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
Against such conjectures too there is the record of the other draught, a
series of incontestible facts, each consistent with those that had gone
before it and with those which were to come after it. Pinckney prepared
a draught; it was presented to the Convention; it was referred to the
Committee of the Whole, and thereby made accessible to every member of
the Convention; it was referred to the Committee of Detail and thereby
placed at the disposal of the committee and brought directly to the
notice and knowledge of every member; the Committee never returned it to
the Convention and it has not been found among the papers of any one of
them; Pinckney published a description of it within a month after the
adjournment of the Convention; and a month later republished the
description in a newspaper. In 1818 he authorized the publication of a
paper which he certified to be a substantial copy of the draught; it was
immediately published with the first publication of the secret journal
of the Convention and widely disseminated as a public document; at the
time of publication 16 members of the Convention were living who must
have desired, we must assume, to see the journal of the proceedings in
which they had personally taken part; and when they received the journal
received with it a copy of Pinckney's draught; and yet when Pinckney
died more than six years afterwards no surviving member of the
Convention had denied or questioned the verity of the published draught.
There are very few historical papers in the world which have such a
record of publicity behind them as Pinckney's draught; and it is idle to
attack such a record with one man's suspicions and another man's
inferences, and our own prejudices and conjectures. Two incontrovertible
facts are that at the time when these papers were written, Pinckney's
draught was in possession of these same men, Wilson, Randolph and
Rutledge, and that they never returned it to the Convention. This
examination brings us round a circle to the question at which we
started, Did the Committee rightly use the draught of Pinckney, or did
Pinckney fraudulently copy the Committee's draught?
The Randolph and Wilson draughts bring the case into this situation:
1. Randolph, Wilson and Rutledge were the working members of the
Committee and worked together. All that was done with the pen, so far as
we know, was done by them. Wilson was the ready writer of the Committee
and had before him, when he wrote his final draught, his own preliminary
draught and Randolph's draught and Pinckney's draught.
2. The final draught of Wilson was not begun until after his own
preliminary draught was finished. The 43 amendments of Rutledge came
later and were all subsequently considered and accepted by the
Committee.
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