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David Potts, Jr. collection of slip bills from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives
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Held at: University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts [Contact Us]3420 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
David Potts, Jr. was born November 27, 1794 in Warwick Furnace, Pennsylvania and died in his hometown on June 1, 1863. He began his career as an ironmaster, taking over his father's business, Warwick Furnace. In 1819, he married Anna Nutt May. Potts entered politics in 1823 by becoming a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He was then elected as an Anti-Masonic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania for the twenty-second congress in 1831 and was elected to the three succeeding congresses as well, ending his political career in 1839. He then resumed his business pursuits in Warwick Furnace for the remainder of his life.
Slip bills are working copies of legislative texts such as acts, amendments, and orders, printed with wide spacing between lines to facilitate handwritten changes and annotations. They were frequently discarded after their use as working documents. They are unusual to find today, and the annotations help shed light on the evolution of particular legislation.
This collection contains roughly 420 slip bills from the 1823-1824 session of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. These bills belonged to and were annotated by Representative David Potts, Jr. and were read between December 6, 1823, and March 24, 1824. The bills at beginning of this volume are heavily annotated by Potts. These annotations often included the name of the chairman of the House committee, the date, remarks on the act's status, scratched out sentences, and altered passages. The volume also contains an index of the bills for the 1822-1823 session in alphabetical order by subject and a 4-page Report of the Committee of Ways and Means…Read in the House of Representatives, Feb. 20, 1824.
The separate slip bills have been bound in a sequential unit by vernacular binding consisting of a thick cover page and a cloth ribbon tying the bills together. Some of the acts are missing and a few are not in order in the volume; however, the items are listed as they are bound. Titles of acts have been copied exactly from the original, therefore, inconsistencies in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and abbreviations are common.
Topics are wide-ranging with a number of acts focusing on the improvement of or establishment of roads; benefits for revolutionary war soldiers and/or their families; regulations on businesses, governmental agencies, and banks; and establishing boundaries of counties.
Sold by Ian Brabner Rare Americana, 2016.
Organization
Subject
Place
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
- Finding Aid Author
- Kelin Baldridge
- Finding Aid Date
- 2017 March 1
- Access Restrictions
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This collection is open for research use.
- Use Restrictions
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Copyright restrictions may exist. For most library holdings, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania do not hold copyright. It is the responsibility of the requester to seek permission from the holder of the copyright to reproduce material from the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.