Editing Congress Hall (section)

== The Federal Decade ==

The decade of federal government in Philadelphia (1790-1800) was a formative period in American history, and Congress Hall was at the center of the action. The first Congress to meet in the building, the Second Congress (1791-1793), passed legislation establishing the First Bank of the United States, creating the U.S. Mint (which remains in Philadelphia today), and admitting Vermont as the 14th state. The bitter debates over Alexander Hamilton's financial program—assumption of state debts, creation of the national bank, and imposition of excise taxes—echoed through the chamber, establishing the fault lines of partisan conflict that would crystallize into the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties.<ref name="elkins">{{cite book |last=Elkins |first=Stanley |last2=McKitrick |first2=Eric |title=The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 |year=1993 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York}}</ref>

Congress Hall witnessed some of the most contentious political battles of the early republic. The debate over Jay's Treaty with Britain in 1795 provoked intense controversy, with opponents burning effigies of John Jay in the streets while supporters argued the treaty was necessary to preserve peace. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which restricted immigration and criminalized criticism of the government, were passed by a Congress meeting in this building—laws that remain infamous as among the most serious early threats to American civil liberties. The political culture of the 1790s, with its newspaper wars, partisan accusations, and occasional physical altercations, seems remarkably familiar from a modern perspective, and much of it played out within these walls.<ref name="nps"/>