Transcripts For CSPAN3 American Artifacts Congress Hall 20240712

Philadelphia serves as our temporary u. S. Capital. This room is for the house of representatives. The second floor was the United States senate. The house of representatives, each representative at that point in our history represented 30,000 people. We had a population around 3. 75 million. We had 106 members of the house he would sit in this room, and eventually from 16 states. The story of philadelphia as the u. S. Capital, we are taking the new constitution and doing things like adding new states to the original 13. Also the bill of rights would become a part of our constitution while philadelphia was the capital. In fact, secretary of state Thomas Jefferson would formally announce the amendments to the constitution by basically coming to congress here in this building and officially announcing that we have changed our constitution, which of course, the bill of rights is a huge part of our history and will be in the future a continuing talking point in our political life. But also it is the amendment process itself. We are proving that that part of the constitution works, that we can update and make changes to that constitution without having to start completely over again from the beginning. But really for this building, to a large degree, it is creating the american political system, the twoparty system that we know today is going to begin here and its going to begin with issues, much as you would expect. Early issues that we would face as the United States would be debt. We have debt and spending arguments and debates in this building. Its not any different except for the details as to what we do today in washington, d. C. We argued about debts from the revolutionary war. Our early government, Alexander Hamilton the treasury secretary, wanted all of the debt in the state to come through the federal government and then to use that debt, paying it off to build credit for the young United States, and not everyone agreed with his plans, so you start seeing divisions. And then Foreign Policy questions would rise. Britain and france go to war and the 1790s and a lot of americans felt like we owed france. They helped us in our war. We still do not like the british very much. But for George Washington, the first president , the notion of neutrality is preferable. We dont really have any money. We did not have a navy at all and our army was not much to speak of, so we were certainly not in a position to go and fight a war, certainly not in europe and probably not even fighting our neighbors in british canada in those days. So he is going to present with his cabinet approval a neutrality proclamation, which starts dividing us into this question of, ought we be doing more to help france . Now, in the same notion of keeping us out of war, George Washington will send john j. , at jay at that time our first chief justice of the Supreme Court, send him to britain to negotiate a new treaty, again with the the idea of keeping us out of this european war and settling questions of the border and these rights. John jay had been on the team that negotiated the end of the revolutionary war, so he seemed like a good candidate for washington to send. The treaty he brought back becomes very controversial and really one of the tipping points in creating these two parties as sort of leading to what we know today. The treaty basically becomes publicly attacked in the press, the press of what would become the democratic republican party, the party of men like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, would start vilifying this treaty. What is interesting is nobody has actually read it. It has not been published yet. But yet, its going to be pilloried in the press to the point where a lot of people hate this treaty that they do not know anything about. The federalist side, the side of the john adamss and Alexander Hamiltons, they are in favor of the treaty, in favor of building the young economy of the United States, staying out of a war, trading with all sides in europe, not being limited by an alliance with france. We see this treaty become a symbolic head point between these two sides. And the Senate Approves the treaty. Now, according to the constitution, the Senate Approves treaties and they are done. Now, the problem is, the house of representatives basically says we want a chance to discuss this treaty as well. And so, they demand of washington to see all of the papers and so on. Well, he says, no, the Senate Approves it, you guys have nothing to do with it. What the house is going to do, maybe what we will do is take away the funding. We wont pay for this treaty. Anything that has to be paid for, we will just not spend the money, therefore, the treaty will effectually die at this point in time. So that is not necessarily a new strategy that you see in washington dc today. So, the big fight in the house of representatives in this room is whether or not to pay for this treaty. And there are days of debates, and on the last day, there is a big crowd on our public balcony. You have men like Vice President john adams, Supreme Court justices sitting in the balcony, and of course, an era where we love our speeches, long political speeches, deep, infused with rhetoric. And the best speaker of the time is a man named fisher ames. He is a federalist. He is definitely wanting this treaty to survive. But he has been ill. He has not said anything. Everyone is waiting to see if he will make the last statement on it. And he does. He says, if my strength can hold out, i would like to say a few words on the subject. He speaks for about one hour. I think it is about 55 pages in the congressional record. He collapses at the end. He talks about the last war with the british, and do people remember the devastation, and do we really want to do this again, fight a war for years . Apparently some of the men had tears in their eyes, and when he finally finishes, the Supreme Court Justice James iradel turns to adams and says, my god, isnt that man great, and adam says, yes, indeed, he is. So the treaty ends up passing by just a couple votes. At one point there is a committee of the whole vote. The head of the committee was our first speaker of the house, and he breaks the tie. He is ostensibly on the democratic republican, jeffersonian side, so he should be against the treaty, but he is convinced that maybe not going to war is a good idea, so he ends up voting to pass the bill for this funding of this treaty and he is vilified. He is vilified that he voted for this treaty against his side to the point where he loses his seat in his next election to congress. But even worse, in the short term he is stabbed on the sidewalk by his brotherinlaw. He survived, but i am sure that family gatherings became a little awkward. So it tells us how high our political tensions were in the early days. And yet, and yet at the same time we are proving that new constitution, despite these difficulties, works. Because probably the best day in this rooms history in a lot of ways is the day john adams is inaugurated. He will stand on that platform with Thomas Jefferson also at the front of the room, outgoing president George Washington, and this is a big deal. Changing president s for us today is a fairly normal thing. We have big parades and parties and its a big thing, but this was a really important day, because this is where we were proving that the system, where we, the voters elect our leaders, and we change them when we vote, we are proving that that system works, because the john adams election is a lot of firsts. It is the first time we will not have George Washington as our president. George washington is the only man to be unanimously elected for president. Which he was twice. He did not run for office. At the end of his first term, he did not even want a second term. He was kind of talk into it. Guys on both sides talk him into another four years. He does not really run. He is unanimously reelected. At the end of the second term, people tried to talk him into a third, but hes not having it. He just wants to retire at this point in time. It is somebody elses turn. So he will step aside for john adams. Now, we do not know if this works. We have never done this before. We have never actually changed our president. Will the people accept this . We dont know. The other thing to remember is john adams was contested in his election. He had to fight a battle against his opponent, who was Thomas Jefferson. These two had been friends. Obviously they wrote the declaration of independence together. But now opposite sides of the fence, they dont even want to talk to each other. So the election is very ugly, it is very nasty, it is very close. It is kind of, for us today, a normal president ial election. We have never had a president who only got half the vote, we have never had a president who had to really fight for an election, and of course, the other problem in those early days is if you come in second, you are Vice President , which means the new president is one party, the new Vice President is the other party. Just pick any modern election you like, put the two opponents together and you could see how neither of them would be particularly happy. So john adams and Thomas Jefferson are not happy to handing at the front of the room together. This is a full house that day. The balcony, the seats, you have most of the government here. A lot of curiosity. But you can also figure out half the men in this room are not very happy to see john adams standing up there. The other half of the men in the room are not happy to see Thomas Jefferson standing up there. And generally speaking, no one is happy that George Washington is leaving us at this time. So john adams would look around and see a lot of people who were not very happy. There were people with tears in their eyes that washington was leaving them, and he would kind of later say that as he looked around, he only saw one person that day who looked happy, which was of course George Washington, who had a look on his face that said, john adams, you are fairly in and i am fairly out. So now lets find out who is happier on this day. But washington would quietly go to private life, and i think very happily withdraw from the scene. Adams himself would be inaugurated. He would have a difficult presidency because now were really seeing the throes of political fighting going on, but it happened peacefully. We proved that constitution worked and that we could continue in times of difficulty with the system in place. In 1800, they would leave this building and move to the current capitol in washington, d. C. Adams and jefferson would have another difficult election, this time jefferson winning and he would be the first president inaugurated in the new capitol of washington, d. C. But these years in philadelphia are setting the tone for the rest of our early history all the way up to today. So, the room itself will start out as a courthouse. So, this would have been a courtroom, but around the time this building has finished construction, it is actually being built during the constitutional convention. So when they finished construction is around the time philadelphia offers it to the u. S. Government. Philadelphias secret hope is if we are nice to them, they will just stay here and not go to that city along the potomac. So they give them the Court Building and they actually end up expanding it to make a little more room for congress. We think the setup looks like this. We actually have a seating chart from one session of congress that shows the design of the desks. We do not have any desks that have survived. We are fortunate that we do have some of the chairs today. Unfortunately, we only have about 30 of them between the two houses of congress. And most of them we do not know necessarily which house they were in. For this room, as far as original items goes, the chair on the platform for the speaker of the house is an original. We actually have three chairs exactly like that. We do not necessarily know which was which. But we have one today which we assume was for the speaker of the house, one for the Vice President , as president of the senate, and one for the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Again, we do not know which one is which. What we can fairly say is that somebody important sat in that chair for speaker of the house. Whether it was the speaker of the house or not, we are not sure. But as far as this room went, in the early 1800s, it became a courthouse again. This was divided into two rooms for many years. They divided down the middle. So they could have two rooms instead of one very large one. About the time of the first world war, the City Government has left this block and the city is recognizing the historic value of these buildings. Had some restoration work done, and they kind of want to turn them all into museum space. So if you had visited this in the years around the first world war, the 1920s, you would have seen the room restored back to the big single room it would have been, but it wouldve just been a room filled with old stuff. Kind of the oldfashioned sort of museum. After world war ii when the National Park Service Comes into takeover the Historic Buildings here, again, the goal is to try to get them back how they looked in those important days. We have one chart we have been able to find. One with the members drew showing who was sitting where, at least for one snapshot for congress. We have enough sketches that show the platform for the speaker of the house. We have enough original furniture where we can match up things that we think were here. Unfortunately, a lot of the items that were here, if the city needed them, like chairs, they kept using them, desks, not so much, so they did not save. Things that the government mightve owned, for instance, the library of congress started in this building. They started buying books for congress here in philadelphia. It was not the library of congress as we know it today, but it did begin here. A lot of things that went to washington, d. C. Are burned when washington is burned in the war of 1812. We lose a lot of those early things. So that is one of the challenges with a building like this, is you do not necessarily have all of the things what you try to do the best you can to give people the sense of what it looks like when men like James Madison or Young Andrew Jackson were sitting in the room as members of the house of representatives. Well, we are in the Senate Chamber here at Congress Hall in philadelphia. The room, as you can see, is quite a bit more grand than the house of representatives would have been, and there are a couple of reasons for that. Our roots as a nation go back to when we were british, of course. The british have a parliament with two houses, the house of lords, the house of commons, and theres definitely parallels with our congress. The house of representatives is very similarly set up to the house of commons, and the senate would therefore be based on the house of lords. But obviously were not going to have dukes and earls and noble titles like that. But we have states, and every state is equal in the senate, so so the state take the place of the house of lords in our Senate Chamber. The british, using that green color in government, the colonies would use it, but the red would be much more that house of lords kind of color, so you are going to see red in the early senate here in philadelphia. Definitely has that kind of look to it that seems a bit on the higher end. Now, the interesting thing about the senate is they are created with a bit more power, the power they tied to the president. That the house of representatives does not have. Treaties in the United States are with the advice and consent of the senate, approved with the advice and consent of the senate. So there is one power. Also any time the president makes an appointment to his cabinet, ambassador, Supreme Court, of course, those people would have to come in front of the senate and be approved by the senate, or rejected. And so here in philadelphia, we have our very first treaty approved by the senate, which is the jay treaty, and that led to the big fight in the house of representatives about whether or not to pay for it. Over that same issue, we have the worst rejection of a the first rejection of a president ial nominee by the senate. John rutledge, who was actually a signer of the constitution, one of the players of the constitution, one of washingtons first choices for the original six justices on the Supreme Court. He actually accepts, but then resigns the post without ever having served on the Supreme Court. He will later become the chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. When john jay, who was the first United States Supreme Court justice resigns, he is elected governor of new york. He leaves the post of chief justice. That leaves it empty. Washington will eventually tap John Rutledge of South Carolina. Rutledge will come back to philadelphia this time and actually serve as chief justice. However, he was appointed during a recess of congress. And so technically the senate has not confirmed him, but he actually served a session of the court as chief justice. Leads them through some cases. When the senate comes back later that year, they then take up the question of approving John Rutledge. Now, George Washington has never had anyone rejected that he has appointed. This has never happened in our young history. John rutledge has a number of things going against him. There are guys in the senate who think he is a little crazy. He has definitely had some strange things he had to say at the time. He has a reputation amongst some people. But also, where he will also get into trouble is he made some very pointed comments about that jay treaty that was negotiated by his predecessor. He was very critical in some speeches, and they tended to be a bit rambling speeches. He made some comments about the senate itself. Which of course senators would read the newspapers and they would read what the South Carolina Supreme Court justice would have to say about them, and when he actually came in front of them, they would remember these sorts of things and they would decide perhaps this is not the best guy to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. So even though he had actually run the court for a little while, he was kind of sent packing back home. The first rejection of a president ial nominee. So again, here in philadelphia, you are seeing the constitution in a lot of Different Directions being explored and used for the first time. Of course you go through our history and you see occurrences where this happens. The one other power of the senate that will not get exercised in philadelphia is the power of impeaching. If the president is impeached, the house would vote to have an impeachment, the senate would be basically the jury in what is essentially a trial to decide whether or not the president should be removed from office. So yeah, again, you look at the powers of the senate and you see things that they can do that tie them to the president in a lot of ways, and you see the things that they can do that type into the president in a lot of ways that gives them an advantage over the house. You represent an entire state, which means if you are from a large state, you represent an awful lot of people. Finally, the other thing about the senate that makes it a bit unique is you get that longerterm. The longest elected term in the United States, a sixyear term, but early on, senators were not even elected. Senators are appointed. On the basis of the constitution, originally, senators are appointed by their state legislatures. So, senators do not have to run for office. So, as a result, senators in philadelphia met in private. They did not meet in public. The house of representatives always did. So the house was open to the public, the senate was not. Now, the Senate Starts getting into their own controversial bills like the jay treaty. One of the early senators that is sent by pennsylvanians, probably most famous for being a long time secretary of the treasury, he is of the democratic republican side. So the federalist side of the early senate, looking at the strict rules would say he has not lived in the United States the requisite number of years to serve in the senate. So, the senate voted him out. He is later elected to the house of representatives by pennsylvania, but he is rejected from the senate. So naturally the people of pennsylvania want to know why there senator has been kicked out of the senate. So you start getting this growing public feeling, we want to know what is going on when the senate meets here in philadelphia. Add to that the press obviously wants to know what is going on, because they have guys sitting in the balcony watching the house. They want to have guys watching the senate, because that is news. Finally, i am sure that the house of representatives are meeting in public going why did those guys upstairs get to meet in private while we have to go in front of all these people . Finally after five years of meeting behind closed doors, the senate relents and builds a small balcony and they start to as well meet in public here in philadelphia. Again, thats one of those longstanding traditions. But again, when you go back to our earliest days, this is where you are seeing that they do not have everything set in stone. The constitution is only four pages long. These men have to figure out what they are about based on a few paragraphs. George washington essentially invents the job of the president here in philadelphia, again, just going off of some paragraphs in the constitution. Figuring out what it is i do every day. For example, when he wants to negotiate a treaty with various indian tribes, what he will do, the first time he is going to do Something Like this, is he will actually come into the senate and sit down and say, well, im supposed to do treaties with your advice and consent, so i want your advice and consent on these issues. I want to discuss. And the senate kind of goes, wait a minute, we are not really interested in talking about that with you in the room, why dont you give us some stuff and come back later . So that is about when the president comes and goes from the senate. Since then it is a more strict separation that we are used to. Now, for washington, he is not a guy who likes tons of, you know, public accolade, and he does not like to give a lot of speeches if he can avoid it. He will do an address to Congress Every year. They do not call it the state of the union yet. It is his address to congress, which he writes with his cabinet. He will come to the senate for his inauguration for his second term as president. He kind of keeps it low key. He does not do the bigger events that we saw downstairs with john adams, which was a much bigger deal. Washington, starting his second term, more or less goes back to work. Because he did not really want the big public ceremony to take place. But that is something that would change with adams inauguration. Then moving down to washington, you had inaugurations at the new capital building. So, again we are growing into what the United States is today. When you look around this room, a lot of guys who sat here in the senate were the architects of our constitution. The senators being chosen by their state, a lot of these guys had a big impact on writing the constitution would be sent by their states to philadelphia. One of the ones who is not is James Madison. He runs into the problem in virginia that Patrick Henry is one of the great powers in virginia. Henry is not a great fan of madison and his big role in the constitution. Essentially madison, even though we call him the father of the constitution, the obvious plum of getting a seat in the senate does not happen for James Madison. He has to suffer through being elected and running for office and being a member of the house. As for election of senators, that is actually a very recent phenomena in our history. That would be the 19th the 17th amendment. 1913, just over a century ago. All of the men prior to that just had to court their state legislature. So you think of the Lincoln Douglas debates over senate, they are not debating for people to vote for them. They are debating for people to vote for people for the State Government to vote for them. So its a very complicated system. Which is why when you get into that 20he century populism, people are saying, you know what, we want to be able to vote for our own senators. We vote for everyone else in government, why not senate . Thats one of the changes. You have to grow into how these things work. But the remarkable thing when you go back to these years in philadelphia is other than that, most everything does operate the same way. We are pretty much using the system designed in Independence Hall that they kind of take into this building and use and continue on when they moved to washington in 1800. When you look at this room, unlike downstairs in the house of representatives, the second floor of the building with the senate is a lot more original as far as the things in the building go. We have the setting for 32 senators. We start with just 26 representing 13 states. And as each new state, vermont, kentucky, tennessee comes into the union, they add new senators. Now, when they leave for washington, 32 senators would go. The room would turn into a courtroom, eventually it was the United States Federal District court room in the 19th century. They do not necessarily need the stuff that is here. So, desks go away. We do not know what happened to them. These are sort of our best guesses. But chairs you always need. So in the mid1800s when people start thinking about American History, like we do so much of today, they started saying, we need to start collecting things for Independence Hall. Somebody says we have a couple dozen of the chairs. Somebody starts to think maybe they were the chairs for the Continental Congress, so they stuck them in the room. They were chairs for the federal congress, but either way they were displayed at Independence Hall for a long time. Fortunately when we are restoring Congress Hall to look as it would have, we had 29 original chairs. The majority were in the house, just based on proportion. A couple of them were marked the senate. Some of them had little different itself color. We will fill the Senate Chamber with 29 of the 32 chairs being original. The one thing i can tell you is there are 15 stars above it. So its somewhere after the 15th state. And theres the union. We dont know when that was painted. Its an artistic rendering of the seal of the United States. The seal was created by the Continental Congress in 1782. Its something they worked on off and on with the different committees and kept changing here and a little bit there until they worked out the final version of the seal. We have a carpet on the floor thats a reproduction of the original carpet. The original carpet more than likely went to washington when they moved. Whatever happened to it, its long gone. But it was made specifically for the room here. And it was actually enough written description of exactly what it was that enabled us to sort of recreate the carpet. And it would have featured the seal of the United States. But it would have been encircled by the original state seals. Its sort of setup as a change which is a common motif at the time chaining the states to to create this bigger thing, this United States of ours. So a lot of the interesting symbols whether for the states themselves or the United States again, have their roots in philadelphia. The one original desk was the Vice President s desk. The Vice President which were going to start with john adams. And then hell be succeeded by Thomas Jefferson. They would actually be here a good bit of the time probably a lot more than the Vice President would be there today. Today the Vice President could sit in the senate any day they want. They made it clear to john adams they didnt want him talking. So he could sit there and run the meetings. Which would leave him very disapointed. Hes not the first or the last Vice President to voice his disappointment. If theres a tie vote, the Vice President is the tiebreaker. Any big day, the Vice President will be there. Over than that, the Vice President , you know, john adams would run a bunch of meetings where a bunch of guys that didnt let him talk. And for Thomas Jefferson, when hes Vice President , his opponent is the president , so he doesnt necessarily agree with a lot of the policys that he has to be part of the executive over. It was a very different situation which leads to creating the system where were going elect president and Vice President a little bit more carefully because rather than the Electoral College voting for two men, the guy who gets the second most votes we would create a system where there was a candidate for president and one for Vice President. And the emp us to that is not the adams election in 1796 but the jefferson election in 1800 which is when theyre packing up and moving to washington, d. C. So theres no one you election day in those days. But they pretty much will start meeting in the new capital december of 1800. Theyre leaving philadelphia that summer. And in the midst of this, were elects adams vs. Jefferson. But you the two sides have learned their lessons. You cant specify which is which. When jefferson wins the election he ties his own Vice President ial candidate aaron burr. And being tied that election goes to the house of representatives. The house of house of representatives has to elect the new president and they have to vote more than 30 times before the tie can be broken. Now, youre saying, we learned our lesson with the past two elections, lets fix it so the 12th amendment straightens out the way of electing a president. But you look back to these early days, and theyre managing to find out you what doesnt work which isnt much and find out that most of that constitution does. And so today were look at a room thats much smaller than the senate today, but senator who is sat here pretty much do the same things that the senator doss in washington today. Youre watching American History tv all weekend and week on cspan 3. Ike us on facebook at cspan list. A panel of historians talk about the history of African Americans voting rights. This event was part of the association for the study of africanamerican life and historys annual conference. They also provided the video