Adams Family Correspondence, volume 10
The Alteration of Post Days or some other Cause has disappointed me of a Letter from you this Week, which is the first time I have failled of a Letter on Monday for several months.
The Weather has been very hot and dry here. Yesterday however We had a Light shower: but to day it is very hot again.
The House is slow upon the Ways and means the essential Measure which remains— But I think We shall rise by the first of June, and I fear not before. a tedious Six months it has been to me.
The Senate have given a gentle Check to a very contemptuous Reprobation of the Measures of Congress, voted in the statehouse yard by a Number of Tobacconists & sugar Bakers &c1
By the Way this statehouse Yard is a beautiful Thing formed on an English Plan, like the Inclosure in Grosvenor Square. I walk there every day for Air and Exercise in the shade. It is not a Paines Hill nor a stow, nor a Leasows—but it is pretty. I am, Patience almost / exhausted, tenderly tenderly tenderly yrs.
RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs A.”
A group of manufacturers met in Philadelphia on 8 May to draft a series of resolutions to “reprobate the imposition of an excise upon the infant manufactures of America.” They described the suggested excise as “unjust, impolitic, oppressive, dangerous and unnecessary” and indicated that if such a tax was passed, “the manufacturers of the city of Philadelphia will assemble at the State house … to take into consideration what measures ought to be pursued to express their sympathy for their oppressed brethren, and with a due respect for their obligations as citizens to demonstrate their abhorrance of so unjust, so impolitic and so pernicious a precedent.” These resolutions were presented to the Senate on 12 May. After reading them, the Senate declared them, by a vote of fifteen to nine, “to be disrespectful to the Senate, ordered that the same be dismissed” (Philadelphia Gazette, 12 May;
Annals of Congress,
3d Cong., 1st sess., p. 98).