Editing Gag rule (United States) (section)

==Background==
Congress regularly received petitions asking for various types of relief or action. Before the gag rules, House rules required that the first thirty days of each session of Congress be devoted to the reading of petitions from constituents. Each petition was read aloud, printed, and assigned to an appropriate committee, which could choose to address or ignore it. After those thirty days, petitions were read in the House every other Monday.{{cn|date=August 2022}}

This procedure became unworkable in 1835, when, at the instigation of the new [[American Anti-Slavery Society]], petitions arrived in Congress in quantities never before seen. Over the gag rule period, well over 1,000 petitions, with 130,000 signatures, poured into the [[United States House of Representatives]] and the [[United States Senate]] praying for the abolition or the restriction of that [[Slavery as a positive good|allegedly beneficial]] "[[peculiar institution]]", as it was called in the [[Southern United States|South]]. There was a special focus on [[slavery in the District of Columbia]], where policy was a federal, rather than state, matter. The petitions also asked Congress to use its Constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to end the interstate slave trade. These petitions were usually presented by former president [[John Quincy Adams]], who, as a member of the House of Representatives from [[History of slavery in Massachusetts|strongly anti-slavery Massachusetts]], identified particularly with the struggle against any Congressional abridgement of the [[right of petition|right of citizens to petition the government]].<ref name=nie>{{Cite NIE|wstitle=Gag rules|year=1906}}</ref>

Pro-slavery politicians controlled Congress and responded to this influx of petitions with a series of gag rules that, much to the disgust of Northerners, automatically [[Table (United States parliamentary)#Use in the United States|"tabled"]] all such petitions, prohibiting them from being printed, read, discussed, or voted on, stating that "the effect of these petitions was to create much irritation and ill feeling between different parts of the Union."<ref>{{cite news
|title=Report of the Joint Committee on the Harpers Ferry Outrages, January 26, 1859 [sic]
|publisher=Commonwealth of Virginia
|date=January 26, 1860
|url=http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/vajointcommitteereport.html
|access-date=September 4, 2021
|archive-date=August 7, 2021
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210807063353/http://www.wvculture.org/history/jbexhibit/vajointcommitteereport.html
|url-status=dead
}} </ref>