Four documents on the six years, eight months the Senate spent closed to the public, the four votes to stay shut, and the December 9, 1795 session that ended it.
The framers of the Constitution made no provision regarding whether the Senate would meet in public or private. The Constitutional Convention itself had met in secret. The Continental Congress had operated largely in private. The Senate's first rules, adopted in April 1789, required the doorkeeper to ensure that no one other than senators and authorized staff was admitted to the chamber during sessions.
The Senate's reasoning was partly deliberative: closed sessions allowed senators to speak freely without playing to galleries or the press. It was partly precedential: it was simply how legislative bodies at the highest level had always operated. And it was partly practical: the Senate chamber in Federal Hall had no gallery for observers. The public learned what the Senate decided when the Senate chose to announce it.
Opposition to the closed-door policy grew steadily. State legislatures complained that they could not effectively evaluate their senators' conduct without knowing what their senators were saying. Critics called the Senate a place where conspiracies against the public interest could be hatched without accountability. Four times before December 1795 the Senate considered opening its doors, and four times it refused.
The vote on April 29-30 1790 to open the Senate was rejected. A resolution by Senator James Monroe in 1792 to open the doors was defeated two to one. The motion of February 18 1794 was voted down. A fourth attempt followed before the Senate finally voted to open in 1795.
The immediate trigger for opening the Senate was a political controversy over the seating of Albert Gallatin of Pennsylvania. Gallatin had been elected to the Senate in 1793. The Senate voted to deny him his seat in February 1794, ruling that he had not been a citizen for the required nine years. Gallatin and his supporters believed the ruling was politically motivated. The case became a public controversy, with extensive newspaper coverage of the process and the arguments.
The Gallatin dispute demonstrated that the closed Senate was becoming a political liability. Decisions of enormous consequence to individual citizens and states were being made with no public accountability for the reasoning. The argument that the Senate needed privacy for deliberation was increasingly difficult to sustain when the result of those private deliberations was the denial of a man's elected office. The Senate voted to open its gallery.
A public gallery was constructed in the Senate chamber. On December 9, 1795, the United States Senate opened its doors to public observers for the first time. The session of the Fourth Congress beginning that day was the first Senate session open to the press and the public.
The Senate had met in closed session for six years and eight months. Every major action of the first three Congresses had been taken behind closed doors: the structuring of the federal judiciary, the debate over the Bill of Rights, the creation of the national bank, the ratification of the Jay Treaty. From December 9, 1795 forward, the public could observe the Senate floor. The Annals of Congress, which had previously been reconstructed from fragmentary newspaper accounts about a body no reporters could enter, now had direct observation to draw on.