Jefferson’s Idea for the Senate

After Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as John Adams’ Vice President on March 4th, 1797, he watched how the Senate functioned. Under the Constitution, the Vice President presides over the Senate to make parliamentary rulings on process and debate. He only votes if there is a tie.

Jefferson was very familiar with the rules that governed the British Parliament but wanted a set of rules tailored to the U.S. Senate that governed how it operated. He spent the next three years observing the deliberative body and researching every treatise he could find on legislative processes before he began creating what he called A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States.

Much of the document’s content comes from what is practiced in the British House of Commons tailored to what Jefferson believed was the uniquely American experiment in participatory democracy. His other source were his notes during Senate sessions and the criticism of his rulings Jefferson received from both the Federalists and members of his own party, the Democrat-Republicans.

In December 1800, Jefferson handed his manuscript to a publisher named Samuel Smith, and in February 1801, he had his document finished. In it, Jefferson wrote “. . . I have begun a sketch, which those who come after me will successively correct and fill up, till a code of rules shall be formed for the use of the Senate, the effects of which may be accuracy in business, economy of time, order, uniformity, and impartiality. . .”

Only now, Jefferson was no longer the vice President of the United States; he was now the president-elect. The Democratic-Republicans, who now had a majority in the Senate, adopted his document in toto.

There are 53 sections in this manual organized in alphabetical order starting with “Absences” and ending with “Treaties.” The manual has detailed “do’s” and don’ts” as well as guidance on how handling procedural issues not envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.

Jefferson’s manual changed the way the Senate operated during his presidency and how it operates today. It has been updated, mostly by changing the diction and punctuation and still is part of the rules on how the Senate functions more than two centuries later.

Years later, acknowledging Jefferson’s brilliance as a parliamentary scholar, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted his Senate Manual as a partial guide to its own proceedings. His manual was, as he said, “the Standard by which I judge, and am willing to be judged…”

Sadly, the original manuscript has been lost to history. However, there is one known original copy of the manual, complete with Jefferson’s notes kept in the Library of Congress.

1850 painting by Robert E. Whitechurch of Senate deliberations