Following upon its highly acclaimed conferences on the
American Revolution (held between 1978 and 1993), the United States
Capitol Historical Society (USCHS) decided to focus its next series of
symposia on the Federal Congress before 18 00. Society president Clarence
J. Brown and Society chief historian Donald R. Kennon asked the FFCP to
select the speakers and to work with the Society in other ways to produce
the annual symposia. DHFFC coeditor Kenneth R. Bowling serves as program
chair . Both the Society and the FFCP benefit from this cooperative
venture.
The first symposium, held in 1994, provided a background
for the entire series, covering such wide-ranging topics as legislatures
in the classical world and Congress as an issue during the ratification of
the Constitution. DHFFC director and coeditor Charlene Bickford closed
the session with a paper on the First Federal Congress (FFC) and the
media. In 1995 the FFC itself was the focus. Bickford spoke again-this
time on the organization of the House and Senate; joining her was
associate editor William C . diGiacomantonio speaking on the FFC's support
for the arts, sciences, and public morality. The program also featured
several undergraduates who had taken a George Washington University
history department research seminar with Bickford and Bowling. The 1996
symposium, entitled "Neither Separate Nor Equal," investigated the
relationships among the three branches of government during Congress's
formative decade. This year's topic was the members themselves and
included presentations by diGiacomantonio and Bowling who spoke on the
role of the congressional wife and the social activities of congressmen at
Philadelphia.
In 1998 the topic will be "Influencing Congress" and
the papers will treat petitioning and lobbying. The topic was chosen to
coincide with the publication of volumes 7 and 8 of the DHFFC, which cover
all the Revolutionary War related claims and the requests on myriad
other subjects that were submitted to the FFC by petition. The 1999
symposium will take an overview of the accomplishments and failures of the
first five federal congresses as well as focus on the evolution of the
institution itself. The fin al symposium, in 2000, will be an important
scholarly contribution to the bicentennial celebration of the movement of
the federal government to Washington, D.C.
Scholarly versions of
the symposia talks will be published in volumes which will shed
considerable and much needed light on the history of Congress. Historians
have neglected Congress in the 1790s. Their focus on an executive branch
dominated by three highly effective politicians-Alexander Hamilton,
Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington-has distorted perceptions of the
political history of that formative decade. One of the goals of the
symposia is to draw attention to Congress and its members as they
confronted and resolved as well as they could the many difficult and
deeply divisive issues that confronted the young nation.
Since 1992 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
have partially supported two positions at the project and
occasional student assistants, enabling the regular and frequent
appearances of volumes since that time (seven by the end of 1997).
In April the NEH cited lack of funds (a reduction in funds
available to editions of about 60%) as the primary reason for rejecting
the FFCP's 1997-98 proposal. Since that time the project has turned to The
George Washington University, which has agreed to continue the support
that it had committed to in the NEH grant proposal.
We have also
sent out around two dozen proposals or letters of inquiry to private
foundations. Although some representatives of potential funders have
stated that Congress or the federal government should support the
publication of its own papers, we were successful in April in obtaining a
$10,000 grant from the H.W. Wilson Foundation. Another round of proposals
and letters will go out this summer.
Clearly, private
sources--foundations, individuals, corporations--will need to be a larger
proportion of the FFCP's budget in the future. It is this fact that lies
behind the fundraising appeal accompanying this newsletter.
Project staff look forward to turning their attention in
the fall of 1997 to our final five volumes. The correspondence series will
also include significant diary entries, newspaper articles, and
miscellaneous documents. We plan to send the two first session volumes to
the Johns Hopkins University Press in mid 1999. Topics covered will
include proposals to establish non-hereditary titles for certain elected
federal officials, the adoption of the first federal revenues, the Bill of
Right s, the organization of the executive and judicial branches, the
question of the president's power to remove executive officers without
Senate consent, and the location of the national capital.
Members
of the First Congress corresponded with family members, friends, and
constituents of all types-thoughtful, politically influential, single
issue, and sometimes even apparently mentally unbalanced. Consequently,
the volumes in this series will breathe life into the official record and
reveal much about the behind-the-scenes negotiations and compromises that
were so important to the successful accomplishment of the Congress's
agenda. The letters, more than any other part of the DHFFC, provide a
human perspective on Congress. Motives, inter-personal relationships, the
impact of family separation, and social life at the seat of government are
just some of the subjects that the letters illuminate. Readers will find
some familiarity in comment s such as those describing New York City
(which then lay more than a mile south of Greenwich Village) as polluted,
odoriferous, crime ridden, and gridlocked.
The letters reveal how
members practiced politics and public service, viewed the role of the new
federal government, and dealt with their often conflicting roles as
representatives of states, constituents, and the people or nation at
large. In particular , the letters shed considerable light on how the
founding generation wrestled with sectional conflict and issues of
constitutionality and federalism. Read one after another, they reveal how
very fragile the Union was in 1789 and 1790 and how difficult it was for
Congress to achieve the compromises that held the states together at that
difficult time and laid the foundation for the economic and political
growth of the nation for the next half century.
The letters are
also important for what they tell us about the evolution of the
member-constituent relationship. Members actively sought constituent input
on issues before Congress. Constituents asked support for nominations to
federal office, for private claims often growing out of service to the
country during the Revolutionary War, and for the transaction of business
with the executive branch. Favors requested of the staff-less members were
frequent and varied and included such things as obtaining information
about relatives in other states with whom they had lost touch and the
purchase of books, newspapers and other items more easily obtained at the
capital than at home. The bolder and more intimately acquainted ones even
asked members to use their postage frank to forward personal mail
unrelated to public business.
As these volumes are published over
the next several years, a rich new source on the beginnings of our
national legislature will be made available for generations to come.
With the assistance of the Model Editions Partnership
(MEP), the First Congress Project is actively exploring the possibilities
of creating either a CD-ROM or internet edition of the DHFFC. The process
began two years ago, when the First Congress Project accepted an
invitation to participate as one of seven experimental projects in the
initiative sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records
Commission (NHPRC) of the National Archives. The other model edition
partners include the Documentary History of the Ratification of the
Constitution, the Lincoln Legal Papers, the Nathanaiel Greene Papers, the
Henry Laurens Papers, the Margaret Sanger Papers, and the Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers.
A preliminary site visit in
August 1995 by MEP coordinator David Chesnutt (of the Laurens Papers), and
co-coordinators Michael Sperberg-McQueen (of the Text Encoding Initiative)
and Susan Hockey (of Rutgers' Center for the Electronic Text in the
Humanities) yielded several observations. First they categorized the DHFFC
as a "transitional edition." With over half of its projected 19 volumes
already published, abandoning the letterpress format was not an option.
Second, the edition printed a wide variety of document types, official and
unofficial, from Journals, bills, resolutions, and motions, to petitions,
debates, newspaper editorials, and private correspondence. The
coordinators of MEP accepted the challenge these conditions posed, and
determined that the DHFFC would be used as a model of how the documents
could be linked by chronology or by subject, by way of live indices to
scanned computer images of typeset pages. (A "live index," like a "live
text," is one that the user can "click" into and scan on the computer
screen.) Possible variations and refinements include unifying the page
images of the letterpress editions with live text supplements of
unpublished documents, such as maps and annotations to standard
biographic and bibliographic sources.
Soon after the initial
meeting, the FFCP began to select sections of text from each of the
relevant volumes. In late September 1995, Project Director Charlene
Bickford and Assistant Editor William diGiacomantonio joined
representatives from the six other model edition partners at a steering
committee meeting in Columbia, S.C. (home of the Laurens Papers). The
product of this meeting was a working draft of the "Prospectus for
Electronic Historical Editions," which was presented for consideration at
the Annual Meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing held in
Baltimore in late October. MEP participants took the opportunity to
explain the goals, formats, and principles of electronic historical
editing to the documentary editors likely to be creating some version of
them in the future. The First Congress Project participated by showing a
computer demonstration of its own electronic model edition. Eventually a
subject oriented model, linking various materials on the same subject-the
creation of the executive departments-across the series, was settled
upon. We continue to work with MEP coordinators and partners as they seek
"to develop a foundation for the next generation of historical
editions."
The First Federal Congress was the most important and
productive Congress in American history, a second sitting of the Federal
Convention. Without its tremendous legislative output, the new
constitutional experiment would almost certainly have failed. By passing
legislation to raise a federal revenue, pay the state and federal war
debt, locate the national capital, and regulate interstate
commerce--issues which had obstructed the functioning of the central
government since at least the end of the Revolutionary War-the First
Congress brought to conclusion the American Revolution and found a way to
retain the North and South in the union when both sides were threatening
an end to it.
The First Federal Congress Project was established
at The George Washington University with the goal of locating and
publishing all documents relating to the implementation of the
Constitution by the First Federal Congress. Twelve volumes of the
projected 19 volume series have been published by the Johns Hopkins
University Press since 1972. The bulk of the project's direct support
comes from federal grants. The project must raise substantial private
funds to retain staff and meet production schedules in the face of federal
budget cuts.
Your tax-deductible gifts made out to The George
Washington University are earnestly solicited. Contributions and inquiries
should be sent to:
Charlene B. Bickford, Director
The First Federal Congress Project
The George Washington University
Washington, D.C. 20052
202-676-6777
FAX: 202-496-9055
e-mail: bickford@gwu.edu
"In no nation, by no Legislature, was ever so much done in so short
a period for the establishment of Government, Order, . . . & general
tranquility" (John Trumbull to John Adams, 20 Mar. 1791).
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission
The
George Washington University
The H. W. Wilson Foundation
The U.S.
Capitol Historical Society
Project Staff:
Charlene B. Bickford, Co-editor and Director
Kenneth R. Bowling,
Co-editor
Helen E. Veit, Associate Editor
William C.
diGiacomantonio, Associate Editor
