Three tiers of evidence. Official records that document what was decided. Reconstructed debates compiled from newspapers forty-five years later. One senator's private diary, the only eyewitness account of the closed Senate. This series is built on all three and is clear about which is which.
The United States Congress has kept a journal of its proceedings since the First Session of the First Congress in 1789, as required by Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution. Both the House Journal and the Senate Journal record what was decided, motions made, votes taken, amendments agreed to. They do not record what was said.
No verbatim transcript of a congressional debate exists before 1873. The Congressional Record, which does provide a substantially verbatim account of floor proceedings, began publication with the 43rd Congress. The Congress that wrote the Bill of Rights, structured the federal judiciary, debated the national bank, and ratified the Jay Treaty left no verbatim record of any floor debate. Understanding what that Congress said requires working with three very different kinds of sources, and being clear about what each one is.
The framers of the Constitution assumed the Senate would follow the practice of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and meet in private. The Constitutional Convention had forbidden its members from discussing the proceedings publicly. The Continental Congress had met largely in secret. The Senate doorkeeper's first orders were clear: no public, no members of the House of Representatives.
The Senate met in closed session from its first day in April 1789 until December 9, 1795, when a gallery was completed and the doors were opened to public observers for the first time. For six years and eight months, the United States Senate conducted all legislative and executive business behind closed doors. The public learned what was decided when the Senate chose to announce it. They did not learn what was argued. No one was in the room to write it down, and the senators did not do so themselves, with one exception.
Because Senate sessions were closed to the public until 1795, his is one of the few accounts of Senate floor activity in the early Congresses.
William Maclay was one of the first two senators from Pennsylvania. He drew a two-year term in the initial allotment and was not reelected. Within two months of the opening of the First Session, he had begun to keep a daily diary. He continued it almost daily for all three sessions of the First Congress. He wrote it in the evenings. He was recording his own observations and reactions, not taking shorthand on the floor.
Maclay was one of the most radical Anti-Federalist members of the First Senate. He distrusted Alexander Hamilton, clashed repeatedly with Vice President John Adams, opposed the Judiciary Act, opposed the national bank, and opposed most of what the Federalist majority was doing. His diary is indispensable. It is the only firsthand account of the Senate floor during the years it met in secret. It is also the account of a man who disagreed with nearly everything he witnessed. Both things are true simultaneously, and this series holds both.
I really fear it will be the gunpowder-plot of the Constitution.
Every episode in this series distinguishes between what the official record confirms and what a witness recorded. When a vote is cited, it comes from the Senate Journal or Senate Executive Journal, Tier 1. When a debate is described, it comes from the Annals of Congress, Tier 2, paraphrased, reconstructed, cited as such. When Maclay is quoted or referenced, his account is attributed to him, Tier 3, one senator's documented observation, not a transcript of the floor.
The founding era Senate did not produce a verbatim record. This series does not pretend that it did. What it produces instead is a clear account of what the documents actually show, the votes that are facts, the debates that are reconstructions, and the one diary that is the only window into a room that was otherwise closed. The documents speak. Where the documents are partial, this series says so.