Beschreibung:

BROADSIDE. U.S. CONGRESS, 2nd Session. Senate. [Title at head:] Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled...[Philadelphia:] John Fenno [l798]. Folio, printed on p.4 of a bifolium, the other pages blank, WITH AN ADDITIONAL ARTICLE ADDED IN CONTEMPORARY MANUSCRIPT in an unidentified hand. Bristol l0561 (recording only one other copy, at the Clements Library). Rare. A broadside printing, possibly for the use of Congressmen, of a four-article proposal, never enacted into law, to amend Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the procedure for the balloting of electors for President and Vice-President. This proposed amendment was introduced by William Loughton Smith (1758-l812) of North Carolina (cf. Debates and Proceedings in the Congress, Washington, l849, col.1824). The additional article added in manuscript appears to be otherwise unrecorded, or was perhaps never proposed. The imperfect procedure prescribed in the original Constitution, in which the candidate with the most electoral votes would be President and the candidate with the next highest tally Vice-President, resulted in the election crisis of l801, when both Jefferson and Burr received the same number of electoral votes, throwing the election into the House, where the Federalists and anti-Federalists fought bitterly on 36 successive deadlocked ballots, until, with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton, some Federalists broke the impasse by voting for Jefferson. That crisis finally resulted in the passage of the Twelfth amendment, in l804, which corrected the problem by having the electors specify votes for President and Vice-President. Sold with another broadside, n.p., December l9, l800, proposing a similar amendment to the Constitution, docketed "N.Pinckney, Secretary," at bottom. (2)