9.) Printed Drafts and Supplementary Material: The Records of the Consututional Convention of 1787.vol 1 On-Line Library of Liberty

Printed Drafts↩⚓✪

The draft of August 6 was printed for the use of the delegates and was the subject of their discussions for over a month. The proceedings were then referred to a committee of five, known as the Committee of Style and Revision, of which William Samuel Johnson was chairman and Gouverneur Morris the most important member. The Committee of Style made its report on September 12, which was also printed for the delegates’ use.

Several copies of the drafts of August 6 and September 12, belonging to various delegates, are extant, and most of them have emendations and marginal notes indicating the action taken upon particular clauses and sections, and sometimes revealing the writer’s attitude or preference.

These documents are hardly worthy of being reprinted, for the marginal notes are in general only confirmatory of other records, but where the comments give any additional information of proceedings in the Convention, they have been embodied in foot-notes.

It is possible, indeed probable, that other records of the Convention will be brought to light. Charles Pinckney stated explicitly that he had taken careful notes of the proceedings;37 William Jackson, secretary of the Convention, kept minutes of the debates;38 in a communication to the Massachusetts convention, Elbridge Gerry “subjoined a state of facts, founded on documents”;39 Gouverneur Morris referred to “some gentlemen” writing up their notes between sessions;40 and James Wilson in the Pennsylvania convention [xxiv] on December 4, 1787, stated that within a week he had “spoken with a gentleman, who had not only his memory, but full notes that he had taken in that body”.41 Whatever may be the accuracy or the value of these various statements, at least they indicate that there once existed material of which we have no present knowledge, but which may at any time be found. It is not probable, however, that any such new material would modify to any great extent our conceptions of the Convention’s work, and it has, therefore, seemed worth while to gather in the present edition the existing records of the Federal Convention.

Supplementary Material↩

Although the sessions of the Convention were secret, and it was understood that the delegates would regard the proceedings as confidential, when the question of the adoption of the Constitution was before the country, and in later years when the interpretation of the Constitution was discussed, many of the delegates referred to and explained the action or the intention of the Convention upon particular subjects. Such statements are to be found in the private correspondence of the delegates, in contributions to the press, in public orations, in the debates in state legislatures and conventions, and in the debates in Congress. The farther away from the Convention one gets, the less reliable these reports become, owing to the deforming influence of memory. But taken as a whole, this supplementary material throws not a little light upon the work of the Convention, and in particular upon the parts taken by individual delegates, and upon opinions and personalities.

In the present edition, all of this supplementary material that could be found has been collected and reprinted in Appendix A; but a few words of explanation are necessary. In the first place, this collection could not be made exhaustive without covering practically all of the material, printed and unprinted, on American history since 1787; the editor has accordingly confined his efforts to the more obvious and accessible sources. In the second place, a distinction has been made [xxv] between notes taken as a part of, or in connection with, the work of the Convention, and information supplied to others; accordingly, letters written while the Convention was in session, and such items as Charles Pinckney’s Observations and Luther Martin’s Genuine Information have been classed as supplementary material. In the next place, the editor has tried to discriminate carefully between statements of proceedings in the Convention and theoretical interpretations of clauses in the Constitution; only the former are included. And finally, to render this material serviceable, in foot-notes to the main text of the Records, references have been made to this supplementary material wherever it seems to throw any light on the proceedings.42

In the present edition, the original manuscripts have been reprinted exactly, except that in abbreviations superior letters have not been used, and in the few cases where it occurs the tilde has been resolved into the corresponding “m” or “n”. In the case of Yates’s Secret Proceedings, Mason’s notes, and the supplementary material in Appendix A, the most reliable printed texts have been followed. Footnotes in the originals are marked by “*” and “†” while the editor’s notes are numbered consecutively for each day. Because Madison’s records have proven to be the best and most reliable source of information, the editor’s notes and references have been attached, in most cases, to Madison’s Debates.