Congress in the Archives

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Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), the longest-serving African American member of Congress and the third-longest serving member of the U.S. House of Representatives, served in the House for over 52 years. His first employment on Capitol Hill was as a staff member in the office of Representative John Dingell (D-MI). Conyers was elected to the House in 1965 and was re-elected every Congress until his retirement in 2017. While in Congress, Conyers served as chairman of the House Committee on Government Operations (101st through 103rd Congresses) and the House Committee on the Judiciary (110th and 111th Congresses), and was known as the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, an organization he helped found. 

On April 8, 1968, four days after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Representative Conyers introduced a bill proposing King’s birthday be celebrated as a national holiday. Conyers continued to push the legislation for the next 15 years until it was signed into law by President Reagan in 1983, a legislative victory Conyers was particularly proud of. 

Representative Conyers died on October 27, 2019, at the age of 90.

Certificate of Election for John Conyers, Jr., Representative of Michigan, 12/8/1964; Records of the Office of the Clerk, 89th Congress, U. S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233; National Archives.

Cheering for the home team tonight! Let’s go Nats!! 

Elijah Cummings (D-MD) was first elected to the U.S. House of Representative in a special election in 1996. He was re-elected to Congress 12 times, continuously representing Maryland’s 7th District until his death on October 17, 2019. While in Congress, Cummings’ committee assignments included the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and the Select Committee on Benghazi. During his congressional career Cummings was a member of a number of caucuses including as co-founder and chair of the Congressional Caucus on Drug Policy, the Congressional Black Caucus (Chair in the 108th Congress), the Congressional Arts Caucus, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The two documents shown here are Elijah Cummings’ certificate of election and oath of office for his first term as a member of the House of Representatives. 

On July 11, 1804, Alexander Hamilton was mortally wounded during a duel with Aaron Burr and died the following day. Five years after Hamilton's untimely death, his widow, Elizabeth Hamilton, submitted a petition to Congress asking for a pension based on her husband's military service as Lieutenant Colonel in the Revolutionary War.

In 1782, Hamilton had been a member of the Continental Congress that passed legislation establishing army pensions. For ethical reasons, he had relinquished his claim to compensation.

In her petition, presented to the House of Representatives on May 30, 1809, Elizabeth Hamilton asked Congress to restore her husband's right to a pension. Along with her petition, she submitted Hamilton's October 28, 1783 Commission as Lieutenant Colonel for the Revolutionary Army and a personal statement of his property and debts. Believed to be written on July 1, 1804, just days before he died, Hamilton's statement is an explanation of his financial circumstances "if an accident should happen to me." In it, he ties his public service to the present state of his finances, which included debts that would prove a burden to his family.

Mrs. Hamilton's initial attempt to secure a pension failed, but in 1816, Congress passed a bill granting five years pay, which was a full pension, to Mrs. Hamilton.

Happy Springtime!

Conjuring Easter egg hunts and springtime is this adorable letterhead from the Paas Dye Company. Tiny elves dye enormous Easter eggs. The Paas Company has been making egg dyeing kits since 1893 and is still going strong today. 

We stumbled on this letter, from 1940, in the records of the House Ways and Means Committee. Because businesses write to Congress about tax and tariff legislation that affects them, the records of the Ways and Means Committee are filled with wonderful letterhead like this.      

In 1857 the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind began to provide primary school education for deaf and blind students. In 1864 Congress authorized the institution to confer college degrees with the passage of S. 163 – seen above. President Lincoln signed the bill into law on April 8, 1864. In 1986, after several name changes, Congress gave the Columbia Institution the name it still goes by today, Gallaudet University.

Map of the Grounds of the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, Committee Papers of the Committee on the District of Columbia, HR 38A-E5.1; Records of the House of Representatives, Record Group 233.

Nothing says “PARTY!!!” like appropriations! Ah, the good old days!

H.J.Res. 1, better known as the 19th Amendment, was introduced on May 19, 1919 by Representative James R. Mann of Illinois. The resolution proposed an amendment to the Constitution extending the right of suffrage to women. On May 21, 1919 it passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 304 to 90, and on June 4, 1919 it passed in the Senate by a vote of 56 to 25.

After passage through U.S. Congress, the 19th Amendment was sent to the states for ratification. Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan were the first three states to ratify – the certificates from each of these three states are represented above. However, the 19th Amendment wasn’t formally adopted until August 1920, when Tennessee became the necessary 36th state to ratify.

This petition protesting the tariff on works of art reads like a who's who of the art world in late nineteenth century America.

Artists Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Asher Brown Durand, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Thomas Eakins, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Eastman Johnson, and Daniel Chester French, and architects Stanford White, Frank Furness, and James Renwick, Jr., are among hundreds of signatories on this 1886 petition which was referred to the House Ways and Means Committee.

These artists asked Congress to enact a law admitting works of art -- paintings, sculptures, engravings, casts, models, antiques, and photographs -- ;from foreign countries into the United States free of duty. They joined a growing movement protesting the 30% tariff on imported works of art enacted by Congress in 1883. While the petition argues that art is a means for education and civilization, some artists, like Childe Hassam, added their own arguments. Hassam handwrote on his petition "art is universal and needs no taxation," but apparently he did not think much of Italian watercolors sold to tourists, as he added, "tax the rot that comes into the country in the way of Italian watercolors." Ouch! As ever, art is in the eye of the beholder.

In 1885 the Treasury apparently had too many silver dollars in its vault and needed to get them into circulation; that was the reported reason why it stopped issuing new one- and two-dollar bills. 

 “A great scarcity of small bills exists at the present time, and those which are in circulation are so ragged, worn and filthy that they are unfit for use…” 

Who knew there was a time when there weren’t enough one and two dollar bills? The following year several cities’ Boards of Trade petitioned Congress to encourage the Treasury to reissue the small denomination paper notes because they were so much easier to carry than heavy coins. Compare what’s in your pocket to what’s in your wallet and see that the nudging worked.   

Baseball History

Spring training is upon us, ushering in the first notes of spring in the midst of the last long month of winter, as it has for over a century. The history of baseball is as integral to the fiber of the sport as is the annual trip to warmer weather and the reporting of pitchers and catchers, and no history of the game is complete without reference to one of its first serious historians. Dr. Harold Seymour’s PhD was the first awarded based on baseball research, and his book (referenced above in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, who was considering sports antitrust legislation during the 85th Congress) influenced generations of sports historians. Modern baseball historians such as John Thorn have rightly identified his wife, Dorothy Seymour Mills, as equally essential to the scholarship presented in the three seminal Seymour tomes (Baseball: The Early Years; Baseball: The Golden Age; Baseball: The People’s Game), and regularly cite the two as major contributors to our understanding of the game.

Letter to Emanuel Celler and Copy of Article, 10/26/1957; Committee Papers (HR85A-F11.16); Committee on the Judiciary; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, RG 233. 

John D. Dingell, Jr., the longest-serving member of Congress, represented the 15th District of Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly 60 years. In 1955 he won a special election to replace his father, John D. Dingell, Sr., who had died in office. He won re-election 29 times and served continuously in the House until his retirement in 2015. Throughout his career Dingell was a strong advocate for affordable health care for all. Every year he introduced national healthcare legislation, continuing an effort begun by his father in 1943. Representative Dingell was instrumental in the passage of Medicare in 1965, and he played a leading role in passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010. In 2015 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. John D. Dingell, Jr. died February 7, 2019 at the age of 92.

Oath of Office for John D. Dingell, Jr., January 3, 1956

Petition of the Convention of Colored People of Ohio

In early 1849, freedmen of Ohio convened and composed this petition to Congress, urging lawmakers to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.  

We are an orderly, law abiding, and peace loving people, but when we see our brother, sister, father, or mother, chained and fettered to be dragged into disgraceful bondage, filial and fraternal affection forces us to release the captive and thereby subject ourselves to the penalty of said law, for doing what nature and nature's God imperiously require at our hands.  

In the decades preceding the Civil War, Colored Conventions brought black abolitionists together to organize and advocate for emancipation and civil rights.  This petition shows the political activism of the black community of Ohio.  The president of the Convention, Charles Henry Langston (1817-1892), was a noted activist and educator.  Born free in Virginia to a formerly enslaved woman and a wealthy white planter, Langston came of age in Ohio.  He and his brother Gideon were the first African-Americans to be admitted to Oberlin College, in 1835.  In 1858, Langston stood trial for his role in rescuing John Price, an escaped slave who was kidnapped in Ohio by slave-catchers (the case is known as the Oberlin-Wellington rescue).  Langston shared his activism with his two brothers, one of whom, John Mercer Langston, became the first black congressman from Virginia in 1890 (and the last, for another century). And activism and self-expression were inherited by subsequent generations: twentieth century poet, Langston Hughes, was Charles Henry Langston's grandson.