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Major Research Project Launched on Early Petitions to Congress

The Byrd Center for Legislative Studies has launched a documentary editing research project on the petitions received by the House of Representatives and the Senate during the early years of the Republic from 1789 to 1817. These petitions, most never published before, offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and concerns of Americans of the time and what they expected Congress to do for them. Each petition is a story unto itself. We hear the voices of Indians, New England whalers, women, abolitionists, both black and white, and manufacturers urging Congress to protect their fledgling industries against the unfair prices of foreign imports. These petitions helped shape the very nature of the House and Senate and for the first time, beginning in 1789, the people of all the states had a national government to hear their grievances.
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Index of Early Petitions
All of these documents are from Record Group 233 at the National Archives.  The transcriptions preserve original spelling and punctuation as allowed by modern typography. Dockets noted by clerks are included in the transcriptions but lists of signatures are omitted.
Links will open these documents in MS Word format.

• Petition of Absalom Jones and others (1799)
• Petition of sundry manufacturers of Umbrellas, in the City of Philadelphia, and its vicinity, in the State of Pennsylvania (1802)
• A Memorial to Congress, From the Trustees of Jefferson College (1803)
• Petition of Andrew Jackson (1803)
• Memorial of sundry citizens of the City of Washington in the District of Columbia (1803)
• Petition of the inhabitants of the Island and town of Nantucket, in the State of Massachusetts (1803)
• Petition of sundry inhabitants of the Counties of Ulster and Delaware in the State of New York (1804)
• Petition of Ann Alricks, of the town and county of Alexandria, in the district of Columbia (1804)
• Petition of Thomas Spalding, complaining of the undue election of Cowles Meade, one of the members returned to serve in the Housefor the state of Georgia (1805)
• Petition of the Warriors of the Upper and Lower Sanduskies (1806)
• Petition of sundry inhabitants of Northampton in the county of Hampshire and state of Massachusetts (1808)
• Petition of sundry inhabitants of the City of Philadelphia, praying that the Post Office may not be kept open for the receipt and distribution of Letters on Sunday's (1811)
• Petition of Eli Whitney (1812)
• Petition of Sundry Inhabitants Merchants of Boston (1814)
• Petition of Inhabitants of Centre & Clairfield Counties, Pennsylvania against the compensation Bill (1817)
• Memorial of the American Society for the encouragement of Domestic Manufactures (1817)