The Public Opinion Project will further public understanding of the discourse and debate over the nature of the United States government during those initial years when the experiment of a unified nation based on a strong Federal Government was first tested. The year 1789 marked a transition to a new form of national representative government. Whereas previous national congresses were appointed by state legislatures, the constitution created a House of Representatives whose members were directly elected by the people and thus ultimately had to answer to their constituents' concerns. The newspapers of this period published the debates of the House--which opened its doors to the public--and the public, in turn, could read the debates and air their ideas, forging lines of communication between congressmen and their constituents, while at the same time setting in motion an overarching conversation about the role of the Federal Government that was imperative to a fledgling democratic institution. During the three sessions of First Federal Congress (FFC), representatives from states with divergent and often competing interests fleshed out their ideological divisions about the meaning of the federal experiment. The opinion pieces published throughout the nation during this two year period set the course for the continuing debate and tensions over the nature of the American government including the two major philosophical camps, centralists and de-centralists, as well as both sectional and economic divisions. The public debate in the newspapers also addressed tangible issues facing the FFC such as the creation of a national financial system and a corresponding national bank, the funding of the revolutionary war debts, the establishment of the federal courts structure, a Bill of Rights, the power to remove executive officers, federal regulation of state militias, federal revenue and commercial policies including an unpopular excise, slavery and the slave trade, organization of new territory, and Indian relations.
The project's editors have collected some 2800 public opinion pieces published across the nation in more than 86 newspapers during the three sessions of the First Congress. This site currently houses a complete collection of second session pieces and a partial run of third session articles. The editors will continue to add material as they index and obtain digital copies of the pieces. They plan to have put all of the public opinion material on the web by December 2008.