History of the United States Senate

About the Briefing

This handout was created for the AHA’s July 24, 2025, Congressional Briefing offering historical perspectives on the United States Senate. Panelists Joseph Crespino (Emory Univ.), Joanne B. Freeman (Yale Univ.), and Daniel S. Holt (Senate Historical Office) discussed how the structure, composition, and culture of the Senate has changed over time.

The recording of the briefing is available to watch on C-SPAN.

The Early Senate

• Debate about the Senate ranged far and wide during the Constitutional Convention. What kind of body was it? Some thought it should be grander, more national, and of higher status than the House, like Britain’s House of Lords, with senators elected for life during good behavior. Life tenures were a great idea, argued one delegate, because they would attract greedy demagogues to support the new government to get one of those seats.
• Not surprisingly, in the Senate’s early years, much time was spent debating and deciding precedents: How should the Senate operate? Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay documented much of this painstaking process in his diary, an invaluable ground-level record of the working of the Senate in its early years. The final decisions risked shaping the character of the Senate, and thereby, the character of the government and the nation in sweeping and unpredictable ways.
• Accounts like Maclay’s are rare because the Senate was closed to the press in its early years—a controversial decision because it raised the key question: What precisely should be the Senate’s connection with the American people? Should the press have access to the Senate, as it did to the House? (Initially the answer was no.) Were Senators social superiors to their constituents, or equals? This became a subject of debate when the Senate debated congressional salaries, always a touchy topic.
• In the 1830s and 1840s, Congress was at the center of the news; newspaper column inches were focused on Congress, not the president. The American people had a personal connection with the Senate—as evident in their response to the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. Northerners saw it as a personal attack. People saw Congress as the government, and the Senate as an intimate version of their representation overall.

The Senate, 1865–1932

• Emerging from the Civil War, the Senate was arguably the most powerful institution in the federal government. Senators served long careers and their seniority allowed them to exercise power as committee chairs. Many senators were political party bosses, wealthy industrialists, and corporate lawyers, leading to charges that the Senate had become a “millionaire’s club” that served business interests rather than the people’s.
• In the 1900s and 1910s, southern and western states elected new progressives who challenged the entrenched power of the Republican majority. In hopes of weakening party machines and ending the corruption that plagued Senate elections in state legislatures the states ratified the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, providing for the direct election of senators by the people.
• Both parties innovated new organizations and leadership between the 1880s and 1920s. A small number of powerful Republicans, led by Iowa’s William Allison and Rhode Island’s Nelson Aldrich, exercised power over the Senate’s agenda through their party’s steering committee and their positions as head of major Senate committees. Democrats centralized power in their conference in a single leader, beginning with Arthur Gorman of Maryland in 1890. By the 1920s, both party conferences elected floor leaders who took greater control over the legislative agenda and sought to enforce party discipline.
• The filibuster, whereby senators delay or block action on measures through extended debate, became a defining feature of the Senate, used by southern Democrats to block civil rights legislation and by progressive Republicans to buck the conservative majority of their party.
• Public outcry over obstruction during World War I led the Senate to adopt its first cloture rule, which allowed a supermajority to cut off debate, but it was only rarely used before the 1960s.

The Last Hundred Years

• For much of the 20th century, the Senate was the venue for some of the most dramatic legislative battles over civil rights.
• The use of the filibuster by southern Senators to dilute or defeat civil rights legislation from the 1920 through the 1960s shaped the course of civil rights history and American political history. Those battles led to fundamental changes in Senate rules that were intended to make it more difficult for a minority of senators to impose their will on the majority.
• Yet those changes had unintended consequences. In the 20th century, new Senate rules, combined with rising partisanship and a transformed media environment, allowed filibusters—or the threat of a filibuster—to become much more common than they ever were in the civil rights era.

Participant Biographies

Joseph Crespino is the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Divisional Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the 20th-century United States and the American South since Reconstruction. His recent books include Strom Thurmond’s America, a biography of the longtime South Carolina senator, and Atticus Finch: The Biography—Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon. He has published in popular forums such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal. Among his current book projects, Crespino is writing the chapters covering United States history in the 20th and 21st centuries for the textbook America: A Narrative History.

Joanne B. Freeman, Class of 1954 Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is a leading scholar of early American politics and political culture. She is the author of the award-winning Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic and editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings and The Essential Hamilton. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, explores physical violence in the House and Senate chambers. Long committed to public minded-history, she has published in popular venues such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, among others, and is a frequent commentator on MSNBC. She hosts a weekly webcast, History Matters (…and so does coffee!).

Daniel S. Holt is the Associate Historian at the US Senate Historical Office. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia. At the Senate, Daniel writes on Senate history for print publications and the web, conducts oral histories, delivers talks and tours, and provides historical information to senators, staff, journalists, researchers, and the general public. Prior to joining the Senate Historical Office in 2016, Daniel was a historian with the federal judiciary, where he edited volumes II and III of Debates on the Federal Judiciary: A Documentary History.