Category Archives: Confederation Congress

Rufus King weds Mary Alsop

30 Monday Mar 2020

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The beautiful Mary Alsop married Rufus King on March 30, 1786.

Over the weekend I continued on a project that ideally will become public sometime later this spring. I’d rather save the content for the project itself but could not resist sharing right now that two of the main figures in my story were married on this date in Manhattan in 1786. Rufus King represented Massachusetts in the Congress of the Confederation when he met Mary Alsop, the beautiful daughter of wealthy New York City merchant John Alsop. The following year King represented Massachusetts in the 1787 Constitutional Convention and helped draft that document. By the following summer the necessary number of states had ratified the Consecution, after which he and Mary moved to New York permanently. King was soon elected to the U.S. Senate and served in the First Congress. More . . . hopefully, to come.

(image/NYPL)

Dateline January 11, 1785: Congress moves to New York City

11 Saturday Jan 2020

Posted by in Confederation Congress, Federal Hall National Memorial, George Washington, Pierre Charles L'Enfant

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New York City Hall was home to the Confederation Congress from January 1785 until October 1788.

On Christmas Eve a few weeks back I noted that on that date in 1784 the Congress of the Confederation was packing up its temporary home in Trenton, New Jersey and moving to more permanent, or at least semi-permanent, digs in Manhattan. Specifically Congress was moving into New York City Hall on Wall Street, which it did on January 11, 1785. The image above, as the caption notes, is from prior to the Revolution. The image is more representative of the structure as it would have been in 1785, a few years before Pierre L’Enfant renovated the building in preparation for its transformation into Federal Hall.

There is a tendency to think that not much happened at City/Federal Hall during the Confederation Period, presumably due to the weakness of the Articles of Confederation themselves. It was during this time, two years later in 1787, that the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia. Still, many significant things happened during the Confederation Congress’s years in the building we see here. Among other things, congressmen passed the Land Ordinance of 1785, put down Shays’s Rebellion, and passed the consequential Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that made possible the eventual ratification into statehood of numerous territories. After New York became the eleventh state to ratify the Constitution in late July 1788 Congress soon thereafter moved into the Walter Livingston House in order for L’Enfant to begin his work converting the building in time for the Federal Congress to convene on the site in March 1789 and for George Washington’s inaugural that April.

(image/NYPL)

Christmas Eve 1784

24 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Confederation Congress, Federal Hall National Memorial, Lafayette

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French Arms Tavern in Trenton, New Jersey served as a temporary site of the federal government for nearly two months the year after the Revolution ended. The Confederation Congress’s final day in the tavern was Christmas Eve 1784.

Two hundred and thirty five Christmas Eves ago the Congress of the Confederation concluded its affairs in Trenton after its brief–less than two-month–stay in that southern New Jersey town. The Confederation Congress’s time in New Jersey was short but not without its highlights; it was there that the Marquis de Lafayette gave his goodbye oration to the United States legislature on December 11, 1784. Forty years later in 1824 Lafayette would return to the United States for a grand tour in which he was received with great interest and turnout everywhere he went.

The image we see above is the French Arms Tavern, where Congress met from November 1 to December 24, 1784. I had a conversation not long ago with someone in which we discussed how official and semi-official business in the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early American periods often took place in such venues as coffeehouses and taverns. I suppose the reason is that infrastructure was just not so prevalent in those times. The men of the Confederation Congress had voted the previous day to move the nascent nation’s capital to New York City. Congress would move in to New York’s City Hall, today’s Federal Hall, on January 11, 1785. One can imagine the men wrapping up their affairs on that long ago Christmas Eve and enjoying a holiday meal before preparing in the coming days for the move to New York.

(image/Architect of the U.S. Capitol)