The Senate voted (20-7) to censure Senator Timothy Pickering (MA) for disclosing confidential documents. Pickering thereby became the first senator to face such a formal rebuke by his colleagues.

Under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution's newly ratified Twentieth Amendment, Congress for the first time convened on January 3. Until adoption of the amendment, the Constitution had required Congress to "assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by law appoint a different day."

John Crittenden (KY), the Senate's senior member, rose to speak  in a chamber packed to capacity. "This place, which has known us for so long, is to know us no more forever as a Senate." Vice President John Breckinridge, following his fellow Kentuckian, offered his own farewell. The vice president then led a solemn file of senators out of that room (now known as the Old Senate chamber) and down the hall forty-five paces to the newly constructed chamber that the Senate continues to occupy today.

Senate Republican floor leader Charles McNary (OR), for the first time, occupied the front-row, center-aisle desk on the eastern side of the Senate Chamber. Democratic floor leader Joseph T. Robinson (AR) had inaugurated a comparable tradition on his side of the center aisle ten years earlier. Since then, floor leaders of both parties have consistently chosen to operate from these well-placed desks.

As the Senate prepared to consider a highly controversial diplomatic agreement with France, it established rules requiring that all relevant executive communications and treaty documents be kept "inviolably secret" until specifically made public. On January 6, 1801,  the Senate clarified and toughened its procedures for managing treaties by specifying that the constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote on final agreement to ratification would also apply to amendments to that resolution. The Senate later eased this requirement, adopting the current practice of allowing a simple majority vote on treaty amendments.

As required by the Constitution, President George Washington delivered his first annual "state of the union" address to a joint session of Congress meeting in the Senate chamber of New York City's Federal Hall.

On this day in 1924, members of the Senate's majority party helped the minority party gain the chairmanship of one of the body's most important committees. Progressive Republicans vigorously opposed reelection of Albert Cummins (IA) as chair of the Committee on Interstate Commerce. Conservative Republicans, with equal tenacity, fought the candidacy of progressive Republican Robert La Follette (WI). Unable to secure enough votes for La Follette, progressive Republicans joined with minority party Democrats to award the chair to Ellison Smith (SC), a conservative Democrat.