The Mystery of the Pinckney DraughtNott, Charles C.
History
The Mystery of the Pinckney Draught
Nott, Charles C.
Constitutional history -- United States; Pinckney, Charles, 1757-1824
Madison forgot that on the 6th of June South Carolina had voted "no" on
the motion, to make "a convenient number of the National judiciary" a
council of revision, and that the vote was unanimous; and he forgot that
he had written with his own hand only eight days after Pinckney had
presented his draught to the Convention:
"Mr. Pinckney _had been at first_ in favor of joining the heads of the
principal departments, the Secretary of War, of foreign affairs, etc.,
in the council of revision. He had however _relinquished the idea_ from
a consideration that these could be called on by the Executive
Magistrate whenever he pleased to consult them. He was opposed to an
introduction of the judges into the business." Hunt's Writings of
Madison, III., pp. 89, 111.
According to Madison there was a discrepancy--more than a discrepancy, a
flat contradiction between the Observations and the draught in the State
Department, the one saying explicitly that in "some of the best
instituted legislatures of the States" there was "a council of revision,
consisting of their executive and principal officers of government" and
that he had "incorporated it as part of the system"; the other
containing no such provision but, like the Constitution, giving the
executive alone the revisionary control of the laws. A superficial
examination of the case would easily bring one to the conclusion that
Pinckney in 1818 omitted the council of revision from the draught for
the State Department and copied from the Constitution the provision
which the Convention framed. But the brief speech of Pinckney written
down contemporaneously by Madison himself, singularly vindicates both
the Observations and the draught and leaves the latter stronger than it
would have been if Madison's friend had not furnished "the discrepancies
noted below."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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