Biography

Asbury Dickins, a North Carolina Democrat,  for many years had wanted to become the Senate's Secretary.  He had sought the job unsuccessfully in 1825, but with Lowrie's departure, he narrowly won the position.  Dickins had worked as a publisher, a bookseller, and -- for the past twenty years -- as chief clerk in the Treasury and then the State Department.
When Dickins took over the position, the Secretary's Office consisted of six clerks and one messenger.  Responding to complaints about staff disorganization and blurred responsibilities, Dickins prepared a manual that carefully described each person's duties.  Sensitive to senators' complaints that clerks were not always available when needed, he instructed his staff that "the hours of business will be from 9 o'clock to 3 and until such later hour as the Senate may remain in session; and it will be expected of the gentlemen in the Office to be ready at all times ... and that the business of each day will be dispatched during the day, so as to prevent accumulation and delay."
Dickins' quarter-century as Secretary coincided neatly with the Senate's so-called "Golden Age" -- a period of national political turmoil that propelled the Senate to the front rank of America's political institutions.  In its increasingly jammed chamber, the "Great Triumvirate" of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun held forth on the divisive issues of territorial expansion.  During Dickins' tenure, sixteen additional senators from eight new states took their places in that chamber, forcing an 1850 decision to construct "extensions" to the Senate and House wings.  We can only assume that preparations for the Senate's new chamber, committee rooms, and staff offices weighed heavily on Secretary Dickins through the remainder of the 1850s.
Within the Secretary's Office, the growth in the Senate's membership and national stature brought additional staff and more detailed job descriptions.  The executive clerk handed over responsibility to a newly appointed account clerk for keeping daily pay and mileage reimbursement records.  Messengers, who were previously interchangeable, received more carefully spelled out assignments that foreshadowed the Office's twentieth-century development.  The first messenger provided senators with stationery supplies; the second delivered bills, documents, newspapers, and janitorial services; and the third -- sharing duties with a page --swept, built fires, and actually carried messages.  
As the Secretary's Office became more "professionalized," the Secretary gained legal authority to select his own staff.  To protect employees from arbitrary dismissal, the Senate required the Secretary to submit a written justification of all terminations to the Vice President for approval.  Surviving evidence is not sufficient to tell us how well these protections actually worked.
Asbury Dickins helped direct the Senate's institutional activities at a time of vast political growth and turmoil.  That he survived several changes in party control attests to the bipartisan respect he earned for his office.  On July 15, 1861, with hostile armies maneuvering to seize Washington, the eighty-year-old Secretary reluctantly retired and died soon thereafter.