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
It is comprehensible that if the provision of the veto power had started
wrong as it did in Pinckney's draught, it might have continued wrong,
and its misplacement might have remained unnoticed; but it is
incomprehensible how the error could have been known to at least the two
leading members of the Committee and have been actually and plainly
corrected by one of them and the provision then have relapsed into the
condition in which Pinckney left it, unless the Committee found about
the end say of the seventh day that they must forego either the
completion of Wilson's carefully prepared work or their bringing into
the convention printed copies for the use of members, and that they then
determined to use Pinckney's draught as copy for the printer, letting
Wilson work into it, so far as he could, the corrections that he had
embodied in his own and the changes which the Committee had agreed upon.
The incompleteness with which this was done shows very plainly that
toward the end of the ten days the Committee worked in haste. There are
too many errors in the draught which would be both inexcusable and
inexplicable if the Committee had had ordinary time to do their
extraordinary work.
There is a curious omission in Wilson's draught which indirectly brings
to the light the composite authorship of one section of the
Constitution.
In 1777 the punishment of treason had been a delicate subject in the
United States more likely to be avoided than discussed. In 1787 the
members of the Convention had not forgotten that within a dozen years
they had had a personal interest in that subject. Pinckney in article 6
had given Congress twenty-two specific unrestricted powers but when he
came to the power to declare the punishment of treason he paused and
defined what treason should consist in and provided that no person
should be convicted of the restricted crime but by the testimony of two
witnesses. He threw all this into a distinct paragraph which ultimately,
with additional restrictions, became section 2 of article VII of the
Committee's draught. But neither the paragraph of Pinckney nor the
section of the Committee is in the draught of Wilson.
Wilson did not overlook the subject, "The Legislature of the United
States shall have the power," his draught says, "to declare what shall
be treason against the United States," and, having attached no
restriction to the power, he properly placed it among the specified
powers immediately after the one "To declare the law and punishment of
piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and the punishment of
counterfeiting the coin of the United States, and of offences against
the law of nations."
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