by his hatred of the president, which exceeded even his distaste for the president's father whom he had battled in his youth. “The cub,” he said, “is a greater bear than the old one.” 15 Randolph also despised Henry Clay, whom he regarded with loathing as an ex-Virginian, a slaveholding Kentuckian who had become a renegade from the one true way of life by engineering the Missouri Compromise and giving rise to the so-called “American System.” Randolph had never forgiven Clay for eclipsing his charismatic dominance over the House. He had been plotting his revenge on both Adams and Clay, and, in March 1826, he seized the moment to strike.

The specific issue between the president and the Senate which presented Randolph with the opportunity to vent his spleen was United States participation in the Panama Congress of South American states, called with the idea of forming a loose confederacy for military and commercial purposes. Clay had secured an invitation to the Panama Congress for the United States, and Adams had unwisely accepted without consulting the Senate. Members of the Senate were furious. Van Buren opened the battle by offering resolutions designed to annoy Adams by 0110 92 requesting the president to tell the senators whether or not he had truly sent them all the papers involved in the matter. 16 Van Buren had judged Adams well. The resolution goaded Adams into a tactless reply in which he questioned the honesty of the senators, angering them further. 17

Following Van Buren, Senator John Branch of North Carolina attacked the president's assertion that he had the right to appoint ministers independently of the Senate. In his speech, Branch launched the first direct assault on Adams:

. . . he came into office in opposition to three-fourths of the American People, in opposition to seventeen or eighteen states out of the twenty-four. He came in by the prostration of our dearest principles. He came in by the total disregard of the right of instruction, the basis of a Republic. He came in, sir, in opposition, not only to the sovereign will of the People, but he overcame the most formidable of all difficulties: He came in in opposition to the will of the Representatives too. 18

It was now Randolph's turn. On March 30, he began a speech that goes on for eight tightly packed pages in the Register of Debates. At first, he rambled from topic to topic—the administration's internal improvements program was an attempt to buy Congress with its own money. Now that Judas had received his thirty pieces of silver, let him buy a potter's field with them in which to inter the Constitution. Old President Adams was the Apostle of Monarchy. But after an hour of general invective, Randolph began to home in on his victims, Adams and Clay.

As the other senators listened in horror, Randolph rose to new heights of maliciousness and openly compared the union between Adams and Clay to that of Bliful and Black George. Anyone familiar with Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones —and most of Randolph's contemporaries certainly were—knows how disgusting are the characters of Bliful, the canting hypocrite, and Black George, the blackguardly gamekeeper. The senators were stunned. Perhaps Randolph had not meant so vile a slander and would recant. But, no. Toward the end of the harangue, he not only uttered the same insult but also embroidered upon it. Claiming that he had been trying to save the last shreds of Jefferson's dream, Randolph shouted:

I was defeated, horse, foot and dragoons—cut up—and clean broke down—by the coalition of Bliful and Black George—by the combination, unheard of till then, of the puritan and the black-leg. 19

President Adams was outraged at Randolph. He was even more angry with his own vice president, Calhoun, who impassively presided over the Senate during Randolph's outburst, oblivious to the many appeals to call Randolph to order. Not only had Calhoun declined to call Randolph to order, but he had also exhibited “the most perfect indifference to whatever was said.” As he had on previous occasions, Calhoun masked his enjoyment at the Virginian's attack on the administration and gravely insisted that, since he was not a member of the Senate but merely its presiding officer, he had no wish to usurp its power and interfere with debate. Two years later, in 1828, the Senate would adopt the forerunner of our Rule 19 governing the propriety of members' remarks. Under this rule, the presiding officer, or a member, could call to order any other member casting aspersions against another senator, a member of the House, or a state. However, the right to criticize the executive was carefully maintained. 20

On May 1, 1826, the pro-Adams National Journal carried an article bitterly attacking the vice president for not exercising a power clearly his, and charging Calhoun had not done so because he was “the residuary legatee of General Jackson's pretensions to the Presidency.” Signed “Patrick Henry,” the style suggested that its author was the president 0111 93 himself. On May 20, the rival National Intelligencer carried a response signed “Onslow,” presumably after the eighteenth-century speaker of the British House of Commons, Albert Onslow, who set a high standard of impartiality. The trenchant style clearly identified it as the work of Calhoun. For the next six months, the public was treated to the spectacle of the president and his vice president slugging it out in the pages of the Washington newspapers. 21

Randolph's insults were too much for Clay to bear in silence. He challenged Randolph to a duel, and Randolph, waiving his constitutional privilege not to be “questioned in any other place” for words uttered in congressional debate, accepted. Neither man was an expert at handling arms, but, nonetheless, the senator and the secretary of state met on the afternoon of April 8, 1826, in a clearing on the Virginia side of the Potomac River just above the Little Falls bridge. If he were to die, Randolph wanted to do so on the soil of his beloved native state. Randolph arrived wearing a dramatic white, flowing, flannel wrapper.

In the first exchange of shots, both men missed. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, himself no stranger to the dueling ground, had come as a spectator and conciliator and rushed from the woods to demand that the duel should cease. Clay brushed him aside. Randolph agreed to shoot again but whispered to Benton that he did not intend to return Clay's fire. He calmly stood still while Clay fired a bullet that went through the hem of the white flannel overcoat without hurting him. Randolph then fired into the air, tossed his pistol aside, held out his hand to Clay and said, “You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.” Said a much relieved Clay, “I am glad that the debt is no greater.” 22

Randolph's stay in the Senate was brief. The Virginia state legislature refused to return him in 1827, putting John Tyler in his place. His own district, however, immediately sent Randolph to the House where he continued his anti-administration maneuvers. After a brief and disastrous stint as minister to Russia during the Jackson administration, Randolph broke down entirely in 1831. Struggling with total insanity, he used opium and drank excessively. He died in Philadelphia in 1833, while awaiting a ship to England. He was buried at his estate, Roanoke, as he had ordered, facing west in order to keep his eye on Henry Clay.

Brilliant but tormented, the flamboyant John Randolph served in both the House and Senate. U. S. Senate Curator's Office

In the turmoil that followed Randolph's March 30, 1826, speech, Adams' Panama mission took a back seat. While the Senate 0112 94 debated the executive's power to appoint ministers, the House came out in support of the mission. Ironically, though the Senate yielded, nothing ever came of the enterprise. Owing to the delay, the Panama Congress, after a poorly attended session, adjourned before the representatives of the United States could arrive. 23

Though only a few spoke as openly or as harshly as John Randolph, many senators in the Nineteeth Congress opposed the president and his policies. The irony was that the president, the senators, and the representatives were, in 1825, all nominally members of the same party. Though the unity this single party designation implies was chimerical, they were all ostensibly National Republicans.

When Adams took the oath of office that year, he had pleaded for complete and final political harmony. Few of those listening, however, really believed that the party system could or should be eliminated. Indeed, by the time Randolph spoke out in the spring of 1826, the bitterness lingering from the presidential election, the rivalries of the defeated candidates and their partisans, sectional interests, conflicting political theories, and economic changes all combined to defeat Adams' pious wish.

Adams viewed it as providential when, in one of the supreme coincidences in American history, former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which each had signed. If these two longtime foes could become reconciled through a warm correspondence in their old age, certainly the next generation could iron out its differences; but, as the president stood beside his father's grave in Quincy, there were clear signs that his administration was in danger of collapsing. As the fall elections approached in 1526, anyone looking at the Senate could have easily perceived two political groupings. On the one hand, there were the National Republicans—the followers of Adams, Clay, and Webster. On the other, the opposition, which would eventually become the Democratic party, gathered under the banner of Jackson, and, tentatively, Calhoun, and included Senators Van Buren, John Eaton of Tennessee, and Benton.

Within these opposing camps, there were some surprising and uneasy alliances. As historian Glyndon Van Deusen notes:

Federalists, under the leadership of swarthy Daniel Webster, already the servant of the vested interests in Massachusetts, and Jeffersonian Democrats of the Clay stripe found themselves side by side in the National Republican ranks. Many high tariff men looked to Clay for leadership. A strong Western element championed internal improvements at national expense. The party was conservative, by and large, favored a vigorous national government, and sought to establish its predominance by an alliance of East and West.

The Opposition was decidedly heterogeneous. There were Southerners, hating the tariff and fearing that a strong central government would endanger slavery; Northern high tariff men, who distrusted Adams or disliked Clay; states' rights advocates and strict constructionists, moved to wrath by Adams' woefully inept championship of a vast system of internal improvements at national expense; democrats and demagogues who championed the downtrodden, demanded a government free from corruption, and cried out against aristocratical successions. The Opposition had a liberal tint, but the group, as a whole, required careful handling. 24

Obviously, Randolph was a member of the opposition. The fact that the Virginia legislature did not return him to the Senate did not obscure the fact that the winds of change had begun to blow hard, and much of the South was rapidly shifting to the hard antinational position he and other opposition leaders espoused. These were nebulous times when new coalitions, one of which would emerge as a major national party, were forming on every side. Historian George Dangerfield has suggested that, 0113 95 while the period during Monroe's administrations has been labeled the Era of Good Feelings, Adams' unstable times might well be called the Era of Suspense. 25

Martin Van Buren was one of the leading figures of this political ferment. Short, plump, beautifully dressed, he was a poised and witty companion. One of the most astute political managers in the country, he was determined to ruin his enemy Adams. Van Buren was a deadly adversary, who assassinated quietly and with a smile. In a delightfully apt phrase, John Randolph said of Van Buren that “he rowed to his object with muffled oars.” 26 Calhoun, about to become one of Van Buren's victims, did not realize the treachery until after the deed was done.

Van Buren greeted enemies with a smile, suffered defeat gracefully, and played his cards close to his vest. He relished his reputation as a “wily fox” and gleefully told this story against himself:

Mr. Knower came to me in the evening and told me that, on his way home from the Capitol, Mr. Wood, one of his wool buyers and a sensible man, said to him—“Mr. Knower! That was a very able speech!” “Yes, very able!” he answered. “Mr. Knower!” again said Mr. Wood, after a considerable pause—“on which side of the Tariff question was it?” 27

Throughout 1826, Van Buren and other members of the opposition worked feverishly to increase their ranks in Congress in the autumn elections. While the fall results were difficult to decipher, when the Twentieth Congress convened in December 1827, it was clear that the opposition had gained strength. In the House, the proadministration Speaker, John Taylor of New York, was replaced by the hostile Andrew Stevenson of Virginia, who gave all the important chairmanships to Jackson men.

In the Senate, John Tyler of Virginia made his debut with the expectation that he would continue, with more discretion, Randolph's attacks on the administration. Opposition leaders were extremely annoyed when Clay published an old letter from Tyler congratulating him on his vote for Adams. The opposition carried the day, however, when the Senate chose for its printer the ebullient Duff Green, whose Washington-based United States Telegraph was violently abusive of Adams. For the first time in their history, both the House and the Senate had majorities hostile to an administration only two years old.

Martin Van Buren of New York, known as the Sly Fox, proved to be a quietly treacherous opponent. Library of Congress

Nearly every measure that came up in the Twentieth Congress was debated and voted on from the point of view of its likely effect on the 1828 presidential election. National Republicans sought to discredit Jackson, while the opposition sought to destroy 0114 96 Adams. A resolution was introduced by Jackson men to have one of the large, empty panels in the Rotunda of this building filled with a painting of the Battle of New Orleans. Adams partisans defeated that move. Then the president's friends offered a resolution calling for an inquiry into the court-martial and execution of six Tennessee mutineers by Jackson during the War of 1812. Handbills were scattered across the country bearing six black coffins and this verse:

Oh! Did you hear the plaintive cry Borne on the southern breeze? Saw you John Harris earnest pray For mercy, on his knees?

The resulting House committee report exonerated the general. 28

Jackson's supporters then took the offensive, calling for an investigation of how the president spent the government's money. Among the documents presented was a White House inventory listing a sixty-one dollar billiard table and a chess set costing twenty-three dollars. Cried one southern representative, “Is it possible, Mr. Chairman, to believe that it ever was intended by Congress that the public money should be applied to the purchase of gaming tables and gambling furniture? And if it is right to purchase billiard tables and chessmen, why not, also, faro banks, playing cards, race horses, and every other article necessary to complete a system of gambling at the President's palace?” 29 As a matter of fact, the inventory was incorrect. The chessmen had been purchased with private money, and the billiard table had never been bought at all, but this information did not serve the opposition's purposes and was squelched.

The most important item before the preoccupied Twentieth Congress was the tariff question. Quickly dubbed throughout the South the “Tariff of Abominations,” it mirrored the political turmoil of the nation. Like all tariffs, the tariff of 1828 was a very complicated affair. Historians still debate the true intentions of the principals involved. What is clear is that, by the time the tariff finally became law, the South was threatening to secede from the Union, John C. Calhoun had been maneuvered out of second place in the coalescing Democratic party, and, even though things had not worked out quite as he planned, Martin Van Buren had taken Calhoun's place.

Both Calhoun and Van Buren would have liked to ignore the tariff question but, by 1827, this was impossible. High-tariff propagandists had met with success in stirring up pro-tariff sentiment among farmers everywhere except in the South and Southwest. Merchants and bankers in the Northeast, particularly Massachusetts, had been converted to the cause as was evident when Daniel Webster, still in the House, drove through a bill that gave woolens manufacturers all the protection they asked for. This woolens bill put both Van Buren and Calhoun in a terrible predicament.

Van Buren had decided that opposition to Adams, represented by Webster in this case, must be founded upon “the most natural and beneficial combination . . . that between the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North.” 30 Unfortunately for him on this issue, planters of the South were opposed to protective tariffs while those plain republican farmers of Van Buren's own New York state favored them. What was Van Buren to do? He solved the problem by not voting at all. Long afterwards, he lamely explained that he was absent from his seat because he had “promised to accompany a friend on a visit to the Congressional Cemetery.” 31

More likely, it was his own political burial that Van Buren feared. Other senators also found it convenient to disappear. When the woolens bill came up for a vote in the final 0115 97 days of the Nineteenth Congress, on February 28, 1827, the result was a 20 to 20 tie. 32 So the issue was placed squarely in the lap of Vice President Calhoun. At one point, Calhoun had been a mild advocate of protectionist tariffs, going along with Clay and other nationalists because of the plausible arguments that South Carolina and other southern states might become industrialized. But few plants had been built in the South, and now, tariffs and internal improvements, most of which linked the North and West, encouraging growth in those sections rather than in the South, worked to the disadvantage of the southern states.

Calhoun was definitely caught in an impossible situation—what we would call today a Catch-22 situation. A tie-breaking vote in either direction was bound to hurt him as a national figure. His position in Jackson's emerging Democratic party was still insecure, especially since he had aroused the jealousy of Van Buren. Certainly, the vice president must have wished he could have gone sightseeing that day, too, but Calhoun had to make a decision. He could not vote maybe. He voted to kill the woolens bill. 33

Now the maneuvering began in earnest: Jackson men plotting against the president; Van Buren plotting against Calhoun. The defeat of the woolens bill roused a northern demand for a tariff that would protect all sorts of different products; and such a bill was produced in the Twentieth Congress—a Congress filled with a new influx of Andrew Jackson supporters. In the Senate, where Jackson was stronger than ever, Van Buren, Benton, and Eaton of Tennessee were among those who watched out for the general's interests and saw in the tariff a way to embarrass President Adams.

Van Buren, however, was playing two games: trying to win support for Jackson and discredit Calhoun at the same time. First, he traveled to the South, in an effort to bring the Crawford radicals into Jackson's fold. He did this by promising Crawford, who was slowly dying, that he would do everything in his power to ruin Calhoun, Crawford's great bugbear. Such a maneuver would be tricky. Calhoun was still a Jackson man, and Van Buren was far too shrewd to break openly with him at this point. But Van Buren also knew that he could never rise in the new Democratic party if Calhoun were to remain Jackson's heir apparent. In the tariff, Van Buren saw a way to force Calhoun to cause his own fall from grace. 34

The first draft of the new tariff bill of 1828 was hammered out in the House Committee on Manufactures in December 1827. The smiling and cordial Van Buren was repeatedly seen “lurking” outside the committee room. He was in the habit, observed the Massachusetts Journal, “of calling out the Jackson members of the committee daily, and many times a day, to hold talks with them; and it is presumed that nothing important was done or has been reported without his knowledge and consent.” The pro-Adams National Journal confirmed the report and sarcastically added, “We believe that every thing has been arranged under the superintendence of Mr. Van Buren, who, from managing the Albany legislature, has kindly taken upon himself the management of congress, so far as relates to the tariff.” Duff Green, editor of the friendly United States Telegraph and the official printer to the Senate, attempted to refute these claims, assuring his readers that the senator from New York “did once . . . call at the committee room, and that was done upon the request of his friend, Mr. McLane of Delaware.” Green's protest notwithstanding, Van Buren was responsible for the tariff bill as eventually reported. 35

The bill first went to the Senate Committee on Manufactures and, on May 5, was reported out. Historians disagree over just what the strategy of the Jacksonians was at 0116 98 this point. Many argue that they decided to play a devious and dangerous game. By joining with the Adams protectionists and loading the bill with so many outrageously high duties, they were sure Congress would kill the bill and they could then blame the Adams forces for its defeat. The intrigue bore all the marks of the work of Van Buren and his partner in the House, New York Representative Silas Wright. As the plotters would soon find out, it was one thing to devise a strategy for defeating the tariff and another to actually carry it off. 36

Throughout the spring of 1828, debate on the tariff filled the House and Senate. Much of it was uninspired. Representative John Taylor complained that “day after day passes without any sensible advance in the public business. One dull prosing speech after another & arguments for the fiftieth time repeated are hashed up & dished in new covers.” 37 And one can picture the House as it looked to Taylor with, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described it, members “lolling back in armchairs, laughing, coughing, spitting, rattling newspapers, while some poor speaker tried to talk above the din.” 38

Through the din, Jacksonians obediently set about antagonizing the northern manufactures with a variety of bedeviling amendments increasing duties on pig iron, flax, hemp, and so forth. Everyone supposed that the New England senators would join with the southern anti-protectionists to kill the measure. Daniel Webster, who had moved from the House to the Senate in the autumn elections, emerged, to the consternation of many, as one of the leaders of the pro-tariff forces. On May 9, he offered an extraordinary spectacle. He stood in front of his colleagues to explain why he was about to repudiate all the free-trade arguments he had made in the House in 1824. He was not eloquent, not the “great cannon loaded to the lips,” but he was very honest. He offered no moral or intellectual justifications for the switch.

As vice president, John C. Calhoun presided over the Senate's tariff debates of the late 1820's. Architect of the Capitol

He changed his mind, he said, simply because New England, his constituency, had accepted the protective system as the established policy of the government and, after 1824, had built up her manufacturing enterprises on that basis. This candid avowal of allegiance to a section was one the public would not forget and Webster would later regret. 39

Vice President Calhoun presided over the tariff debates with an easy mind. He thought he knew just what Van Buren's plot was, and he approved. Suddenly, he realized that things were going very much awry. Years later, the betrayal still rankled and he recalled:

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Relying on the assurance on which our friends acted in the House, we anticipated with confidence and joy that the bill would be defeated and the whole system overthrown by the shock. Our hopes were soon blasted. A certain individual, then a Senator, but recently elected to the highest office in the Union, was observed to assume a mysterious air in relation to the bill, very little in accordance with what, there was every reason to believe, would have been his course. 40

That things went awry is clear, but historians still debate whether or not Van Buren, that “certain individual,” was actually in control of the shift or whether he was taken by surprise and swept along with the tide just as Calhoun was. What did happen is that Jacksonian senators, while offering amendments in jest to sink the bill, seemed to be seized with the realization that it might just pass, and then their own constituents might not be protected. So, we have the spectacle of Thomas Hart Benton mockingly asking for a duty on indigo but very seriously requesting a duty on furs and a duty on lead for Missourians. Suddenly, Senator Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey, who had discovered that a solitary vermicelli factory did business in his state, wanted a 50-percent duty on imported vermicelli. The jest had turned serious. Van Buren could no longer control the forces he had set loose.

Though the bill was a bad one for all concerned, many felt it was better than no bill at all. To the astonishment of Jackson's supporters, the tariff bill passed the House and Senate and became law on May 19, 1828. Senator Littleton Tazewell of Virginia was among those who felt tricked. He cornered Van Buren and said, “Sir, you have deceived me once; that was your fault: but if you deceive me again the fault will be mine.” 41

The Tariff of Abominations was denounced on both sides. Protectionist journals like Niles'Register repudiated it as did anti-protectionist organs such as the Richmond Enquirer. The legislatures of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia condemned it. In Washington, the South Carolina delegation met at the home of Senator Robert Hayne to consider withdrawal from the Congress. After violent argument, it was decided to do nothing extreme until after the upcoming presidential election. Calhoun, now fully identified with southern interests, was not present at these meetings but influenced them. He counseled restraint. He could not, however, restrain himself from writing an anonymous and widely circulated essay expounding the doctrine of the right of a state to nullify what it considered an unconstitutional law. The groundwork for the nullification crisis, which would haunt the Twenty-first Congress, was laid.

In addition to the major issues of the day such as the tariff, the Senate also considered a wide variety of other more routine matters during these four years. A glance at the index to the Register of Debates reveals a fascinating array of resolutions introduced but not passed—burning issues that quickly lost their fire, familiar-sounding debates, information about incidents in this building, and the revision of the Senate rules that continue to guide us today. These events and issues help to give us a sense of the day-to-day life in the early nineteenth-century Senate.

No sooner had the Nineteenth Congress convened in December 1825 than Thomas Hart Benton presented a resolution “to inquire into the expediency of amending the Constitution of the United States, so as to provide for the election of the President and Vice President by a direct vote of the People.” 42 Senator Robert Hayne applauded Benton and went even further, suggesting that the election of the president be removed from the intervention of the House. Senators Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey joined Benton and Hayne in pushing these presidential election measures.

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The motives behind these resolutions were quite transparent, following, as they did, so closely after the 1824 elections. Their promoters were all ardent Jackson men; their opponents, like Senator John Holmes of Maine, Adams partisans. It is doubtful that the opposition expected these resolutions to bear fruit, and, in this, they were realistic; however, they wanted to make it clear that they felt that Jackson had been robbed of his victory, winning the popular vote only to have the House hand the presidency to Adams. What is most interesting about these debates, however, is not that nothing came of them but how current they sound today. Benton had encouraging words of support for those who continue to seek constructive constitutional change. He said, “No great reform is carried suddenly. It requires years of persevering exertion to produce the unanimity of opinion which is necessary to a great popular reformation; but because it is difficult, it is not impossible.” 43

Another unsuccessful resolution, introduced by Senator Thomas Cobb of Georgia, was even more pointed. Cobb suggested an amendment to the Constitution which would prohibit the appointment of any senators or representatives “to any office of honor, trust, or profit, under the authority of the United States,” during the period for which they were elected. 44 Its intent, said Benton, was to cut off the possibility for a member to receive an appointment from a “President to whom he might have lent a subservient vote.” 45 Benton had a specific member in mind. Henry Clay, the alleged coconspirator in the “corrupt bargain,” had resigned from the House to become Adams' secretary of state.

Just in case the point of both of these resolutions was lost on the proadministration senators, the opposition introduced a third resolution on December 19 to prohibit any president from serving more than two terms. Though they expected to defeat Adams in 1828, the opposition obviously did not want to take the chance that the presidency would be “stolen” a third time. 46

In 1828, the Senate recodified its rules last set down in 1820. Among the significant changes was the dividing of the Committee on Commerce and Manufactures into panels for each of its named subjects, and the creation of committees on agriculture and private land claims. 47

As the eye runs down the index to the Senate debates for this period, the issues stand out that set the followers of Jackson apart from those of Adams, issues that would increase in importance as the years went by. Debates on bankruptcy, a theme dear to the hearts of anti-big-money Jacksonians; public lands, the pet of Benton and the westerners; and internal improvements like the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Cumberland Road, extolled by adherents to Clay's American System, fill the pages of these dusty volumes.

Just as the eye begins to weary of the columns of fine, faded print, an item will leap off the page and demand investigation. Such an entry appears in the O section of the index in 1828: “Outrages in the Capitol, two resolutions laid on the table in relation to the assault made by Russell Jarvis on the president's personal secretary, and that of Duff Green on Edward Vernon Sparhawk, one of the reporters.” 48 Now, I know senators sometimes have their differences with the press but they seldom come to actual blows! Who were these men, Messrs. Green, Sparhawk, Jarvis, and the president's secretary, and what provoked the “outrages”?

Let us begin with the case of Jarvis, a journalist, and the president's private secretary, who also happened to be his son, John Adams. In April 1828, Mr. Jarvis, responding to a rude remark that young Adams had directed at him several days earlier at the 0119 101 White House, assaulted Adams as he was walking through the Rotunda of the Capitol from the House to the Senate on official business. The president was outraged and sent a message to both the Senate and the House asking for redress. Unfortunately, his message did not spell out the particulars of the case, so we must rely on Jarvis' own communication to the Senate, which was printed in full in Niles' Register, a nationally circulated Baltimore newspaper. Jarvis' letter is marvelous in its detail:

. . . while he [Adams] was in the rotunda of the capitol, I accosted him and asked if he had given his final answer to my note; for I still hoped that he might be induced to offer some apology or explanation. On saying that his final answer had been given, I was excited by his continued refusal, and by a recollection of the offense, to commit an assault upon his person, which consisted merely in pulling his nose and slapping one side of his face, with my open hand. In doing this I disclaim any intention of inflicting upon him any bodily injury; for I was totally unarmed, and assailed him merely in the manner above described, while he was provided with a stout cane. I also disclaim any intention of way-laying him, for our meeting at the capitol was accidental. More especially do I disclaim any intention of infringing on the rights, or assailing the dignity of the president of the United States, of either house of congress, or of any public functionary, or any intention of obstructing an officer of the general government in the discharge of his official duties.—When I accosted Mr. John Adams in the rotunda, I supposed he had discharged his official duties, and was on his way from the capitol. I was not aware of his being charged with a message to the senate, or of his being on his way to the chamber of that body. I viewed the rotunda as common ground, as a public passage, not particularly within the jurisdiction of either house of congress, and differing in no respect, so far as it related to the rights or dignity of any public functionary, from any public street or highway. I know that an assault upon an individual within the public peace, is a violation of the laws; and I regret that any indignity should have been offered to a party of ladies under my protection, and in a place where they expected, at least, the ordinary forms of civility, whereby I was impelled to an offense against the civil authority, which I hope, that I may be always disposed to maintain, as a sober and peaceful citizen. But, if either house of congress shall consider that I have, unintentionally, or inadvertently, violated its rights or dignity, or those of the executive, by resenting, within the walls of the capitol, a grievous insult to the ladies of my family, and which insult I chose to consider entirely of a private character, I am ready and disposed to offer any atonement that shall be due to such body. 49

The upshot of the incident was that, while both the president's message and Jarvis' epistle were laid on the table to quietly slip into history, the U. S. Capitol Police force was established. 50

The case of Duff Green and Edward Sparhawk was equally dramatic and suffered the same fate in the Senate. Green, as I have already noted, was the editor of the pro-Jackson Washington United States Telegraph, a rising star in the emerging Democratic party, and the Senate's printer. Sparhawk was apparently a reporter for the New York American. On January 25,1828, the two men came to blows in a room set aside for the Senate Committee on Claims. On January 29, Sparhawk presented the Senate with a memorial, accompanied with affidavits, which humbly sheweth, that, having been subjected to insult and violence in the room of the committee on claims of the senate of the United States, from a person called Duff Green, an officer of the Senate . . .; and having been threatened by said Green with further violence, in case your memorialist should “ever write a line about him”—considering that said violence was not, in any manner provoked by your memorialist, and that it was committed within a room devoted to the use of the senate; Therefore, your memorialist humbly prays that such notice may be taken of this matter as may, in the opinion of your honorable body, comport with its dignity, and extend protection to individuals while within the precincts of the Senate. 51

The next day, Green begged to present his side of the story, and his is the only side that was printed. According to Green, Sparhawk was the author of an anonymous article which charged that Green had grossly and intentionally misrepresented remarks by John Randolph in an article in the Telegraph. 0120 102 Green, finding out that Sparhawk was the author, “felt as every honorable man . . . would feel in his situation, as the editor of a public journal of extensive circulation.” He accosted Sparhawk and demanded to know if he was, indeed, the author of the piece. According to Green's account, written in the third person, “Not receiving a satisfactory answer, he proceeded to assault Mr. Sparhawk, having no intention to offer personal injury to him, his sole object being, not to hurt, but to disgrace him.” Green contended he had no intention of dishonoring the Senate, for which he had the profoundest respect, but only to chastise one who had sullied a senator's name. Sparhawk had been, Green concluded, a “profligate instrument of falsifying the reports of the proceedings of the co-ordinate branch of congress,” and he had taken it into his own hands to right the situation. 52

Despite Green's pains on its behalf (and no doubt the pain of Sparhawk!), the Senate did not express its gratitude. Then again, neither did it condemn him. As with the Jarvis-Adams affair, this one was laid on the table and relegated to obscurity.

During the course of this examination of the years 1825 to 1829, I have mentioned the rise of the Democratic party. I would like to end my remarks with a brief look at the origins of that party. To any of my colleagues who would like to pursue this absorbing topic further, I can heartily recommend Robert Remini's useful study of Martin Van Buren and Michael Holt's chapter on “The Democratic Party 1828–1860” in the series History of U. S. Political Parties. 53

We can trace the beginning of the Democratic party back to the early 1820's when, as I noted earlier, the first American party system of Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists collapsed. In its wake, during the Era of Good Feelings, everyone was ostensibly a National Republican. This inclusiveness, however, diluted the party's ideology. To the dismay of purists like Randolph, the Old Republicanism of states' rights, strict construction, and the small government principles of the Jeffersonians no longer prevailed. They were pushed aside by nationalistic programs advocated by younger men like Clay. These tensions were exacerbated by two events. The depression that followed the panic of 1819 ignited working-class and agrarian hostility to paper money as well as to the private banking system that seemed to favor the few at the expense of the many, causing economic fluctuations catastrophic to the little man. Secondly, the angry attacks on slavery during the Missouri debates had opened up an ominous division between the North and South.

Many Old Republicans blamed the potential sectional realignment on the fact that there was only one party, the discipline and adherence to principle of which had collapsed because of lack of competition. They were certain that new men like Clay and Calhoun had corrupted the Republican party with nationalism and jettisoned the pure principles of strict construction, laissez faire, and states' rights.

The Old Republicans wanted to reconstruct their national party, restore it to its first principles, and drive all those nationalistic backers of the American System from their midst. They saw their chance in the aftermath of the 1824 election—stolen, in their opinion, by the evil forces of John Quincy Adams from their own virtuous candidate, Andrew Jackson. It was clear that the election in 1828 would probably come down to these two candidates once again, and this time the opposition would be ready. 54

The opposition was led by Senator Van Buren, and, before he left the Senate in 1828 to return to New York to rally his “Bucktails” and become governor of the state, he delivered one last important speech on the 0121 103 Senate floor on February 12. His remarks on that particular occasion reinforced his commitment to Jeffersonian concepts. What Van Buren presents to us in that speech is the creed of the Jacksonians, soon to be called Democrats. The dogma of states' rights was the central theme. The essential conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson, at the time of the Republic's founding, was the identical struggle going on in 1828 between the friends of Jackson and those of Adams. The members of the Democratic party—the true descendants of the patriots of 1776, in Van Buren's view—were mindful of the causes and the history of this longstanding philosophical dispute. They were, therefore, averse to a national government that sought to enlarge its area of activity beyond the fixed boundaries set by the Constitution. Only through the continued existence of powerful states, he averred, could the liberties of the people be protected. Here, in a nutshell, were the principles behind the Democratic party. 55

Riding and channeling the wave of resentment against the president and the enthusiasm for the Hero of New Orleans, supremely talented Jacksonian managers, such as Van Buren and Senator Eaton, organized the Democratic party from the top down. Michael Holt explains their technique:

Central committees were established in Nashville by Jackson's friends and in Washington by Van Buren, Calhoun, and other Jackson cronies. These committees, and Jackson himself, corresponded voluminously with state politicians urging them to build state organizations which in turn established Jackson clubs or committees in each county and most localities. Once completed, the Democratic organization consisted of a multitude of conventions and committees built in pyramid fashion from the locality to the county to the state to the central national committees. The national committee and Jacksonian congressmen disseminated propaganda to the local committees to keep Old Hickory in the public eye. A politician of superb instincts, Jackson himself directed much of this propaganda, making sure that the public remembered he was the victim of a cynical and corrupt bargain. The politicians in Washington also raised money to support an extensive chain of newspapers they had established across the country, and these sheets brought the Jacksonian gospel to the people. 56

The campaign of 1828 was one of personalities. Such campaigns are bound to degenerate into abuse, but the name-calling of the 1828 campaign has rarely been equalled. To call Jackson a gambler, a drunkard, and a duelist, and Adams a monarchist, a gourmandizer, and a spendthrift was one thing; but, in 1827, pro-Adams newspapers began to print stories accusing Jackson of having knowingly lived in adultery with Rachel Jackson before she was divorced from her first husband. That one of the happiest and loving of marriages in the United States had been dragged into the campaign was proof of the depth to which the partisans could sink. Slander was infectious.

Duff Green was soon printing in his United States Telegraph columns a nonsensical story about premarital relations between President and Mrs. Adams. Green wrote to his hero, Jackson, “Let Mrs. Jackson rejoice, her vindication is complete.” How one reputation could be vindicated by the blackening of another apparently did not disturb him. 57

The feel of a Jackson victory, a Democratic victory, was in the air in the fall of 1828. When it came in the winter, it was a substantial one: 178 electoral votes to 83 for Adams. It was a great triumph for the “common man,” particularly in the West and South where Jackson was lionized. Under the vastly liberalized franchise laws, large numbers of Americans voted who had never done so before. The popular vote jumped from 400,000 in 1824 to more than 1.1 million in 1828 (647,276 for Jackson and 508,604 for Adams). In only two of the twenty-four states, Delaware and South Carolina, did the 0122 104 legislature still choose the electors. In the rest, the people now had the power. 58

The Era of Suspense was over. The political turmoil of the preceding years was temporarily resolved. The forces of discontent had coalesced long enough to bring about a political revolution under the banner of the new Democratic party. The coalition that elected the Hero of New Orleans in 1828 was too broad and heterogeneous to be stable. For example, Jackson's overwhelming popularity in the South and West camouflaged deep differences among his followers, some of which would cause defections once the northerner, Van Buren, became his successor. In 1829, there was a Jackson coalition. At the end of his administration in 1837, there would be a smaller but more homogeneous and unified Democratic party. 59

None of this, however, mattered to the followers of Jackson in March 1829. On March 4, all of Washington saw the real contemporary meaning of the word Democrat as masses of farming, frontier, and working-class families swarmed into the capital to hail Old Hickory, the symbol of a new democracy that had brought the common people of America to political power. John Adams had decided that it would be unbecoming for him to attend the inauguration of a man who, for three years, had accused him of bargain and corruption, and he had quietly ridden out of town the day before. He was hardly missed by the cheering crowds massed everywhere in the city to welcome their president. As the delirious multitude flooded the White House, turning over buckets of punch, trampling chairs to sawdust, sober men like Daniel Webster reflected, “People have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think that the country had been rescued from some dreadful danger.” Indeed, they believed just that. Only time would tell whether or not they were right. What was abundantly clear from the perspective of the Senate chamber, however, was that the Age of Jackson had arrived.

March 3, 1982 Link to Annals.

Mr. President, with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, a new era dawned in this nation. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has labeled it the Age of Jackson. Others have called it the Age of the People, but, for our purposes, we may well entitle this era the Coming of Age of the Senate. It was during these years, crowded with so many monumentally important issues which saw the incomparable lions of the nineteenth-century Senate—Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Benton—striding through the chamber, that the Senate became the principal forum and battleground for the questions confronting the nation. As issue after issue came to the fore, all eyes focused on the beautiful old Senate chamber down the hall from where I speak today.

The “Virginia Dynasty” and the customary line of succession from secretary of state to president died on the day that the expanded electorate elevated to the presidency a Tennessee military hero who had never served in the cabinet; never distinguished himself in Congress, though he had been both a representative and a senator; and never appealed to the national aristocracy of intellect and culture. Though Jackson was opposed by two-thirds of the newspapers, four-fifths of the preachers, seven-eighths of the bankers, and nearly all the manufacturers, the people had spoken. He had amassed 56 percent of the popular vote. 1

The growing importance of the electorate and of political parties had an enormous effect on the Congress, too. The new parties devised parades, slogans, picnics, and all the trappings of political hoopla to vie with one another for popular favor. The bestowing of patronage—franchises, contracts, and jobs—became as important as the advancement of issues, and the winning of elections sometimes became an end in itself. To win elections, parties needed men who wanted to win and who could win. Prime candidates were no longer the landed gentlemen who had dominated the early Senate—men who felt the office should seek them rather than the other way around; instead, many of the new members of Congress who were swept in with Jackson boasted of their close kinship to the people and deliberately pandered to the ignorance and prejudices of their humblest constituents.

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This new trend changed both the House and the Senate and highlighted the differences between the two chambers. It brought mediocrities, nonentities, and even oddities to Congress. Davy Crockett is perhaps the best example in the House. A loudmouthed braggart who boasted that he was “unlarned,” Crockett's brief House career was totally undistinguished. When his constituents refused to return him in 1835, Crockett disgustedly told them, “I am going to Texas and you can go to Hell.” 2 Crockett did go to Texas and died the next year defending the Alamo.

Senators, of course, were still chosen by their state legislatures. They were, said Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, “the elect of the elect.” And they were generally a cut above the representatives in ability and manners. Reversing the trend of earlier years, the more capable and respected representatives now tried at the first opportunity to graduate from the House to the Senate. When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited Washington in 1831, he was much dismayed by the “vulgar demeanor” of the House and correctly noted, “The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity within its walls.” The Senate, on the other hand, earned his praise as a body “of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates in Europe.” 3

The Senate had been rising in esteem as a showcase for “eloquent advocates” even before Jackson's inauguration. The small, lovely chamber with its domed ceiling had excellent acoustics, ideal for the ringing voices of silver-tongued orators. The senators sat at mahogany desks—many of which are here in this chamber today—arranged in a semicircle. Unless they were standing committee chairmen, our predecessors in 1829 had no clerks, assistants, or offices of their own in which to work in private. It is hard to imagine carrying out all of one's Senate business—studying documents, preparing speeches, answering correspondence—at these small desks or in nearby rooming-houses, but that is exactly what men like Webster and Calhoun did. Even these labors had to cease when the galleries and the floor filled up with spectators who pushed and shoved their way in to hear a major debate or a favorite senator declaim. Squeezed all along the walls and standing even among the senators' desks, these visitors heightened the drama in the little chamber.

In the changing Senate, however, it required more than grand oratory to ensure legislative success. A new and equally powerful senatorial type was emerging with gifts rivaling those of the great speakers. Leadership was moving behind the scenes, retreating to the quietness of the Capitol's hallways. The greatest orators of the day, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Henry Clay of Kentucky, were, we must remind ourselves, sometimes on the losing side. They were highly vulnerable to the tireless labors on the floor and in the cloakrooms of the new-style men like Senators Felix Grundy of Tennessee and Silas Wright of New York.

The new style was intimate; it was one of low-pitched voices and subtle reminders of debts owed and claimed. It left many of the older men baffled; defeated President John Quincy Adams, almost immediately elected to the House, was one. The former Harvard rhetoric professor could not account for a new colleague's importance. “He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no elegance of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus.” 4 As it turned out, many of those who could not grasp the importance of the new-style manipulator were condemned to defeat or insignificance by them. The new 0125 107 era would belong to men like Martin Van Buren of New York who knew the importance of laying sturdy behind-the-scenes groundwork.

As this cartoon of the period indicates, the Senate was regarded as the more sober and august of the two houses of Congress, while the House of Representatives was considered rowdy and raucous. Library of Congress

Interwoven throughout this era in the Senate are several richly colored threads. One is the hardening sectional bitterness between North, West, and South, seen in the careers of Webster, the northerner; John C. Calhoun, the southerner; and Henry Clay, “Harry of the West.” Another is the attempt by the new Democratic party to make good on its campaign promises to champion the little man caught, said the Democrats, in the coils of the serpentlike money interests which were draining away his life's blood. And thirdly, there is the spectacle of two hostile factions arising within the Democratic party itself: one pressing the claims of Vice President Calhoun, who would resign that office for a Senate seat; and the other supporting Martin Van Buren, the former New York senator. None of these threads was separate from the others. As the Twenty-first and Twenty-second congresses unfolded, it was clear that at least two or three of these threads were always braided together and, as new issues came forward, the braid would unravel and be rebraided to pick up a new strand.

On March 17, 1829, after confirming the new president's cabinet, the Senate adjourned its special session. The administration looked forward to almost nine months of noninterference from this body until the regular session of the Twenty-first Congress convened in December. During that time, Jackson set about replacing scores of long-time federal officeholders in Washington and in the states with deserving Democrats 0126 108 who had worked for and supported him. Patronage, as a device to strengthen the party, came to town with a vengeance. The first spate of nominations Jackson sent to the Senate—a majority of whose members were on guard against any sign of executive usurpation—roused spirited opposition.

Jackson got the nine-month respite he wanted during adjournment, but the first storm of his administration broke in the Senate almost as soon as the new Congress convened on December 7, 1829. The enemies of Jackson in the Senate, known as the “opposition,” sought the earliest possible opportunity to denounce the wholesale dismissals, and they turned their hostile scrutiny upon every nomination requiring confirmation.

A comparatively new senator, elected on the supposition that he would support the president, stepped forth to organize and direct the fight against the confirmation of nominees in whom Jackson was deeply interested. That senator was John Tyler of Virginia. He typified those Democratic senators who were soon to become members of the opposition. Tyler does not readily come to mind when we think of key senators from this period, but it would be a mistake to underrate his importance, lie was highly respected by his colleagues, and his dignity, courtliness, and urbanity gave him a certain social prestige. Tall and slender, his Roman nose, firm mouth, broad and lofty brow, and honest blue eyes combined to give him a distinction that marked him on the Senate floor. Tyler was of the old school of gentlemen senators. His detachment from the political world made it possible for him, during the famous debate on the Foot resolution which I shall mention shortly, to entertain himself in the Senate chamber with the reading of The Life of Byron. 5

Among the Jacksonian nominations were those of, in Tyler's words, “a batch of editors,” men who had long been attached to the cause that Jackson personified. 6 Having received recess appointments, most of these men were already at their posts. This provided Jackson's enemies with the perfect opportunity to affront him personally. The friends of Clay and Adams were eager to humiliate their enemy, but the actual conspiracy behind what became known as “massacre of the editors” originated with Tyler.

Among the editors up for confirmation was Major Henry Lee, a half brother of Robert E. Lee, who had been appointed consul general to Algiers. A charge of “moral viciousness” was the pretext used to reject him, but the fact that he had helped with the writing of Jackson's inaugural speech was the principal reason behind the opposition's vendetta. 7 Lee received news of his rejection in Paris and died shortly thereafter.

Isaac Hill of the New Hampshire Patriot, nominated for a minor treasury post, presented a greater problem. Instead of taking his defeat gracefully, Hill was elected as a senator from New Hampshire in the next election and lunged into the Senate that had humiliated him to lead the Jackson forces against the opposition. Hill's offense was ostensibly that he had printed unkind things about Mrs. Adams during the late campaign. That these charges sounded rather hollow coming from men who had so recently slandered Rachel Jackson did not escape the president's notice.

Tyler was delighted with his work. He wrote a friend: “On Monday we took the printers in hand. [Amos] Kendall was saved by the casting vote of the Vice-President [Calhoun]. . . . Out of those presented to the Senate, but two have squeezed through, and that by the whole power of the government here having been thrown in the scale.” 8 The president was, however, less than pleased. The effect of the rejections was like a slap in the face, and it aroused all the lion in his nature. The rejections were the Senate's first challenge to the president, and 0127 109 it was instantly accepted. Jackson renominated several of his defeated friends and marshalled his allies to ram through their confirmations on the second try.

The Senate's fight against Jackson had begun at the earliest possible moment. The president was affronted that such a fight would begin before he had even announced a policy or a program. The battle would continue for the full eight years of the Jackson administration.

To the senators of 1829–1830, events sometimes must have seemed like onrushing ocean waves. No sooner had one breaker, the nominations controversy, tumbled over them when another crisis rushed in before they could regain their footing.

The Webster-Hayne debates began, it seems, quite by accident, but the issues involved were like a powder keg ready to ignite at the slightest spark. The volatile mixture included Calhoun's jealousy of Van Buren and uncertainty over the latter's standing with Jackson, as well as the constitutionality of the doctrine of nullification hinted at in the South after the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 but kept under wraps until after the election. A third issue was the smoldering resentment over the perceived denigration of the nation's agrarian past in favor of an industrial future, mirrored in the contest for power between the South, West, and North.

The inevitable spark that ignited this dangerous mixture was a resolution introduced on December 30, 1829, by Senator Samuel Foot of Connecticut. Foot, an anti-Jackson man, sought to have the Committee on Public Lands inquire into the expediency of limiting the sale of western public lands and abolishing the office of surveyor general. Thomas Hart Benton, the champion of the West, immediately leaped to his feet, assailing the resolution as a diabolical plan to safeguard cheap labor in the Northeast by shutting off opportunities for poor people to escape to the frontier. It was, shouted Benton, nothing short of “a most complex scheme of injustice which taxes the South to injure the West, to pauperize the poor of the North!” 9

Benton's speech drew approving nods from Vice President Calhoun, who was then presiding. Calhoun was undoubtedly frustrated that he could not join the fight, but the southern states' rights cause had yet another determined advocate in the Senate who could and did speak out—thirty-eight-year-old Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina. Hayne was a knight of southern chivalry who, as a youth, like the Greeks and Romans, had studied oratory as an art. Hayne's philosophy would bring him head to head with Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Though nine years Webster's junior, Hayne enjoyed an oratorical reputation that promised the contest would not be one-sided.

Webster's own reputation as an orator was greater than that of any living American. Behind him in 1830 was his Plymouth oration, which rivaled the writings of Washington Irving as a bestseller; his Dartmouth College plea, delivered in the old Supreme Court chamber, which had moved Chief Justice John Marshall to tears; his Bunker Hill address, which had been translated into several languages; and his plea for Greek independence, which had been read around the world. 10

On January 19, Hayne rose to speak on the Foot resolution. Branching out from Benton's rugged and rather sententious presentation, he gracefully invited the West to unite with the South against encroachments inimical to both sections. His idol and his friend, Calhoun, presided and encouraged him with a smile. Indeed, Hayne saw the public lands question as an opportunity to build an alliance between westerners and 0128 110 southerners which might help Calhoun's presidential chances. The leading Jackson senators, John Forsyth of Georgia, Edward Livingston of Louisiana, and Felix Grundy of Tennessee, urged him on. Buoyed, he charged the Northeast with a host of sins against the South and West, attacked the American System of high tariffs, and condemned federalism by saying, “There is no evil more to be deprecated than the consolidation of the government.” Hayne's blows at federalism, at New England, at all Webster stood for, fell like hammers on an anvil. 11

Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina was a champion of the southern states' rights cause. Library of Congress

Apparently Webster had not caught the full force of Hayne's attack. Wearing his customary blue coat with bright brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and big white cravat, he had just entered the Senate chamber, having climbed the marble stairs from the Supreme Court chamber below where he had been arguing a case. Webster was lounging against a pillar on the edge of the chamber, only half-listening, when Hayne began to lambaste him. Webster took a seat and paid close attention.

On the following day, Webster replied with a relatively short speech in which he defended both Foot's proposed land policy and the tariff of 1828. But he ended the speech by flinging the challenge back at Hayne, homing in on two points on which the South Carolinians were most sensitive. The first was slavery. By identifying anti-slavery with pro-western policy, Webster struck at the heart of the South-West coalition that Hayne and Calhoun hoped to forge. His second barb was aimed at the specter of consolidation, “that perpetual cry both of terror and delusion” which Hayne had raised. He deplored the tendency of some southerners habitually to “speak of the Union in terms of indifference, or even of disparagement” and regretted that Hayne was among them. He branded Hayne as a politician anxious to bring the whole value of the Union into question “as a mere question of present and temporary expediency; nothing more than a mere matter of profit and loss. The Union is to be preserved while it suits local and temporary purposes to preserve it; and to be sundered whenever it shall be found to thwart such purposes.” In short, the “Carolina doctrine” did not sound very American to Daniel Webster. 12

When Webster finished, it was clear that he had successfully shifted the focus of debate from the specifics of public land and tariffs to the larger issue. What was to be debated was the future of the United States. Hayne took the bait. Word went out that he would reply the next day. By that morning, the city was packed. The Indian Queen, Gadsby's, and every nameless boarding-house in Washington were jammed to the 0129 111 rafters with bickering partisans jostling each other on the staircases, disputing the merits of Hayne and Webster.

By eight o'clock, on the morning of January 21, every seat in the Senate chamber was filled. All eyes were on Hayne and he knew it. He looked boyish and slender in the coarse homespun suit he had substituted for the hated broadcloth of northern manufacture. If he was tense, he barely betrayed it. An observer noted that “he dashed into the debate like a mamluk cavalry upon a charge.” (The mamluks had created one of the most formidable empires of the Middle Ages in Egypt and Syria.) In a moment, Hayne was in full swing. He launched into a sarcastic examination of Webster's Federalist record in Congress, made a passionate defense of slavery, and finished with a ringing reaffirmation of the South Carolina theory of nullification. A glance at the “white, triumphant face” of the vice president revealed his satisfaction with his protege. During much of the speech, Calhoun was bent over his desk scrawling hasty, half-legible notes of advice and encouragement to Hayne, which a few moments later would be carried down the aisle most ostentatiously by one of the pages. 13 (Pages were a new fixture in the Senate chamber at that time.)

Hayne's speech took parts of two days, January 21 and 25, 1830. Webster sat through the entire punishing performance. His face a mask as unresponsive as a sphinx, he took careful notes. As he scribbled, it became clear to him that, carried away by his excitement, Hayne had carelessly misstated a crucial point of the whole nullification doctrine, laying himself open to attack. Webster must have smiled inwardly. 14

Few others caught the error. Southerners tumbled out of the Senate chamber flushed and ecstatic and proceeded to the taverns to toast Hayne, nullification, and the South. The administration's newspaper, Duff Green's United States Telegraph, was in a frenzy of delight. Through the aides he had sent to the chamber to listen to Hayne's remarks, President Jackson learned of their content almost immediately. Though uneasy over the emphasis being placed on nullification rather than public lands, on which he clearly supported Benton and Hayne, Jackson professed to be pleased. It was said that you could tell a New England man that night by his downcast face. But Webster was not downcast at all. His friends found him calm and confident, predicting that he would “grind” Hayne “as fine as a pinch of snuff.” 15

The morning of January 26, the day Webster would begin his reply to Hayne, dawned cold and clear. Margaret Bayard Smith, doyenne of Washington society whom I have quoted before, tells us that a biting wind filled the streets with clouds of red dust. She could write that day free from callers because, she said, “everyone is thronging to the Capitol . . . to hear Mr. Webster's reply to Col. Hayne's attack on him and his party.” 16

Coach after coach rolled up before the Capitol, and the sharp, frozen ruts in the road cut into the satin slippers of the ladies as they descended from their carriages into billows of ruffles. There were women everywhere—over 150 of them, one observer said. Mrs. Smith might regret the tendency of women to monopolize the seats in the gallery and on the floor, but that day, by the time they had positioned themselves, there was scarcely room for a senator to stand, much less sit. As Mrs. Smith noted: A debate on any political principle would have had no such attraction. But personalities are irresistible. It is a kind of moral gladiatorship. . . . The Senate Chamber . . . is the present arena and never were the amphitheatres of Rome more crowded by the highest ranks of both sexes. . . . Every seat, every inch of ground, 0130 112 even the steps were compactly filled. . . . The Senators were obliged to relinquish their chairs of State to the fair auditors . . . . 17

Lewis Machen, chief clerk of the Senate, of whom I have spoken before, confirmed Mrs. Smith's description of the day. He tells us:

. . . the Senate Chambers and Galleries were filled almost an hour before the time at which the Senate assembled. To accommodate the ladies who thronged the vestibules, not only the lobbies and passages below were filled with chairs, but even Senators had the gallantry to yield their seats; and, still, many were seen standing during the whole of the day. When Mr. Webster commenced his reply I never witnessed a more breathless attention. Amidst the visible excitement which prevailed, he arose. 18

Mr. President, Webster's reply to Hayne must still be ranked as one of the greatest addresses ever made in the Senate. With a packed chamber hanging on his every word and the ladies hanging on the very edges of their seats, Webster delivered what might well be considered the most powerful, most eloquent plea for the American Union any man has ever made. He spoke from twelve pages of notes; with much extemporizing, it took him several hours, spread over two days, to finish. Machen tells us that he spoke for three hours the first day. A Webster partisan, he claimed that “the missiles discharged against him fell harmless at his feet, or were returned with deadly energy.” 19

His deep voice filling the chamber like an organ's chords, Webster proceeded to examine and demolish Hayne's arguments, one by one. Simply by commending the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, he had pushed Hayne into accusing the nonslaveholding states of harboring plots to destroy the South. Webster was able to reply quite correctly that he had not uttered “a single word which any ingenuity could torture into an attack on the slavery of the South.” Hayne's sensitivity on the subject was, said Webster, typical of that of southern politicians who sought “to unite the whole South against Northern men, or Northern measures” on the basis of a feeling “at too intense a heat to admit discrimination or reflection.” Although he admitted that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery in the states, Webster refused to agree with Hayne that the morality of the institution was a matter of political abstraction which statesmen could safely ignore. “I regard domestic slavery as one of the greatest of evils, both moral and political. But though it be a malady, and whether it be curable, and, if so, by what means . . . I leave it to those whose right and duty it is to inquire and decide.”

During his assault on Clay's American System, Hayne had contemptuously implied that the people of South Carolina had no legitimate interest in canals or roads in other states. But Webster skillfully picked up this point and turned it around so as to appeal to the patriotic sentiment of the people in all the states:

“What interest,” asks he [Hayne], “has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?” Sir, this very question is full of significance. It developes the gentleman's whole political system, and its answer expounds mine. . . . On that system, it is true, she has no interest. On that system, Ohio and Carolina are different Governments and different countries, . . . On that system, Carolina has no more interest in a canal in Ohio than in Mexico. . . . Sir, we narrow-minded people of New England do not reason thus. . . . In our contemplation, Carolina and Ohio are parts of the same country; States, united under the same General Government, having interests, common, associated, intermingled. . . . We do not impose geographical limits to our patriotic feeling or regard; we do not follow rivers and mountains, and lines of latitude, to find boundaries, beyond which public improvements do not benefit us. . . . Sir, if a rail-road or canal, beginning in South Carolina, and ending in South Carolina, appeared to me to be of national importance and national magnitude, . . . if I were to stand up here, and ask what interest has Massachusetts in rail-roads in South Carolina, I should not be willing to face my constituents.

0131 113

Webster's Reply to Hayne, by George P.A. Healy, captures a moment of high drama in the old Senate chamber during the Hayne-Webster debates in January 1830. Boston Art Commission

This last point carried special weight, because Hayne and the other senators knew that, only a few days earlier, Webster had presented a petition from the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, asking the federal government to subscribe to its stock on the grounds that its projected road would aid the national welfare.

Listening intently as Webster took on South Carolina was Vice President Calhoun, who presided in the chair as “tense as a coiled spring.” Indeed, as Mrs. Smith noted, this was as much a conflict between personalities as issues, and the real principals involved were not Hayne and Webster, but Calhoun and Webster. As the strength of Webster's argument dawned on him, Calhoun's restlessness became “very evident.” The plea for internal improvements nettled him beyond endurance. Forgetting his position, his feelings gave way, and time and again he tried to interrupt Webster. Webster noted Calhoun's distress and deliberately stared first at the vice president and then at Hayne as he issued a pointed Shakespearean warning to both:

A barren sceptre in their gripe, Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand. No son of their's succeeding.

Webster was most effective when he talked of constitutional power and appealed to national pride and sentiment. He began his refutation of Hayne's constitutional position by distinguishing it from the right of revolution which, he said, every American would admit. Hayne interrupted to give his consent to this interpretation. But Webster then proceeded to show how it was wrong in principle and bound to be disastrous in practice. The federal government, he claimed, was not the limited creation of sovereign 0132 114 states but a popular government with powers derived directly from the people and spelled out by the Constitution:

I hold it to be a popular Government, erected by the people; those who administer it, responsible to the people; and itself capable of being amended and modified, just as the people may choose it should be. It is as popular, just as truly emanating from the people, as the State Governments. It is created for one purpose; the State Governments for another. It has its own powers; they have theirs. There is no more authority with them to arrest the operation of a law of Congress, than with Congress to arrest the operation of their laws. We are here to administer a constitution emanating immediately from the people, and trusted, by them to our administration.

Who was to decide the constitutionality of state or federal laws? The answer was clearly given in the Constitution itself in the two clauses which made the Constitution, as Webster said, “the supreme law of the land” and extended the judicial power “to all cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” To proceed on the opposite assumption—that the states were sovereign and could decide to obey or disobey federal laws at their pleasure—was to take a giant step toward civil war. Webster eloquently contrasted this bloody prospect with the harmony of the early Republic when Massachusetts and South Carolina had united to throw off British tyranny. “Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support.”

As the eulogy to the Union reached its zenith, men and women in the gallery wept openly. Webster's dark skin warmed and his eyes burned as if touched by fire. Even Calhoun revealed the emotions he tried so hard to conceal. Love and pride of country—these were things he could understand, too. By the time Webster concluded, with lines many a schoolboy would thereafter have to memorize, there was hardly a dry eye in the chamber. Here is what he said:

When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards: but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! 20

A few hours later, the contending giants met again at a White House levee. “How are you this evening, Colonel Hayne?” asked Webster graciously. “None the better for you, sir,” said the southerner with a smile. 21 Within a few weeks, Webster's speech was being sold everywhere and was in greater demand than any other congressional speech in American history. Webster's own son, Fletcher, wrote to his father that “I never knew what the Constitution really was, till your last short speech. I thought it was a compact between the states.” What should be clear, however, is that Webster's speech was as much political as it was philosophical. Daniel Webster was a very shrewd man. His debate with Hayne did much more than nationalize his reputation; it gave him a base of popular support from which he might reasonably seek the presidency. A speech which was powerful enough to draw praise from old adversaries like James Madison and from 0133 115 competitors like Henry Clay could inspire reverence and awe among his New England constituents. 22

In the tumult that followed Webster's speech, whatever was left of the Benton-Hayne theme of an alliance between the South and the West evaporated. Ultranationalist western senators in the chamber had thrilled to the patriotic fervor of Webster's words. Foot's original, nearly over-looked resolution, which had unleashed this avalanche of rhetoric, was eventually defeated. But the question being raised throughout Washington was how the president, a southerner and a westerner, stood? A correspondent from Jackson's home state wrote that Webster was now known “in every log house” in western Tennessee as “the champion of the Union.” 23 How did Old Hickory feel about that?

March 4, 1982

Mr. President, yesterday, I was unable to complete my statement. I discussed at some length the Webster-Hayne debate, and I wish now to continue my statement, “The Senate Comes of Age: 1829–1833.”

There were reports that after Hayne had made his first speech, the president had sent him a congratulatory note. Jackson was, no doubt, kindly disposed toward the argument Hayne had begun by criticizing eastern capitalists. But this was before the senator from South Carolina had been led by Webster into open advocacy of the right of a state to sit in judgment upon an act of Congress. Since Webster's famous second reply, Old Hickory had kept his own counsel to the great frustration of both sides and to Calhoun's particular exasperation.

Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Felix Grundy of Tennessee, and other administration senators not from the southern branch of the Democratic party believed that, for the benefit of his pro-tariff constituents, Webster had overstressed the perils of the situation. On the Senate floor, Benton came to Hayne's defense. Though the president neither applauded nor criticized Benton, southerners took his silence as boding well. They should not have been so naive. Instead, they should have listened more closely to the speech of Senator Edward Livingston of Louisiana a few days later for clues to the president's true feelings. Livingston was an intimate friend of the president and was destined soon to leave the Senate for the cabinet. In his speech, Livingston sought to return the debate to its original ground but also offered a brilliant defense of the Union against nullification. If the personal views of Jackson are to be found in Senate speeches, 0134 116 they are in this speech by Livingston, not in those by Hayne. 24

After waiting impatiently for more than a month for a sign from the White House, the South Carolinians decided on a scheme to force the issue. Here Calhoun and Hayne put their own heads into a trap. The occasion was to be the first Democratic party Jefferson Day Dinner on April 13, 1830. The place was Washington's Indian Queen Hotel, known by the luridly painted picture of Pocahontas swinging in front. Calhoun's men planned the evening, and, by scheduling twenty-four toasts, all of which were in praise of nullification, hoped to associate that doctrine with Jefferson and, most importantly, the guest of honor, Andrew Jackson. They scheduled Jackson to offer the first voluntary toast after the twenty-four.

That night, light blazed from the Indian Queen's windows and was reflected through the sparkling decanters of whiskey. The air was filled with the scent of turkey, partridges, and pickled oysters—and heavy with suspense. At each plate lay the program listing the twenty-four speakers. The meaning was clear. The Pennsylvania congressional delegation entered, took one look, and left.

At the White House, Jackson and Van Buren, his secretary of state, considered what their course of action should be. The conspirators' intentions were clear. How to show by his toast that Jackson was familiar with their intent and to demonstrate his determination to preserve the Union at all hazards was the puzzle. They settled on a plan. “Thus armed,” wrote Van Buren, “we repaired to the dinner with feelings on the part of the old Chief akin to those which would have animated his breast if the scene of this preliminary skirmish in defense of the Union had been the field of battle instead of the festive board.” 25

Benton arrived to find the hall alive with excitement. Dinner was served. From the head and foot of the central table, Calhoun and Jackson eyed each other. As each course was served, the tension mounted. Hayne began the speeches with a flowery reiteration of his challenge to Webster. Then came the twenty-four toasts. Jackson sat impassively, betraying nothing of his intentions. Finally, it was time for the volunteer toasts, and Jackson stiffly arose amid cheers. So many diners were on their feet that the diminutive Van Buren could not see and so climbed onto his chair.

Andrew Jackson looked straight into the eyes of John C. Calhoun and said, “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” Utter silence followed. “A proclamation of martial law in South Carolina and an order to arrest Calhoun where he sat,” said Isaac Hill, “could not have come with more blinding, staggering force.” Jackson raised his glass, a signal the toast was to be drunk standing. As a man, the room arose, Calhoun with the rest. Slowly Calhoun's hands closed around the stem of his glass. Hill reported that “his glass trembled in his hand and a little of the amber fluid trickled down the side.” Calhoun drank with the rest, while Jackson continued to stare at him. For a moment more, the white-haired president stood there, and then walked away to talk with Benton. Finally, all were reseated. The toastmaster called upon the vice president. Calhoun arose slowly. He lifted his glass. He picked up the challenge, surrendering nothing. Slowly, but clearly, he said, “The Union—next to our Liberty most dear.” Within five minutes, the room had cleared, men fleeing from the scene as from a battle. 26

From then on, the already strained relations between the president and his vice president went from bad to worse. Calhoun sagged under the strain. A visitor to the Senate gallery found the South Carolinian “more wrinkled and careworn than I had expected from his reputed age. . . . His voice 0135 117 is shrill and to my ear disagreeable. . . . His manners have in them an uneasiness, a hurried, incoherent air.” Calhoun, forty-eight years of age, was indeed uneasy. Once more, Van Buren had scored over his rival in the contest to ride Old Hickory's popularity into the presidency. 27

Calhoun sat uncomfortably in the vice president's chair in the Senate chamber, wishing for the end of the session and release. Before relief came with the close of the first session of the Twenty-first Congress on May 31, however, the Senate and the president locked horns once again. Despite his strong stand for the supremacy of the Union, Jackson had given ample evidence that on other issues he would support the exercise of national authority only in limited areas. One of these limited areas was that of internal improvements.

The House and Senate were indulging in an orgy of so-called pork barrel legislation that provided federal aid to individual projects. The logrolling was fast and furious on Capitol Hill. Would Senator A support Senator B 's bill for a highway in his state? The trading of votes and cooperation, either for the passage or defeat of bills, would, in time, become a basic and complicated part of congressional procedure in the movement of legislation through committees and on the floors of both houses. But in 1830, Jackson and his followers were disgusted by the raid on the federal treasury and the mileage such efforts gave to Henry Clay and his American System.

Jackson told Van Buren to watch Congress and bring to the White House the first vulnerable bill to meet his eye. By the end of April, Van Buren told the president that he had found the victim—a measure to authorize the government to subscribe $150,000 worth of stock to build a sixty-six-mile turnpike from Maysville to Lexington, Kentucky, Henry Clay's state. The bill had passed the House and would soon pass the Senate. Van Buren sat down to help Jackson write his first veto message, justifying the action by noting that the road lay entirely within one state. Despite a great deal of bluster, Clay's supporters in the Senate could not override the veto and had to leave for home on a crestfallen note. Jackson vetoed twelve measures during his administration—two more than all his predecessors combined. 28

As the session finally closed, Henry Clay fumed in the West; Calhoun angrily presided over the Senate, nursing his wounds; and Webster still basked in the glory of his recent speeches. It had been a busy five months for the senators, and they gladly went off for a seven-month rest.

During the second session of the Twenty-first Congress, the national spotlight shifted away from the Senate, but, with the opening of the Twenty-second Congress on December 5, 1831, the full glare focused on the senators once again.

In October 1831, Henry Clay sat in the library of Ashland, his Kentucky estate, reading a letter from Daniel Webster which went as follows:

You must be aware of the strong desire manifested in many parts of the country that you should come into the Senate. The wish is entertained here as earnestly as elsewhere. We are to have an interesting and arduous session. Everything is to be attacked. An array is preparing much more formidable than has ever yet assaulted what we think the leading and important public interests. Not only the tariff, but the Constitution itself, in its elemental and fundamental provisions, will be assailed with talent, vigor, and union. Everything is to be debated as if nothing had ever been settled. It would be an infinite gratification to me to have your aid, or rather, your lead. I know nothing so likely to be useful. Everything valuable in the government is to be fought for and we need your arm in the fight. 29

Webster's message was clear. The opposition was gearing up for a major battle with the obstinate president whose candidacy for 0136 118 reelection in 1832 was almost assured. To combat the Democrats, the opposition needed a strong leader and it turned to Clay, whose own nomination for the presidency was also a foregone conclusion.

Clay responded to the call to carry the fight into the enemy's camp. In the face of a ferocious Jackson press attack, Clay was elected to the Senate by a small majority of the Kentucky legislature and set off for Washington in November. He arrived, observed Margaret Bayard Smith, “borne up by the undying spirit of ambition,” looking “well and animated,” to be received with “the most marked deference and respect.” 30

Henry Clay was the consummate politician. Few have been his equal. Few have ever approached his effect upon a partisan audience. Fluent and, at times, capable of passages of inspired eloquence; a master of sarcasm and ridicule; his was the oratory that moves men to action. Webster and Calhoun spoke in abstractions; Clay spoke the language of the people. Webster and Calhoun inspired respect; Clay, love. 31

This was the militant figure that strode down Pennsylvania Avenue to take his place at the head of the Senate opposition when the Twenty-second Congress convened on December 5, 1831. Five days later, the National Republicans held their nominating convention in Baltimore and offered him the high office he long had sought.

As Clay surveyed his colleagues in the Senate, he must have rejoiced at his advantage. At his side was Webster with all the prestige of his great name. Still presiding, though he knew his days as vice president were numbered, was John C. Calhoun, whose break with the president was now complete. There also was Hayne, obviously no friend of Webster's, but out to revenge the wounds inflicted on his mentor in the chair by the president, willing to join with the opposition now. Also in Clay's camp 0137 119

Arrayed against Clay were pro-Jackson senators, opposite page and this page, from top left clockwise, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Hugh L. White, Felix Grundy, both of Tennessee, Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, John Forsyth of Georgia, and Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey. Library of Congress

0138 120 were John Middleton Clayton of Delaware and Thomas Ewing of Ohio, the latter a robust partisan and able debater. And, while they were of the states' rights persuasion and hostile to the tariff and internal improvements, Clay could scarcely fail to catch the signals that the erudite Littleton W. Tazewell and John Tyler of Virginia were sending out to make it known that they were ripe for opposition.

Against him, Clay could count John Forsyth of Georgia and, of course, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. These two were aided by Senators Felix Grundy and Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, and Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey.

Clay and his opposition faced off against the Jackson men. The Kentuckian was a dominant figure in the debate that winter. An impatient listener, he was wont to sit at indifferent ease reading or eating sticks of striped peppermint candy, a procedure varied by occasional restless wanderings over to the snuffbox that stood on the center table. When he spoke, his telling arguments and effective gestures compelled the attention of his listeners. 32

Skirmishing began almost at once. But Clay was looking for an issue on which to leap. A less provocative message than that with which Jackson opened the Twenty-second Congress, however, could hardly have been penned. For lack of a better scapegoat, the opposition seized upon the nomination of Van Buren as minister to England. At least on this issue, Clay knew that Calhoun's and Hayne's hatred of the Red Fox of Kinderhook (Van Buren) would keep them in the opposition's fold.

Van Buren had resigned as secretary of state in 1831, when Jackson's entire cabinet was overhauled. In June of that year, Jackson had named him to the London mission, too late for the Senate to act upon the appointment. By January 1832, his confirmation was at the mercy of his foes, and a pettier story of party politics is scarcely found in the Senate's history. None really doubted Van Buren's ability or questioned his integrity. The Calhoun faction acted out of spite; Clay, Webster, and Clayton acted out of partisan spleen. Calhoun's men took the tack that Van Buren had plotted the disruption in the cabinet and engineered the quarrel between the president and the vice president. Clay and Webster and their followers denounced him as a spoilsman and thundered against Van Buren's part as secretary of state in the negotiations on the West India trade, where he repudiated previous U. S. policies.

When the nomination reached the Senate, nothing was done for five weeks. The leaders of the opposition were carefully preparing their speeches for publication and wide distribution because they did not have copying machines in those days.

The venom behind the procrastination was finally revealed in a resolution entrusted to an obscure member, Senator John Holmes of Maine, to recommit the nomination with instructions to investigate the disruption of the cabinet and whether Van Buren had “participated in any practices disreputable to the national character.” This cavalier measure was withdrawn without action but then the grander orators began. One after another, with a poor simulation of sorrowful regret over the necessity of injuring an amiable man, a former senator at that, they poured forth protest against the nomination. Clay, Webster, Clayton, Ewing, Hayne, and seven others recited their elaborately prepared harangues under the approving eye of Calhoun in the chair.

Only four replies were made, the principal one by John Forsyth, the accomplished de facto floor leader of the administration. Forsyth bitterly assailed the partisan crucifixion and sarcastically commended the fine public 0139 121 spirit of the senators who voluntarily brought such distress upon themselves in the public good. Forsyth's barbs hit home. Hayne later admitted that he had spoken and voted against his judgment at the behest of party alone. John Tyler noted that he finally voted for confirmation, “not that I liked the man overmuch,” but because he could find no principle to justify his rejection and did not care to join “the notoriously factious opposition . . . who opposed everything favored by the Administration.” 33

We should not be surprised that so few Jackson men came to Van Buren's defense. Many of them rightly saw that in his defeat could come his victory. Benton, who did not participate in the Senate debate, was of this view. Benton believed that though “rejection was a bitter medicine, there was health at the bottom of the draught.” Freshman Senator William Marcy of New York, a firm friend of Van Buren, agreed. “There would have been some difficulty in enlisting the popular feeling in his [Van Buren's] favor, but the blow aimed at Van Buren, Old Hickory will receive, and the two are and will be identified.” 34

When the vote was finally taken for confirmation, it ended in a prearranged tie. In triumph, Vice President Calhoun cast the deciding vote for rejection, ending, he was sure, his rival's career. Within earshot of Benton, Calhoun gloated, “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick, sir, never kick.” Benton knew differently. Said he, “You have broken a Minister, and elected a vice president.” Marcy wrote happily to London to inform Van Buren, jokingly pretending to be transmitting evil news. Van Buren returned to the United States a political martyr. In May, the Democrats chose him as Jackson's vice-presidential running mate. 35

One might think that the presidential election would overshadow all other events in 1832. Instead, a new crisis, really a long-smoldering crisis, suddenly came to a head more quickly than anyone had expected. Ever since the tariff of 1828—the so-called Tariff of Abominations—South Carolina, with Calhoun at the helm aided by Hayne, had been nursing the doctrine of nullification.

To try to conciliate the South, Jackson had asked Congress to revise the harsh 1828 tariff. And, indeed, a new, milder tariff did pass Congress on July 14, 1832, with southern support. Those who thought the threat had passed failed to reckon on the determination of South Carolina and John C. Calhoun. In August, Calhoun wrote a public letter to South Carolina Governor Hamilton defending nullification. The governor then called a state convention which met in Columbia in November and adopted an ordinance nullifying the tariff and prohibiting the collection of any duties within the state beginning February 1, 1833. The legislature passed laws to enforce the ordinance. President Jackson responded by alerting United States forces in South Carolina and by issuing his famous proclamation condemning nullification and asserting the supremacy of the federal government.

As Christmas 1832 approached, threats of war and secession were heard on every side. Charleston, South Carolina, looked like a military depot. Realizing that Jackson already considered him a traitor, Calhoun allowed himself to be chosen by the South Carolina legislature to fill the Senate seat of Hayne, who willingly stepped aside and was elected governor. A few days later, Calhoun resigned the vice-presidency. (By then, it was clear that Jackson and Van Buren had won the November elections. The electoral vote would be 219 for Jackson, 49 for Clay.)

Calhoun addressed a hurried note to Secretary of State Edward Livingston:

0140 122

Sir, having concluded to accept a seat in the United States Senate, I herewith resign the office of Vice-President of the United States.

To this extraordinary document, neither the secretary nor the administration paid any attention. It was so completely ignored that Calhoun finally wrote Livingston to see if he had received it. Even the Senate disdained to recognize the withdrawal of its presiding officer. Business continued as usual as Calhoun prepared to leave South Carolina to carry his state's battle onto the floor of the Senate. 36

Calhoun was literally taking his life into his hands when he left Charleston. There were rumors that Jackson had sworn to hang him. Loyal followers accompanied him as far as the Virginia line into Washington but even they began to drift off as the border was reached. Only a few curious spectators saw him enter his old boardinghouse. The mail that awaited him, full of drawings of skulls and coffins, did little to quiet his nerves.

Crowds lined the streets the next morning, January 4, 1833, to watch him head off to the Senate. The Capitol was packed, and curious friends and foes thronged the Senate gallery. Calhoun entered the chamber, deathly pale but calm. The chamber was just as he had left it with the familiar sound of scratching quill pens, knuckles rapping sand off the wet ink, the rustle of newspapers tossed down as he passed. As the new senator from South Carolina sat down, several southerners came to shake his hand, but many former friends, as they sometimes will, hung back. Some deliberately avoided his gaze. And, my, what a gaze from the piercing, black eyes of Calhoun! When he strode forward to be sworn in, his colleagues watched in wonder as the Great Nullifier solemnly swore to “uphold, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States.”

Calhoun held his peace in the Senate until Jackson's Force bill, designed to enable the president to use the army and navy to enforce revenue laws, arrived in mid-January. He sprang to his feet. His words were exceedingly bitter. In youth, he told the Senate, he had “cherished a deep and enthusiastic admiration of this Union.” He had looked “with rapture” on the federal system, but always knew that, in the last resort, the body that delegated the power could regain the power. And now, for merely daring to assert the state's constitutional rights, “We are threatened to have our throats cut, and those of our wives and children.” He stopped suddenly and told his already startled colleagues, “No, I go too far. I did not intend to use language so strong.” An amazed correspondent for Baltimore's Patriot noted, “Mr. Calhoun spoke under a degree of excitement never before witnessed in a parliamentary body. His whole frame was agitated.” 37

When another senator hastily assured Calhoun that the government would appeal to South Carolina's sense of justice and patriotism, Calhoun retorted, “I am sorry that South Carolina cannot appeal to the sense of justice of the General Government.” When several senators called him to order, Calhoun again “begged pardon for the warmth with which he had expressed himself.” But he could never take back his words. The stage was set for another memorable debate in the Senate, and, this time, the principals would be, not Hayne acting as a surrogate for the silent vice president, but the former vice president himself up against Daniel Webster. 38

That Daniel Webster should represent the administration in this dramatic confrontation had a delicious irony for the swarthy New Englander. Almost simultaneously, he was battling Jackson on the bank issue. Webster and Jackson had not even been on 0141 123 speaking terms for more than a year, but astute senators were aware that Webster was being wooed to take up the administration's part on this issue. Senator Tyler of Virginia, a Calhoun supporter, wrote home in January, “I dined at the Palace [White House] . . . a few days since and found Mr. W. there in all his glory.” 39

The great debate began in mid-February 1833. Calhoun had introduced three resolutions which stated that the United States existed by virtue of a constitutional compact through which each state retained its sovereignty and could judge for itself whether or not the laws of the United States should apply in its case. The resolutions also included a specific denial that the people of the United States were or had ever been “one union.” He set the stage dramatically for his opening salvo to defend his resolutions and condemn the Force bill. Pushing some chairs down to both ends of a long desk which stood in the front of the chamber, he enclosed himself in a sort of cage where he could pace up and down as he spoke. Close observers noted how rapidly he had aged in the past few months. His dark eyes were sunken; his short-clipped hair, brushed back from a broad forehead, was streaked with gray. To some, the gaunt figure looked “the arch traitor . . . like Satan in Paradise.” To others, he was a great patriot with his back against the wall, battling fiercely in defense of violated liberties.

Calhoun's speech, which consumed two days, was uncharacteristically emotional and vindictive. He attacked the president and his friends. He attacked Webster and New England. He claimed that the Force bill declared war against South Carolina. “It decrees a massacre of her citizens. . . . It enables him [Jackson] to subject every man in the United States . . . to martial law . . . and under the penalty of court-martial to compel him to imbrue his hand in his brother's blood.” All the while, Webster's head was bent over a paper on which he busily took notes.

At the end of the first day, in the midst of “the tempest and whirlwind of his [Calhoun's] oratory,” a voice screamed from the gallery, “Mr. President, I am being squeezed to death!” The almost unbearable tension snapped and the Senate, except for Calhoun, rocked with laughter and adjourned until the next day, when Calhoun took up his thread again for another hour before stopping.

As soon as Calhoun finished, Webster arose to speak. He had to pause for the cheering from the New Englanders in the gallery to subside. Standing in the wings were Jackson's intimates, ready to speed down Capitol Hill to the White House with news of the confrontation. Webster's speech was essentially a replay of his part in the Hayne debate. It was late in the evening when he concluded his masterful argument on the proposition that “the Constitution is not a compact between sovereign States.” Brushing aside personalities, scarcely referring to any speech made during the debate, he stuck to his subject and spoke earnestly, without passion.

Long before Webster finished, the lights had been lit in the chamber where the crowd remained densely packed. With his conclusion, the galleries rose and cheered. Outraged, Senator George Poindexter of Mississippi demanded an immediate adjournment. The victory was Webster's. The president was delighted. Jackson wrote to a friend that “Calhoun was in a state of dementation—his speech was a perfect failure; and Mr. Webster handled him like a child.”

On February 24, the Force bill came to a vote. With the beginning of the calling of the roll, Calhoun and all the enemies of the measure, with the single exception of John Tyler, arose and filed from the Senate chamber. A few moments earlier, Clay had left the 0142 124 chamber on an unknown errand. The Force bill passed 32 to 1; the nay was Tyler's.

Troops stood ready to march into South Carolina to wrest the federal revenues from their coffers, but all sides hoped that there was still time for an eleventh-hour compromise. At the same time the Force bill was moving through Congress, a compromise tariff bill was keeping pace with it. Administration supporters had introduced a measure for the immediate lowering of the tariff. Neither Henry Clay nor Calhoun wanted to see this bill pass, for it would permit Jackson and Van Buren to take credit for settling—and winning—the issue. Instead, Clay formulated his own compromise tariff bill, and Calhoun reluctantly agreed to support it.

Clay introduced his modified tariff bill on February 13, 1833, declaring, “I have ambition, the ambition of being the humble instrument in the hands of Providence to reconcile a divided people.” As the “humble instrument” sat down, Calhoun arose and stiffly announced his support. The galleries thundered with applause. By March 1, the measure had passed both houses of Congress. The new tariff bill and the Force bill were both signed into law by Jackson on March 2, the last day of the Twenty-second Congress.

The nullification crisis was finally over. South Carolina suspended the nullification ordinance after the new tariff passed. Both sides claimed victory. What lessons had the three giants of the Senate learned from the experience? Calhoun, sullen and bitter, now knew that no state standing by itself could successfully carry out the doctrine of nullification. The South would have to unite if it was to stand at all. Webster was frustrated. He had supplied the brilliant arguments, but Jackson was getting most of the credit for routing the Nullifiers. And Clay had turned the crisis to his advantage, when, after staying out of it until the very end, he had negotiated a genuine compromise and bolstered his sagging political stock. 40

Even while the burning issue of nullification was before the Congress, the drama of another major dilemma continued to grow apace. This was the issue of the Second Bank of the United States. The question of the bank was very complicated and, at the end of the Twenty-second Congress, it still hung fire. But since it affected the Senate and the election of 1832, I intend to touch on it here briefly before I close.

The issue between the president and his opponents in Congress was the renewing of the Second Bank of the United States whose existing, twenty-year charter was due to expire in 1836. In his first message to Congress, in December 1829, Jackson had revealed his basic antagonism to the bank and suggested an investigation into its dealings. Along with his supporters in the House and Senate, most notably Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson viewed the bank as a national monster, established unconstitutionally and run privately and in a dictatorial fashion by its president, the aristocratic Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia. The bank existed, claimed Benton and others, for the benefit of the privileged commercial interests of the Northeast to the detriment of the government and the agrarian interests of the South and West.

To many others, however, Clay and Webster among the leaders, the memory of the country's near-fiscal collapse during the War of 1812, after the demise of the First Bank of the United States, had not faded. To them, the bank was the source of the nation's stability, and, since this group still held a slim majority in both houses, Congress paid little attention to Jackson's call for an investigation. Jackson, however, meant business and, in his next annual address to Congress in 1830, recommended that the Second Bank of the United States be replaced with a new 0143 125 government bank that would be a branch of the treasury.

The debates over rechartering the Second Bank of the United States pitted President Jackson against much of the Senate and consumed most of 1831 and 1832. Library of Congress

Thomas Hart Benton took up the president's cause in the Senate. On February 2, 1831, he tried to introduce a resolution against recharter of the bank. Despite a fiery speech that lasted several hours, Benton was denied permission even to present his resolution. His words were not wasted, however; pro-Jackson presses circulated his speech widely, and the antibank argument began to make an impact on the electorate. Meanwhile, Clay, fighting mad over the Maysville Road veto, returned to the Senate to lead the fight for the bank and to give Benton a run for his money. 41

Confident of a majority in the current Congress and wary of increased Jackson strength in the next, supporters of the bank decided to apply at once—four years early—for a renewal of the charter. The move led to frantic scrambling in both the House and Senate. In the House, a freshman representative and pro-Jackson man from Georgia, Augustin Clayton, recited a list of fifteen charges against the bank. These charges had been written down for him by Senator Benton on a small piece of paper that Clayton kept wrapped around his finger to refresh his memory as he spoke. Benton had his own problems in the Senate, Isaac Bassett tells us:

0144 126

While Mr. Benton was making some remarks on the United States Bank bill, an incident occurred in the Senate Chamber. A piece of iron, part of a horseshoe, was thrown from the gallery into the body of the Chamber, passing near the head of Senator Benton. The person who threw, hastily withdrew from the gallery but was followed and apprehended by Mr. Shackford, the Doorkeeper. After being detained a little while, he was released by order of the Vice President. He was found to be deranged. 42

Even crib sheets could not save the antibank forces. On June 11, 1832, the Senate voted 28 to 20 for recharter; on July 3, the House concurred, 107 to 86. For seven days, it looked as if the Clay forces had made a shrewd, early move. But, on July 10, the House and Senate received Jackson's stinging veto of the bank recharter. 43

Clay and Benton faced off in the chamber that very hot July—no air conditioning in those days—to debate the president's veto. Benton rose to defend the president and, in the course of his harangue, charged that Clay's attack wanted courtesy and decorum. Clay took the remarks personally and retorted savagely, pointedly telling Benton that when “some senators” rose to speak, “the galleries are quickly emptied, with whatever else the Senate chamber may then be filled.” The Kentuckian professed himself at a loss to determine which of the Missourian's opinions of Jackson one was to take for the correct one and made caustic allusion to the fight between Jackson and the Benton brothers that had taken place years before. Certainly, Clay sneered, “I never complained of the President beating a brother of mine after he was prostrated and lying apparently lifeless.” Benton flung back taunt for taunt. Aspersion brought aspersion until, somewhat belatedly, the chair called for order.

Finally, the question was put on the passage of the bank bill. By a vote of 22 for and 19 against, the Senate failed to override the veto. It was Friday, July 13, 1832, and a black day for Henry Clay. 44

Jackson viewed his overwhelming presidential election victory over Clay in the fall of 1832 as a mandate to proceed against the bank. In September 1833, he announced that the government would begin removing its deposits from the bank and placing them in selected state banks. Chastened but. not undone, Biddle, meanwhile, began a campaign of restricting loans and tightening credit to create financial distress and arouse protests that would force the president to change his policy.

When the new Congress convened in December 1833, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were at the forefront of the battle to save the bank. Day after day, they held up important Senate business to read “distress memorials.” In time, delegations of hard-pressed businessmen began to show up to lobby their senators and representatives. Webster and the other opponents of the administration welcomed them—Webster even once ushering a group of thirty men onto the floor of the Senate, placing them in various spots around the chamber while he read aloud their petition.

Thus, it was clear at the opening of the Twenty-third Congress that the bank issue would not go away; indeed, it would continue to escalate until it resulted in the first and only Senate censure of a president. The dramatic story of the censure of Andrew Jackson is so compelling that I would like to save it for my next statement on the history of the Senate. The years we have just reviewed, 1829 through 1833, which included the Webster-Hayne debates, the rejection of Van Buren, the nullification crisis, and the opening salvos of the bank war, have been far busy enough for now.