23rd Congress, 1st Session. House of Representatives. Executive. [Doc. No. 1 through 49] Message of the President of the United States, to the Two Houses of Congress, at the Commencement of the First Session of the Twenty-third Congress. December 3, 1833

Washington [DC]: Printed by Gales & Seaton. Very Good-. 1833. First Edition Thus. Hardcover. Very thick octavo volume. Contemporary full sheepskin leather, flat spine "paneled" by pairs of rules in blind, red leather label lettered in gilt in the second panel -- covers with a border constructed of decorative tooling in blind, plain endpapers. There are scuff and shallow gouges to the leather suface of the covers, and scattered foxing (both diffuse and little pin-points) affecting many of the text leaves -- as usual for paper used in official publications of the U.S. Congress of the time. 23rd Congress, 1st Session. Ho[use] of Rep[resentative]s. Executive. [Doc. No. 1 (through 49] This is the first volume, only (of six), of the complete set of the Executive Documents produced by the first session of the twenty-third U.S. Congress, during the administration of Andrew Jackson. As detailed at the beginning of the first section -- [an "Index to the Executive Documents... 43 pp.] -- this first volume contains Documents numbers 1-49. The first is the longest, and begins with Andrew Jackson's State of the Union Message, and then incorporates detailed reports from each department of the Executive branch controlled by the office of the President. This Document No. 1 consisted of 292 pages, and its first leaf serves as the title page for this volume, with a full imprint from Gales & Seaton in Washington. These partners were the official printers to Congress for many years. Joseph Gales, Jr. took over as sole proprietor of the 'National Intelligencer,' and after forming a partnership with his brother-in-law, William Winston Seaton, their newspaper started daily publication in 1813. It became the paper of record for Washington and the Federal Government, with a running account of the debates in both Houses. Four major threads run through this part of Andrew Jackson's eventful presidency: the finances of the country and the nature of the (second) Bank of America; the status of the War Department and the several branches of armed services; the ongoing program of "Indian Removal;" and foreign policy (relations, in particular, with Britain, France, Spain, Russia, Denmark, Belgium, the Two Sicilies, and Latin America). Document No. 2 is headed: "Removal of Public Deposites [sic] ... from the Bank of the United States." 42 pages, under the aegis of the Secretary of the Treasury [Roger B. Taney, a future Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court]. (Andrew Jackson's determined opposition to the Bank of the United States is still a matter of historical debate -- Document 21 is a protest from the Philadelphia Board of Trade against the removal of those Federal Government deposits). Document 12 is devoted to another significant response: "Memorial of H. D. Gilpin, Peter Wagner, John T. Sullivan and H. McElderry, the officially appointed directors of the Second Bank of America. 40 pp. There is a document No. 20] of great significance to the history of the U.S. Navy -- the entirely re-designed and rewritten Rules and Regulations of 1833, covering all possible details of Naval service, from specification of the uniforms, ranks and commands, pensions, arrests and courts martial, shipyards and quartermaster details, the Marines, etc. [107 pp.] Another of the most substantial documents is Number 26, the detailed report by the long-serving Third Auditor of the Treasury, Peter Hagner, "Claims of Certain Citizens of the United States for Indian Depredations." [117 pp. -- Peter Hagner was first appointed to the Treasury department in 1793 by George Washington, and served under every administration for fifty-six consecutive years, resigning his office in 1849! The details of these claims are printed in three horizontal columns across the pages, and represent an indispensable record of Native American studies. Hagner's remarks on each claim (printed in its own column) from his signficant position as Third Auditor of the Treasury, demonstrate that, whatever the slant of Andrew Jackson's determination to move vast numbers of the inconvenient native Americans of the south east U.S., at least one high officer of his government was taking an independent view of the details of each case of complaint. Document 45 details the granting of licenses to trade with the Indians. Among the various other matters of interest: Purcase by the U.S. of the Louisville and Portland Canal (in order to make it free of tolls); a Memorial from citizens of Pennsylvania, "praying for an appropriation to construct a canal from Chesapeake Bay to Lake Ontario; More canal matters included a substantial report on the Chesapeake and Ohio canal (begun in Washington by President John Quincy Adams turning the first shovel of dirt in 1826) -- (Documents Nos. 36 "Western Section"& 38 -- 24 pp.) There is a brief report from the Commissioner of the Public Buildings (with appropriations of $12,260.40 for alterations and repairs in the Capitol, but only $500. for the "President's House.") There are also documents requesting improvements to various waterways -- "Petition of sundry inhabitants of the northern frontier asking for an appropriation to improve the navigation of the St. Lawrence River." Railroads had not quite come under the scrutiny of Congress yet (but in June of the year of this volume, Andrew Jackson became the first President to ride a train). This thick volume is an unusual survivor of the official issue of the House Documents from this era. It is likely that most of these 49 documents were circulated individually at the time to interested parties. Many that were bound into nonce volumes by their first users have subsequently been broken up into their individual publications. Consequently, most copies of these public Documents which survive on the contemporary market have been disbound from volumes. But this officially bound and issued whole volume seems too interesting to break, having survived in its original form into the twenty-first century. Rare, thus. Various paginations -- the volume is nearly three-and-a-half inches thick. .