Autograph Letter Signed, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Jason Toory [Torrey], Bethany, Wayne County, Pennsylvania, March 21, 1821

Quarto, three pages, plus stamp less address leaf, formerly folded, postal markings, some staining and some minor damage caused when the letter was first opened, else very good.

Dimmick writes:

"The Improvement bill passed Senate and was returned to our house yesterday…They have made many amendments, cut down several sections and added others; we think we have a Majority in our house that will agree to concur in the amendments…if we take them up separately, I still think there will be no danger, but we are almost afraid to suffer it to go to Senate again, fearing it might meet with some unlucky accident, more on account of the failure of the Loan Office in our house than any thing else which has exasperated the minds of some of the members…I presume that more petitions have come in for a Loan Office than for nay other measure in many years, it was lost day before yesterday on second reading by three votes…it seemed to give a great shock for the moment…Senate are returned to pass it in their house. If nothing is done for the Distresses of the Common people, there will be almost a Revolution, they are getting violent….[Governor Joseph] Hiester is opposed to Improvement bill, Loan office and… every other measure to relieve the Distress – he has become alarmed by his own friends and he said yesterday that he would not object to the Loan Office if it could be got up again, but he is a poor weak superannuated old Cabbage head ant there is not a federalist in the house but calls him thus – he has studied to make all the unpopular appointments possible and could not at this day get twenty thousand votes, he is insulted by them all , even to his face…."

Both Dimmick and Torrey (a pioneer surveyor whose biography was published in 1885) were state legislators in the rural northeast of Pennsylvania, where the populace was still trying to recover from the financial "distress" of the Panic of 1819, "the first widespread and durable financial crisis in the United States that… was followed by a general collapse of the American economy," Pennsylvania was one of several states which considered setting up a government Loan Office to assist the tens of thousands of "Common people" who were so deeply in debt as to be in danger of losing their homes.