Part One

 

THE TIME AND THE PLACE

As our first story begins, in 1803, Washington was no more than a raw, country village. Legend has it that a new French envoy, looking about upon his arrival, cried: “My God! What have I done to be condemned to reside in this city!” In the unfinished Capitol sat the Senate of the United States, already vastly different from that very first Senate which had sat in the old New York City Hall in 1789, and even more different from the body originally planned by the makers of the Constitution in 1787.

The founding fathers could not have envisioned service in the Senate as providing an opportunity for “political courage,” whereby men would endanger or end their careers by resisting the will of their constituents. For their very concept of the Senate, in contrast to the House, was of a body which would not be subject to constituent pressures. Each state, regardless of size and population, was to have the same number of Senators, as though they were ambassadors from individual sovereign state governments to the Federal Government, not representatives of the voting public. Senators would not stand for re-election every two years—indeed, Alexander Hamilton suggested they be given life tenure—and a six-year term was intended to insulate them from public opinion.

Nor were Senators even to be elected by popular vote; the state legislatures, which could be relied upon to represent the conservative property interests of each state and to resist the “follies of the masses,” were assigned that function. In this way, said Delegate John Dickinson to the Constitutional Convention, the Senate would “consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”

Moreover, the Senate was to be less of a legislative body—where heated debates on vital issues would be followed anxiously by the public—and more of an executive council, passing on appointments and treaties and generally advising the President, without public galleries or even a journal of its own proceedings. Local prejudices, said Hamilton, were to be forgotten on the Senate floor, else it would simply be a repetition of the Continental Congress where “the first question has been ‘how will such a measure affect my constituents and . . . my re-election.’”

The original twenty-two United States Senators, meeting in New York in 1789, at first seemed to fulfill the expectations of the makers of the Constitution, particularly regarding its resemblance to the House of Lords. A distinguished and glittering gathering of eminent and experienced statesmen, the Senate, as compared with the House of Representatives, was on the whole far more pompous and formal, its chambers far more elaborate, and its members far more concerned with elegance of dress and social rank. Meeting behind closed doors, without the use of standing committees, the Senate consulted personally with President Washington, and acted very nearly as an integral part of the administration.

But, as it must to all legislative bodies, politics came to the United States Senate. As the Federalist party split on foreign policy and Thomas Jefferson resigned from the Cabinet to organize his followers, the Senate became a forum for criticism of the executive branch, and the role of executive council was assumed instead by a Cabinet of men upon whom the President could depend to share his views and be responsible to him. Other precedents had already divided the Senate and the White House. In 1789 “Senatorial Courtesy” rejected Benjamin Fishbourne as officer of the Port of Savannah because he was unacceptable to the Georgia Senators. Shortly thereafter, special committees launched the first Senate investigations of Administration policies and practices. And in that same year the impossibility of the Senate’s role as an executive council became apparent when a Northwest Indian Treaty was being discussed in person with the Senate by Washington and his Secretary of War. Senator Maclay and others, fearful (as he expressed it in his diary) that “the President wishes to tread on the necks of the Senate,” sought to refer the matter to a select committee. The President, Maclay records,

started up in a violent fret . . . [and withdrew] with a discontented air. Had it been any other man than the man whom I wish to regard as the first character in the world, I would have said with sullen dignity.

Gradually the Senate assumed more of the aspects of a legislative body. In 1794 public galleries were authorized for regular legislative sessions; in 1801 newspaper correspondents were admitted; and by 1803 the Senate was debating who should have the privilege of coming upon the Senate floor. Congressmen, Ambassadors, Department Heads and Governors could be agreed upon, but what about “the ladies”? Senator Wright contended “that their presence gives a pleasing and necessary animation to debate, polishing the speakers’ arguments and softening their manner.” But John Quincy Adams, whose puritanical candor on such occasions will be subsequently noted, replied that the ladies “introduced noise and confusion into the Senate, and debates were protracted to arrest their attention.” (The motion to admit “the ladies” was defeated 16–12, although this policy of exclusion would be reversed in later years, only to be restored in modern times.)

Although Senators were paid the munificent sum of $6 per day, and their privileges included the use of great silver snuffboxes on the Senate floor, the aristocratic manners which had characterized the first Senate were strangely out of place when the struggling hamlet of Washington became the capital city in 1800, for its rugged surroundings contrasted sharply with those enjoyed at the temporary capitals in New York and Philadelphia. Formality in Senate procedures was retained, however—although Vice President Aaron Burr, himself an object of some disrepute after killing Hamilton in a duel, frequently found it necessary to call Senators to order for “eating apples and cakes in their seats” and walking between those engaged in discussion. And John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that some of his colleagues’ speeches “were so wild and so bluntly expressed as to be explained only by recognizing that the member was inflamed by drink.” But certainly the Senate retained greater dignity than the House, where Members might sit with hat on head and feet on desk, watching John Randolph of Roanoke stride in wearing silver spurs, carrying a heavy riding whip, followed by a foxhound which slept beneath his desk, and calling to the doorkeeper for more liquor as he launched vicious attacks upon his opponents.

Nevertheless, the House, still small enough to be a truly deliberative body, overshadowed the Senate in terms of political power during the first three decades of our government. Madison said that “being a young man and desirous of increasing his reputation as a statesman, he could not afford to accept a seat in the Senate,” whose debates had little influence on public opinion. Many Senators surrendered their seats to become members of the House, or to hold other state and local offices; and the Senate frequently adjourned to permit its members to hear an important House debate.

Senator Maclay, whose diary provides the best, if somewhat acidly warped, record of that early Senate, frequently complained of dull and trivial sessions, as witness this entry for April 3, 1790: “Went to the Hall. The minutes were read. A message was received from the President of the United States. A report was handed to the Chair. We looked and laughed at each other for half an hour, and adjourned.”

But as the Senate shed its role as executive council and entered on a more equal basis with the House into the legislative process, it also became apparent that no Constitutional safeguards, however nobly created, could prevent political and constituent pressures from entering those deliberations. Maclay was disgusted that, in place of “the most delicate honor, the most exalted wisdom and the most refined generosity” governing every act and deed of his colleagues, as he had expected, he found “the basest selfishness. . . . Our government is a mere system of jockeying opinions: ‘Vote this way for me, and I will vote that way for you.’” The local prejudices which Hamilton had hoped to exclude only intensified, particularly as the Federalists of New England and the Jeffersonians of Virginia split along sectional as well as partisan lines. State legislatures, which would become increasingly responsive to those previously scorned “masses” as property qualifications for voting were removed, transmitted the political pressures of their own constituents to their Senators through “instructions” (a device which in this country apparently had originated in the old Puritan town meetings, which had instructed their deputies to the Massachusetts General Court on such measures as “removing the Capital from the wicked city of Boston,” taking any steps possible “to exterminate the legal profession,” and preventing debtors from paying their debts “with old rusty barrels of guns that are serviceable for no man, except to work up as old iron”). Some Senators were also required to return regularly to their state legislatures, to report like Venetian envoys on their stewardship at the Capital.

It was a time of change—in the Senate, in the concept of our government, in the growth of the two-party system, in the spread of democracy to the farm and the frontier and in the United States of America. Men who were flexible, men who could move with or ride over the changing currents of public opinion, men who sought their glory in the dignity of the Senate rather than its legislative accomplishments—these were the men for such times. But young John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts was not such a man.