First passed in 1836 and renewed in some form in every legislative session until its repeal in 1844, the gag rule played a key role in escalating sectional tensions over slavery and galvanizing support for its abolition.

[citation needed] This procedure became unworkable in 1835, when, at the instigation of the new American Anti-Slavery Society, petitions arrived in Congress in quantities never before seen.

Over the gag rule period, well over 1,000 petitions, with 130,000 signatures, poured into the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate praying for the abolition or the restriction of that allegedly beneficial "peculiar institution", as it was called in the South.

There was a special focus on slavery in the District of Columbia, where policy was a federal, rather than state, matter.

The third was known from the beginning as the "gag rule", and passed with a vote of 117 to 68:[3] All petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table and...no further action whatever shall be had thereon.

Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to outrage Americans from Northern states, contributing to the country's growing polarization over slavery.

The pro-gag forces gradually succeeded in shortening the debate at the beginning of each session, and tightening the gag.

However, it had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108, with substantial opposition among Northern Democrats and even some Southern Whigs, and with serious doubts about its constitutionality.