Reviews of Books

Creating Congress

Neither Separate nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s. Edited by KENNETH R. BOWLING and DONALD R. KENNON. Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789–1801. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 344. $44.95.)

The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development. Edited by KENNETH R. BOWLING and DONALD R. KENNON. Perspectives on the History of Congress, 1789–1801 . (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002 . Pp. x, 348 . $ 44.95 .)

Reviewed by Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University

It is a commonplace that the First Federal Congress of 1789–1790 was a virtual continuation of the Federal Convention of 1787. Not only did a significant number of framers take seats in the new legislature, but the congressional agenda inevitably picked up where the Convention had left off. One obvious unfinished item was the discussion of what James Madison called "the nauseous project of amendments" that eventually produced the Bill of Rights.1 Other questions arose as Congress confronted the interstitial silences and ambiguities of the constitutional text, beginning with the June 1789 debate over the removal power of the executive. If this commonplace about the First Congress has any value, however, it also covers the next six or seven congresses as well, for in each of these bodies the boundary between the constitutional and the political was so permeable as to be indistinct. New interpretative issues continued to arise, leading precedents to be set, and rival interpretative doctrines to be crafted and deployed. We deal with the legacy of these developments still, not least when the executive asserts its unilateral prerogative to frame and impose its vision of national security with minimal assistance, much less assent, from Congress.

1

All of this suggests that studies of the institutional development of Congress and the political behavior of its members should occupy an important place in the current efflorescence of Very Early Republic Studies. Of course, much of what transpired in Congress throughout its first long decade is already familiar because it is so closely bound up with the standard narrative of mounting partisanship within doors and without. To add significantly to this story therefore calls for raising fresh questions about the evolution of Congress as an institution, asking how the unanticipated release of great surges of partisan energy affected (or altered?) its development, or (in a Namierite key) looking systematically at the nature of political recruitment in a body with high turnover.

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