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
The third paper of Wilson was likewise discovered by Professor Jameson.
Wilson had prepared the second draught for himself, but this third or
final draught manifestly was prepared for the consideration of the other
members of the Committee. He wrote it on large foolscap in what is
called double columns, _i. e._ half of each page was left blank for the
comments and suggestions and amendments of the others. The writing is in
the clear, neat, legible hand, characteristic of Wilson, and before the
work of revision began, there was hardly a clerical error in the paper.
A remarkable contrast is stamped upon it consisting of 43 amendments in
the scrawly, slovenly, bold, illegible writing of Rutledge, who really
seems to have found pleasure in cutting and slashing the careful work,
the almost feminine neatness and niceness of Wilson's pages. This
draught unlike the second, is divided into articles, but unlike the
Committee's, is not subdivided into sections.
The fourth of these recently discovered papers is in the handwriting of
Edmund Randolph. Mr. William M. Meigs in his Growth of the Constitution
has done an excellent piece of historical work in reproducing the
draught of Randolph in facsimile. In its interlineations, erasures,
changes, omissions and marginal queries we see Randolph's doubts and
perplexities and the incompleteness of his plan and the limitations of
his mental view of a draught; and we see this as distinctly as if we
stood beside him while he wrote. A more disheveled paper was never
reproduced in facsimile. Upon its margin are annotations and suggestions
of omitted provisions which are in the hand of Rutledge. One thing, most
meritorious, appears--that Randolph carefully and conscientiously went
through the 23 resolutions and neglected no instruction which they gave.
But the chief question remains unexplained as Sparks left it, How came
the Committee of Detail to wander so far from the resolutions "with the
resolutions before them and Randolph himself one of their number"?
The draught of Randolph begins in this way:
"In the draught of a fundamental constitution two things deserve
attention:
"1. To insert essential principles only, lest the operations of
government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and
unalterable which ought to be accommodated to times and events, and
"2. To use simple and precise language and general propositions
according to the example of the constitutions of the several States."
Randolph then considers the subject of a preamble and sets forth a brief
disquisition to show that a preamble is proper and what it should
contain. "We are not working," he says, "on the natural rights of men
not yet gathered into society, but upon the rights modified by society
and interwoven with what we call the rights of States." He outlines what
the preamble should set forth; his views are sound, but his intended
preamble is not the preamble reported by the Committee of Detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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