President John Q. Adams was absent from the capital during his Presidential term of four years two hundred and twenty-two days.  During such absence he performed official and public acts, signing and issuing commissions, exequaturs, pardons, proclamations, etc.  Referring to his absence in August and September, 1827, Mr. Adams, in his memoirs, volume 8, page 75, says:  “I left with him [the chief clerk] some blank signatures, to be used when necessary for proclamations, remission of penalties, and commissions of consuls, taking of him a receipt for the number and kind of blanks left with him, with directions to return to me when I came back all the signed blanks remaining unused and to keep and give me an account of all those that shall have been disposed of.  This has been my constant practice with respect to signed blanks of this description.  I do the same with regard to patents and land grants.”

President Jackson was absent from the capital during his Presidential service of eight years five hundred and two days.  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.  In January, 1837 (26th), he refused the privilege to a committee under a resolution of the House of Representatives to make a general investigation of the Executive Departments without specific charges, on the ground, among others, that the use of the books, papers, etc., of the Departments for such purpose would interfere with the discharge of the public duties devolving upon the heads of the different Departments, and necessarily disarrange and retard the public business.