The Birthplace of Robert’s Rules of Order By Carl Nohr, PRP
In 1863, Major Henry M. Robert attended the annual general meeting of the First Baptist Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He had been transferred there to recover from recurrent tropical fever. At the meeting, he was elected chairman pro tem. Unfortunately, there was a contentious issue regarding local defense concerns, and the meeting lasted fourteen hours. Major Robert was embarrassed because, by his own description, he did not know how to run a meeting. It was that experience that prompted him to begin studying parliamentary law, as he resolved he would never find himself embarrassed at a meeting again. He developed a process to accumulate observations and thoughts about parliamentary procedure, which culminated in the publication of the first edition of his book, Robert’s Rules of Order, in 1876. This experience of Major Robert at the First Baptist Church is described in the biography, Henry Martyn Robert: Writer of Rules, An American Hero, by Joseph F. O’Brien, compiled, edited, and expanded by Leonard M. Young, PRP, National Association of Parliamentarians, 2019. “I attended a meeting one neverto-be forgotten evening, and to my surprise I was elected chairman. My embarrassment was supreme. I just did not know what to do. My 12
National Parliamentarian • Winter 2021
life at West Point, on the Frontier, and service in the Civil War had made it so that I had never had anything to do with any deliberative assembly. I did not know the least thing about the difference in rank of motions, which were debatable, or which could be amended. In fact, I was just as ignorant as anyone could be. I felt that to decline would probably not let me out of the dilemma, as I would have been forced to serve and then I would only have called attention to my ignorance, thus making my critics more alert. So I plunged in, trusting to Providence that the assembly would behave itself. But with the plunge went the determination that I would never again attend any meeting until I knew something on the subject of parliamentary law.” In his proposed, but unpublished preface to the Rules of Order, he credits this meeting directly with having started him off on the study that led to his manual. “…[F]or four years afterwards I kept in my pocketbook a small slip of paper giving a list of the ordinary motions arranged according to rank, a list of debatable questions and of those that could not be amended. But experience soon showed that this was not enough to enable one to act
