The first session of the Twenty-fourth Congress saw the tensions over slavery in the District of Columbia erupt on the floors of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In both chambers the presentation of abolitionist petitions became a point of controversy As actors in the Senate and House groped for a path around the polarizing and consuming issue of abolition, they moved away from reliance upon the text of the constitutional document and toward a constitutional spirit – embodied in the idea of “the compact” – as a way to navigate the apparent incompatibility of Southern and Northern understandings of the Constitution’s guarantee of rights of property. This chapter traces the process of the debates within each chamber of Congress before turning to a closer analysis of the constitutional issues raised by them. The chapter outlines the manner in which the invocation of “the compact” in the debates and in Pinckney’s Report of May 1836 met the challenges of the abolitionist petitions and erected an understanding of constitutional faith that rested upon the reanimation of values deemed present in the debates of 1787–88.

In 1973, by a 52–42 vote, the U.S. Senate adopted the Helms amendment, a law that prohibits the use of federal foreign assistance funding for abortion research and procedures. Congress did not hold a single hearing related to the legislation, despite the seriousness of family planning access and the fact that women’s reproductive healthcare was at stake. Only months before, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the right to terminate a pregnancy was a fundamental constitutional right rooted in privacy and protected under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. In dramatic contrast, the Helms amendment effectively conditioned U.S. foreign aid policy on the antiabortion platform long advocated by the legislation’s author, “the late, stridently antiabortion Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC).” Senator Helms, a former journalist, was a master of rhetoric. He claimed, “My amendment would stop the use of U.S. Government funds to promote and develop ways of killing unborn children.”

William H. Williams’ slave jail, the Yellow House, garnered a great deal of controversy as the abolitionist movement gained momentum. Abolitionists decried the slave coffles that marched through the District of Columbia, yet from the mid–1830s to mid–1840s, the "gag rule" stymied debate over the antislavery petitions submitted to Congress. Shortly before the presidential election of 1844, Thomas Williams flew a flag of the Democratic Polk/Dallas ticket above the Yellow House. The banner ignited a newspaper war in the nation’s capital, as the Democratic organ, the Washington Globe, claimed the move a clever Whig ruse to smear the Democratic Party with the odium of slavery. Washington’s Whig mouthpiece, the National Intelligencer, made the much simpler argument that Thomas Williams flew the Polk/Dallas flag because the slave dealer was, in fact, a Democrat.