‘The model which we have studied’
A would-be nation may declare rebellion and separation from the homeland with any rhetoric that suits its fancy. In order to win its independence, a
nation must empower its envoys to bargain at an international conference.
Recognition is premised on diplomats credentialed to international stanÂdards. On this account, protocol obliged the Continental Congress to accept existing diplomatic practices and satisfy their exacting requirements.There has always been a connection between rebel pretensions and the opportunities afforded by legislative assemblies and their pageantry. Simon de Montfort advanced his thoroughly subversive designs via the Parliament of 1264. John Maddicotfs Origins of the English Parliament points out that this ‘parliament endorsed a new constitution setting up a new counÂcil of nine headed by a triumvirate, among whom Montfort was the chief, and effectively transferring the king’s powers, including the vital power to appoint new ministers, to the council’.11 We ‘need not baulk’, Maddicott concludes, ‘at the notion of English exceptionalism’ which he credited to the ‘tried and tested instrument of the great council, long central to the work of government’.12
It was not going to be easy for rebel provinces to accept the practices of any ‘tried and tested instrument’ of British government. Jefferson’s deft handling of these issues was much in evidence. He preferred to idealise BritÂish procedures and practices. These served to ‘model’ the ‘system of rules’ which ‘has served as a prototype... which we have studied’.13 After JefferÂson introduced an ideal as the preferred source of parliamentary procedure, he threaded the narrative of American reception of Westminster procedures through ‘the systems of regulations adopted by the government of some one of the parliamentary bodies within these States’.14 This flourish permitted Jefferson to placate any chauvinist reader.
However, the House of RepresenÂtatives and Senate composed new procedural rules in April 1789 without crediting state legislative procedures.15 George Wythe’s 1797 corresponÂdence with Jefferson (to be taken up shortly) did not direct Jefferson to the procedures and practices of the Virginia House of Burgesses, for example. It was not until 8 June 1789 that Congress arranged to furnish ‘each member of the Congress with a complete set of the journals of the late Congress’.16Jefferson located ready equivalents to Congress’ procedures and pracÂtices in the experience of the House of Commons at Westminster. Jefferson cited to the House of Lords on only three occasions.17 His Manual, on the other hand, cited a British work published in 1586; this was Jefferson’s most ancient reference.18 The total count of citations in his Manual numbers 658, with the ratio of British to American citations running 556 to 102. The vast majority of Jefferson’s citations to British sources may be traced back to passages in the Journals of the House of Commons.
The Manual did not jumble these citations into a shapeless mass. Jefferson employed his sources to illustrate an idealised ‘system of rules’, instances of which were in operation at Westminster and in Washington. These were siblings, one to the other. Jefferson was able to explain how the Senate’s procedures could appear as reflections of Commons’ practices without the Senators acting as lifeless imitations of parliamentarians at Westminster. Jefferson made sense of American parliamentary experience by modelling sibling-to-sibling relations in the place of parent-to-child relations.
There were advantages to Jefferson’s treating the Senate’s Rules for ConÂducting Business as an instance of a model. Westminster was maturing its practices and procedures at a pace of its choosing. Westminster nurtured the interests of promoters of internal improvement schemes, for example, while light-brushing public business.
The rules of the United States Senate were much more comprehensive in scope than those of the House of Commons, for example; comparing procedures in the late 1790s from one chamber to another demonstrates this point.19W. S. Howell, the editor of Jefferson’s Parliamentary Pocket-Book, put the matter with tact equal to Jefferson’s. ‘Jefferson has often been called a revolutionary and so he was. But the American Revolution... was in fact anticipated by what had happened in Britain between Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence’.20 Here the graceful elocution ‘anticipated by’ signals that Howell was unwilling to straitjacket the development of parliamentary procedure into a parent-child relationship. Jefferson’s interÂest ‘in those centuries in relation to the king and the nobles... gave the Pocket-Book a philosophical import not often found in books devoted to parliamentary rules of order’. Jefferson’s Manual could not supply the vanÂtage attained in its ‘philosophical import’ without the pioneering work of Hatsell in exploring the null case, for example.21
Jefferson was the first writer to employ the phrase ‘parliamentary science’ in the nineteenth century. Proceeding in an oblique manner, he praised his former mentor George Wythe. In 1762 Jefferson’s promise won him Wythe’s support in Jefferson’s legal and political career in Virginia. In Jefferson’s letter to him (28 February 1800), he requested Wythe’s comments and corÂrections on his Manual. Jefferson’s intention - disclosed to Wythe - was to ‘deposit’ this Manual with the Senate. He ensured Wythe’s willingness to critique his draft with the praise that ‘you are, in fact, the only spark of ParÂliamentary science now remaining to us’.22
Wythe replied on 7 December 1800; his letter offered his comments on Jefferson’s draft of the Manual.23 Wythe’s 1,552-word response did not cite to any British or American sources, but did support - as to the particulars Wythe touched on - Jefferson’s analysis.
Wythe addressed his comments from a relatively high level of abstraction: what were best practices that an ideal assembly should consider adopting? ‘When a paper is under the correction of the house’, Wythe advised Jefferson in one instance, ‘the natuÂral order is to begin at the beginning, & proceed through it with amendÂments. but there is an exception as to a bill, the preamble of which is last amended’.24 The phrase ‘natural order’ does not appear in any of the three volumes of Hatsell’s Precedents of Proceedings that Jefferson consulted in composing the first edition of his Manual.Jefferson’s Manual offered a useful reading of the Senate’s inventory of prescriptions which framed his 53 Sections. To this framework, Jefferson elaborated examples, British and American, which illustrated the prescripÂtions and usages he related. Hatsell, on the other hand, preferred to move his data into the reader’s field of view and then comment on the anecdotes he related. It was central to Jefferson’s nuanced explanation for American competence in parliamentary science that an ideal could be given a useful focus, if only for the purpose of spinning off instances of parliamentary experience at Westminster and Washington.
Jefferson piled up useful trans-national comparisons. It was a function of the presiding officer (in the Senate, for example) to supply that assemÂbly with just-in-time rule-making. In Commons this function was presumed to remain with the House, with the ‘Speaker most commonly [supposing] the consent of the House’. This fiction might be disregarded if ‘objection is expressed’.25
In the Senate of the United States, every question of order is to be decided by the President, without debate; but if there be a doubt in his mind, He may call for the sense of the Senate. Rule 16. In ParliaÂment, all decisions of the Speaker may be controlled by the House. 3 Grey, 319. But in small matters, and which are of course, such as receiving petitions, reports, withdrawing motions, reading papers, etc., the Speaker most commonly supposes the consent of the House, where no objection was expressed, and does not give them the trouble of putÂting the question formally.26
Each of these two political systems faced the challenge of translating best practices into code-written procedures.
Each system exploited the core comÂpetence of its legislators. Solutions selected from this range of logically valid choices on either side of the North Atlantic were equally valid. The Speaker of the House of Commons might resolve problems arising ‘with the consent of the House’ or the President of the Senate of the United States might act as oracle ‘for the sense of the Senate’.27 Jefferson treated the role of the presidÂing officer as if the practice in each assembly was both logically valid and worth evaluation. In total Jefferson supplied 89 references to the Speaker of the House of Commons.