This may not be a CS question, but it does stem from a movie and there might be movie-specific reasoning.
So we finally got around to watching Lincoln last night, and quite enjoyed it. However, a lot of the action takes place in the 1865 House of Representatives, which seems… full of desks which are all occupied. Shouldn’t the desks normally occupied by Southern representatives be empty? But this is such an obviously detailed movie that we wondered, I dunno, maybe everybody left over got a bigger desk?
Only about a quarter would have been empty- slightly less actually: there were 239 seats and 58 were empty from the southern states in secession. (Tennessee and the border states continued to have representatives throughout the war.) Perhaps in the absence of so many members, the delegates who were in back moved closer to the front (no sense Alabama having a better seat than your’s, after all, if they’re not going to be here).
My main beef was that it looked much smaller than the real House Chamber.
Capitol furniture arrangements, alas, are not one of the more thoroughly explored aspects of American history.
I believe, at the time of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), that Representatives were still using the double benches and desks as depicted in this 1859 illustration. I’m not sure whether seats were assigned, or were first-come first-served as in the current House. Either way I suppose it would make sense for some Representatives to claim a double desk for themselves, rather than let doubles sit empty, which might give the illusion of a fuller chamber. But ultimately, those illustrations of a jam-packed House floor were almost certainly a little fanciful.
Note that furniture arrangements had to be more transitory in the Nineteenth Century, because both houses were expanding–the House after every census and both chambers with frequent admission of new states. Curiously however the House expanded only very modestly, from 239 members to 241, after the 1860 census. The admission of Nevada brought it up to 242, of which 58 were vacant due to secession.
Senators have always had individual desks. I’m not sure whether in the Nineteenth Century they followed the current custom of moving seats from one side of the floor to the other as parties gain and lose seats. If so it’s conceivable that they removed desks due to secession because on which side of the aisle would you place a vacant desk? But I don’t know.