Congress schedules the first presidential vote, and picks New York as the temporary capital
For most of a decade, Congress under the Articles of Confederation had struggled to muster a quorum for routine business, let alone hand power to a new form of government. On September 13, 1788, the Congress of the Confederation set the machinery in motion: electors would be chosen January 7, 1789, cast their votes February 4, and the new Congress under the ratified Constitution would convene March 4. The same resolution named New York City the temporary seat of government, the city where Congress already sat.
This single resolution set the first version of a calendar that would evolve into the modern election schedule.: electors chosen in January, votes counted in February, and a new government seated in March. It also made New York, not Philadelphia or a Southern capital, the first home of the presidency and Congress under the Constitution, a fact settled with little debate.
QWhy did the Confederation Congress keep calling itself the Continental Congress right up to its final days?
The body that scheduled the first presidential election never adopted a new name for itself. Formed under the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781, it continued referring to itself as the Continental Congress throughout its entire run, the same label used by the earlier revolutionary congresses that had declared independence and run the war. Modern historians draw a firm line between the pre-1781 Continental Congresses and the post-1781 Confederation Congress, but the delegates sitting in New York in September 1788 drew no such distinction in their own records. The name stuck out of habit, not legal necessity, and it quietly disappeared only when the new Constitution's Congress convened in March 1789 with its own defined House and Senate.
QHow long had New York already been hosting Congress before it became the capital of the new constitutional government?
New York City had served as the seat of the Confederation Congress since January 1785, nearly four full years before the September 1788 resolution made it the temporary capital under the new Constitution. That earlier move had nothing to do with presidential elections or new charters; Congress simply relocated its ongoing, often poorly attended sessions there after leaving other host cities. So when delegates picked New York in 1788, they were not selecting a fresh site for a fresh government but simply keeping the government where it already happened to be sitting. The building and staff were already in place, which is part of why the choice drew so little debate.
QWhat specific power did the Articles of Confederation deny Congress that the new Constitution restored?
Beyond the well-known inability to tax, the Articles gave Congress no authority to regulate commerce between the states or with foreign nations, a gap the new Constitution was built specifically to close. The Confederation Congress could request money and goods from the states but could not compel payment, and it could not set uniform trade rules that bound all thirteen states together. This left the country vulnerable to trade disputes among the states themselves. The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia handed the new Congress explicit commerce power, a change that took effect the same day the new government convened, March 4, 1789.
