British and American Foundings of Parliamentary Science, 1774–1801 by Aschenbrenner Peter J

Author:Aschenbrenner, Peter J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

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 environment was not unknown to Jefferson. Renovations at Monticello, after his retirement as Secretary of State, began in 1794. His swearing-in as President 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 structures 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.

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