The first session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress, which met from December 1859 to June 1860 was tumultuous but not productive of the legislation that histories recall – such as the Compromise of 1850, the grab-bag of legislation that was intended to put slavery as a political issue to rest once and for all; or the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that revoked the Missouri Compromise and decreed that popular sovereignty henceforth would determine whether the federal territories would enter the union as free states or slave states; or the Kansas Statehood Act of 1859, which endorsed the Lecompton (pro-slavery) Constitution for slavery IF the Kansas voters reaffirmed it, which they overwhelmingly did not do.
The tumult of that session of Congress resulted from two sources. One was the investigation by a select committee of the Senate in the raid conducted by John Brown and his followers upon Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in mid-October 1859. John Brown was captured, tried for murder and treason, and executed on December 2, 1859. Less than two weeks later the Senate adopted a resolution to conduct the inquiry, and, after hearings, the committee delivered its report in June 1860.
The other source of tumult was the inability of the House of Representatives to elect a speaker. The Republicans had the largest delegation in the House, but they did not possess a majority. The leading candidate was John Sherman of Ohio. After the first vote it was disclosed that a number of Republicans, including Mr. Sherman, had endorsed a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South that argued that slavery, although profitable to the large slaveholders, was responsible for impoverishing the rest of the south. Eventually Mr. Sherman withdrew, and William Pennington of New Jersey was elected speaker on the forty-fourth ballot. He assumed office on February 1, 1860.
We should pause at this point to ask ourselves why should we concern ourselves with the first session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress if was “not productive of the legislation that histories recall”. The principal reason is that it provides evidence that can help us understand the times more fully. By the standards of the twenty-first century, the federal government of 1860 was tiny and lacked much of the administrative apparatus and judicial and quasi-judicial decision makers that the present day considers routine. Accordingly, much of the government’s largess was allocated by the Congress directly rather than by administrative agencies. We will see this below in the number of public laws relating to interests in lands and in the number of private laws and resolutions. Also, appropriations remind us that while the mechanisms of government were relatively meager, they were extant and those in existence indicate the areas of domestic and international life upon which government attention was focused. Although not dealing with legislative issues of historic dimensions, and with the attention of the politicians probably focused upon the presidential and other elections to be held later in 1860, the topics of public laws give us a flavor of what was important to the nation at the time and what issues – beyond slavery, the underlying cause of the tumult described above – thrust themselves onto the national agenda.
The Congress adopted 87 public laws during the session, and a large portion of these (about 15) dealt with appropriations. Some concerned the ordinary maintenance of the government – the Post Office, the Army and the Navy, the consular and diplomatic offices overseas, and the lighthouses on the coasts and internal waterways. Some appropriations were for internal improvements like the construction of a bridge over the Potomac River at Little Falls and improvements in the Tennessee River. Others were related to the Indian tribes – the fulfillment of payment obligations under various treaties, an indemnification for depredations committed by whites upon the Shawnees, and a repayment to the state of Missouri for the cost of repelling an invasion by the Osage Indians.
Another group of laws (about 14) dealt with land and property claims. These ranged from reclaiming swamp lands in Minnesota and Oregon to establishing the land claims of certain “half-breed” Kansas Indians to ordering a survey of Grand Cheniere Island in Louisiana. The second largest source of revenue for the federal government (after tariffs) was the proceeds from the sales of federal lands.
Other laws dealt with the terms and jurisdictions of the federal courts, the post office routes, the promotion of an electric telegraph to the Pacific coast and the punishment of those who seduced female passengers aboard steamboats and other vessels.
The Congress also adopted 14 resolutions, which included granting permission to Flag Officer William Shubrick of the U.S. Navy to accept the gift of a sword from the Argentine Federation and authorizing the United States Coastal Survey to expend government funds to observe the solar eclipse that was scheduled to occur on July 18, 1860.
Congress also ratified 11 treaties, some with Indian tribes and others with foreign nations, including New Granada (present day Colombia and Panama with parts of Ecuador and Venezuela), Paraguay, China, Japan, Belgium, and Sweden and Norway (the two kingdoms at the time ruled by a common monarch).
The foregoing constituted the public business of Congress, but Congress also enacted what were referred to as private laws and resolutions – in 1860 they amounted to 139 private laws and 13 private resolutions. For the most part these were the honoring of claims individuals asserted against the federal government – for amounts not paid on contracts, for use or destruction of their property without compensation, for the recognition of claims to federal lands, and for pensions payable to destitute former government employees or their widows.
The Congress governed Washington, D.C., and some of the laws relating to the District of Columbia were counted as parts of both the public business of the Congress and the private business of the Congress. In general, these laws more like those passed by state legislature and included the authorizing the construction of a new market building, setting aside land for a public school, providing for divorce, and incorporating a lodge of the Odd Fellows Hall, a cemetery company and a provident association for clerks employed by the federal government.
Many of the private laws have embedded in them a human story of dimensions only hinted at by the final legislative pronouncement, each with its own mix of hopes and triumphs, disasters and disappointments. Although the stories that made up America in 1860 were so numerous as to make it impossible to consider exploring each and holding each separate in one’s mind, the consciousness that individual people underlie the statistics that speak in broad terms about this nation, as any nation, can help us savor the humanity that endows the study of history.
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