He also performed
executive duties and public acts while absent. He appears to have signed
and issued while absent from the capital very many public papers,
embracing commissions, letters of credence, exequaturs, pardons, and
among them four Executive proclamations. On the 26th of June, 1833, he
addressed a letter from Boston to Mr. Duane, Secretary of the Treasury,
giving his views at large on the removal of the "deposits" from the
United States Bank and placing them in the State banks, directing that
the change, with all its arrangements, should be, if possible, completed
by the 15th September following, and recommending that Amos Kendall
should be appointed an agent of the Treasury Department to make the
necessary arrangements with the State banks. Soon after, September 23,
a paper signed by the President and purporting to have been read to the
Cabinet was published in the newspapers of the day. Early in the next
session of Congress a resolution passed the Senate inquiring of the
President whether the paper was genuine or not and if it was published
by his authority, and requesting that a copy be laid before that body.
The President replied, avowing the genuineness of the paper and that it
was published by his authority, but declined to furnish a copy to the
Senate on the ground that it was purely executive business, and that the
request of the Senate was an undue interference with the independence of
the Executive, a coordinate branch of the Government.
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