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In July 1842 the Twenty-seventh Congress of the United States enacted the Sixth Apportionment Act to recalculate the number and distribution of the States' Representatives. For the first time in history, the act led to a contraction in the number of the members of the House. Furthermore, the Apportionment Act of 1842 also included an amendment calling for the adoption of a federal uniform system for the election of the States' Representatives. Both these issues immediately became the subject of a long and heated discussion that exposed many of the political, sectional, and ideological fractures that had been building up in Congress. On the one hand, the long debate on the Apportionment Act of 1842 mirrored the political and sectional dynamics of the Second Party System, and, on the other, it pictured an important transition in the evolution of the representative systems in the United States. The relations between State and Federal powers, and the divergences on political representation had inflamed the political debate since the Revolution, but it was in the party-centred climate of extreme conflict that characterized the 1830s, that the planning of national electoral strategies, the party control of district apportionment, and the other equipment of political �campaigning� such as a federal, uniform electoral system, became central in defining the new political universe that would generate the Third American Party System.
