The First Congressional Gridlock

Contemporaries who complain about a national legislative gridlock might reflect that it could certainly be more complete, and cynics who suspect that there could be advantages in that might also think about the Continental Congress. Why was this assemblage chronically unable to resolve important problems that were not to prove intractable for the First Federal Congress? Standard histories point primarily to the constraints imposed by the Articles of Confederation. Congress lacked authority to regulate the country’s trade, enforce its treaties, or compel compliance with its lawful requisitions. It was never able to secure the states’ unanimous consent to constitutional amendments granting it such powers. In 1786, differences between the North and South, exacerbated by the failure to resolve financial and commercial problems, resulted in an impasse threatening a speedy dissolution of the Union.

But there is more, this new work tells us, to the story. “The norms, rules, and institutional structures of the Continental Congress . . . were as much to blame for the institution’s eventual failure as the reluctance of the states to support the new government or the propensity of delegates to divide along sectional lines” (p. 3). “Institutions are not neutral.” Rather, structures, procedures, and rules shape choices and help to determine specific outcomes. The institutional structure of the Continental Congress encouraged obstructionism, factionalism, and debilitating work loads and operated against a successful resolution of the issues of the time.

Congressional Dynamics is not much fun: five appendixes, eighteen tables, thirty-nine figures, and a comparable amount of social-science jargon. It will not dramatically alter current understandings of the Continental Congress. It is, however, worth the struggle—both for historians specializing in the Confederation era and for political scientists interested in an early and thorough attempt to apply the approaches of the “new institutionalism” to a particular historical laboratory. Calvin Jillson, the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of quantitative studies of legislative behavior during the founding era, joins with Rick K. Wilson of Rice University, who is a statistician as well as a political scientist. Together they provide the most comprehensive examination available of the way in which the Continental Congress worked and the most graphic study currently in print of voting, factionalism, and coalition-building in the Congress.

Influenced by the new institutionalism, which focuses on the incentives and constraints created by institutional structures for the rational individuals involved in collective action, Jillson and Wilson began their study by trying to reconstruct the rules, structures, and procedures within which members worked. (Nowhere in the existing literature, for example, could they find even a brief discussion of the way in which committees were appointed or a full explanation of the way in which the Congress ordered its business and arranged its agenda.) Their findings here do not greatly change, although they do significantly deepen, current understandings. With Jack N. Rakove, ¹ the collaborators note how little systematic thought was given at the outset to the nature of a federal system or to Congress’s own rules. Working from a powerful consensus both within and out of doors, the First Continental Congress adopted rules and procedures that were appropriate to its mission, largely by following the precedents of the Stamp Act Congress. But even though its duties changed enormously with the eruption of the war, these early choices were never seriously reconsidered. Like the state officials who appointed them, the delegates resisted concentrated power even when they knew, too well, the costs of inefficiency and weakness. Throughout its history, Congress chose to run its business from the floor, declining to confide agenda-setting or appointive powers to its “leaders,” overseeing its administrators and preparing legislation through ad hoc committees, and maintaining rules that made it easy for any delegate, at any time, to move for reconsideration of decisions. Among the consequences were a crushing workload for the members who were not “free-riding,” kaleidoscopic factionalism rather than stable and effective coalitions, and...