The Senate Meets for the Last Time in Philadelphia

May 14, 1800, was the last day of the first session of the Sixth Congress. More importantly, it was the last day on which the Senate met in Philadelphia. The chamber on the second floor of Congress Hall had been the Senate’s home since December 1790. In that year the government had moved from New York to Philadelphia under the terms of the bargain struck during the First Congress that created a new capital city to the south and provided that Congress would meet in Philadelphia for a decade while its new home was readied.

By 1798, many members had come to regret that bargain. They faced the grim prospect of abandoning bustling, cosmopolitan Philadelphia, with its sophisticated social life and handsome houses, for the wilds of the Potomac River’s shores. Rumors that the new capital was still a swampy morass of half-finished federal buildings hardly lifted their spirits. Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who had supported the move, charged that John Adams and the Federalists in Congress, who opposed the transfer, were toying with the idea of merely going through the formality of moving the government to Washington in order to comply with the law—and then moving right out again. While they did not disavow Jefferson’s charges, the Senate’s Federalist majority passed, and Adams signed, the construction bill for the new capital. That measure included an authorization of $9,000 to furnish the new Senate and House chambers and move the records of Congress to the new site.

Within days of the May 14 adjournment, sloops carrying the Senate’s records sailed out of Philadelphia harbor. In late May, they docked at Lear’s wharf on the Potomac and the task of unpacking began. When the Senate reconvened in November, it met in the unfinished north wing—the only wing—of the Capitol Building, perched in lonely isolation atop Jenkins’ Hill. Its travels were over.