‘I shall be called on to preside in a legislative chamber’
The inauguration ceremony in Philadelphia scheduled for 4 March 1797 marked the changing of the presidential guard. Outgoing President George Washington would be replaced by John Adams, then serving as Vice-President.
Constitution II required Jefferson to serve as President of the Senate, having been elected to the office of Vice-President. Jefferson replaced Adams as the presiding officer of that body.Translated across the North Atlantic, Constitution II assigned the nation’s second most popular politician to serve as the Speaker of the House of Commons. Alternatively, Constitution II’s Article II - translated across the pond - would oblige the Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the throne, to serve as Lord Speaker of the House of Lords. In a new republic with so many untested arrangements, a few hiccups were to be expected. Necessity called upon Congress to ride to the rescue of the young republic. Review and revision of constitutional defects rapidly became the order of the day. The House and Senate passed and the President signed the first enactment of the new government on 1 June 1789. A week later debate opened on wholeÂsale rewriting of the nation’s second constitution in the House of RepresenÂtatives. James Madison proposed renumbering the articles and sections of Constitution II in his opening speech proposing amendments to that instruÂment (8 June 1789).39
Two years after the republic’s new-fangled Supreme Court handed down its first decision (1791), Congress was obliged to intervene on another front.40 The Supreme Court attempted to prod truculent state legislators and judges to do their duty and honour British creditor claims. Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 U.S. 419 (1793), ignited a firestorm of controversy. Americans
‘I have begun a sketch’ 87 were unwilling to pay for their Chippendale furniture or repay their loans to London bankers, despite promises American envoys made in the Treaty of Paris to their British counterparts.
This truculence rankled Chief Justice John Jay - one of the diplomats who negotiated the Treaty of Paris - but the popular urge to stiff British creditors overwhelmed any nascent willingness to honour pre-war debts and obligations.41By the time Jefferson was inaugurated into a second term as President (1804), patching up the work of the federal convention of 1787 had required two major Supreme Court cases and 12 formal amendments to Constitution II. Repairing Constitution II required considerable additional language; the word count increased to 5,224 words from the original 4,321 words approved by the convention (17 September 1787). The last of these constitutional patch-ups touched Jefferson’s career at two points. The fedÂeral convention had written the method for selecting the President and ViceÂPresident into Article II of the new nation’s Constitution II. This method crashed the fourth time it was put into practice. Jefferson’s career interÂsected with Article II on this occasion in the aftermath of the 1800 general election. Constitution II required the House of Representatives to select either Aaron Burr or Thomas Jefferson as President, voting by states in a tie-breaking procedure. Oddly enough, Burr and Jefferson were allies in the 1800 general election. John Adams, the incumbent, came in third. Adams’s out-of-the-money finish in the Electoral College excluded him from conÂsideration when the House of Representatives balloted between Burr and Jefferson in February 1801.
In 1803 Congress cobbled together a patch to Article II. This fix made Jefferson the only President of the United States to be elected via two difÂferent methods of presidential selection: one method was at work in 1800. The Twelfth Amendment created a new method for the presidential election of 1804. Jefferson won the election of 1804. He was not allied with Aaron Burr on that occasion.
On receiving the news that he had been elected Vice-President, Jefferson posted a request to his former teacher George Wythe (22 January 1797), previously introduced in this chapter.
‘It seems probable that I shall be called on to preside in a legislative chamber’, Jefferson observed.It is now so long since I have acted in the legislative line that I am entirely rusty in the Parliamentary rules of procedure. I know they have been more studied and are better known by you than by any man in America perhaps by any man living. I am in hopes that while enquiring into the subject you made notes on it. If any such remain in your hands, however informal, in books or in scraps of paper, and you will be so good as to trust me with them.42
Not surprisingly, Jefferson had very mixed emotions on taking up his duties in the Senate; surprisingly, he recorded them for posterity in his Manual.
The President of the United States Senate ‘must feel, weightily and seriously, this confidence in his discretion’. On this occasion Jefferson referred to the President’s ‘necessity of recurring, for [the Senate’s] government, to some known system of rules, that he may neither leave himself free to indulge caprice or passion, nor open to the imputation of them’.43
The lack of how-to guidance for the presiding officer placed ‘under the discretion of the President a very extensive field of decision, and one which, irregularly exercised, would have a powerful effect on the proceedings and determinations of the House’.44 Jefferson shouldered significant burdens as President of the Senate. Working in a half-completed, half-unfinished enviÂronment was not unknown to Jefferson. Renovations at Monticello, after his retirement as Secretary of State, began in 1794. His swearing-in as PresiÂdent took place on 4 March 1801, when the Capitol was still unfinished. Jefferson’s visit to John Adams took place in another construction site, the President’s Palace. This building became Jefferson’s official residence after his inauguration. Over the 15-year interval from 1794 to 1809 Jefferson endured the inconveniences of construction-in-progress at Monticello.
The University of Virginia’s principal edifice - another one of his domed strucÂtures and one which became known as ‘The Rotonda’ - was likewise under construction at the time of his death (4 July 1826). In his appeal to ‘those who come after me’ Jefferson described the state of the Senate’s procedural code as unfinished. He introduced his Manual under the motto ‘I have begun a sketch’. This experience mirrors the physical environment in which he worked as he put the final touches on the Manual at the close of his term of office (December 1800 - February 1801). On other occasions Jefferson’s work was subjected to rough handling. Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence - an inventory of prescriptions layered on foundations of ‘human events’ and fashioned as national grievances - was treated as fodder for extensive wrangling and rewriting-by-committee. His Land Ordinance of 1784 detailed a plan for imposing legal order on geophysical reality in the new territories that Congress acquired and organised. After Congress dispatched Jefferson to Paris as its Minister to France, delegates repealed his ordinance, thereby rubbishing the evocative names he offered for future American states, such as Metropotamia and Sylvania.