As a secret session is always supposed to be for the purpose of discussing a Presidential communication, the fiction is embalmed in the form of a motion “that the Senate proceed to the consideration of executive business.” This is the signal for the doorkeepers to evict the occupants of the galleries and shut the doors leading into the corridors; but sometimes the real reason for the request is widely removed from its pretext. I have known it to be offered for the purpose of cutting short the exhibition which a tipsy Senator was making of himself; or to prevent a tedious airing of grievances by a Senator who had quarreled with the President over the dispensation of patronage in his State; or to silence a Senator who, objecting to the negotiation of a certain treaty, kept referring to it in open debate while it was still pending under the seal of confidence. In this last instance, the offending Senator was so obstinate of purpose that the doors had to be closed and reopened several times in a single day.
On the face of things, there is no reason why the President should not attend any session of the Senate at which business of his originating is under debate. No President since the first, however, has made the experiment. Washington attended three secret sessions, but was so angered by the Senate’s referring to a committee sundry questions which he insisted should be settled on the spot, that he quitted the chamber, emphatically vowing that he would waste no more time on such trifling. The Senators excused their conduct by saying that they were embarrassed in talking about the President and his motives while he was sitting there.
The custom of wearing their hats while transacting business was continued by the Representatives for fifty years or more. Even the Speaker, as long as he sat in his chair, would keep his hat on, though he was accustomed to remove it when he stood to address the House. The Senators, whatever may have been their practice during the years of their seclusion, distinguished themselves from the Representatives immediately thereafter by sitting with bared heads. They also avoided the habit, common in the House, of putting their feet up on the nearest elevated object--usually a desk-lid--and lolling on their spines. English visitors, though accustomed to the wearing of hats in their own House of Commons, nevertheless found a text for criticism in the way the American Representatives did it; and they all had something severe to say of the prevalence of tobacco-chewing in the House, with its accompaniment of spitting, as Mrs. Trollope put it, “to an excess that decency forbids me to describe.” Less offensive to the taste of our visitors from abroad was the indulgence in snuff-taking, which was so general that boxes or jars were set up in convenient places inside of both halls, and it was made the duty of certain employees to keep these always filled with a fine brand of snuff. Any of the most eloquent orators in Congress was liable to stop at regular intervals in a speech to help himself to a large pinch, bury his face in a bandanna handkerchief, and have it out with nature. A few of the lawmakers, indeed, cultivated snuff-taking as a fine art, and were proud of their reputations for dexterity in it. Henry Clay was one of the most skilful.