CHAPTER V
MADISON AS AN ADVOCATE
At this day Madison is regarded as one of the chief statesmen in the group of leading framers of the Constitution; but his best appreciated work was his keeping the only record which we have of that august assembly. He, who dealt with the great questions of the hour, may not have been aware how much good work the Pinckney draught was doing in an unnoticed way. Madison spared no effort to make his journal complete, and no little time in doing so. He copied and inserted in it the Virginia resolutions and the New Jersey resolutions; and he also inserted Pinckney's long speech of the 25th of June; and yet he did not procure and apparently did not even read and certainly did not insert in his journal Pinckney's plan or draught. He seems to have felt sadly a certain self-conviction of this, and to have realized the fact that the omission of the Pinckney draught from his record was an irretrievable error. To a man holding the author of the draught in contempt, it must have seemed preposterous in 1831 for the shade of Pinckney to stalk upon the historic stage and say, I formulated the Constitution. It was my hand that sketched its outline, leaving it to the members of the Convention, myself among the number, to change its provisions and modify its terms. My draught was changed and modified, and the conflicting views of the framers were welded together by notable compromises and persuasive arguments, but nevertheless I contributed more of form and substance, more of detail and language to the instrument known as the Constitution of the United States than any other man.
Accordingly, Madison, while he closed his lips as a witness, rallied his failing forces as an advocate and proceeded to give from time to time first to one correspondent and then to another and finally to the people of the United States, in a "Note" to accompany his Journal when published, all the reasons he could marshal from the written record of the case why the draught in the State Department was an impossible verity.
At what time the Pinckney draught was first brought to Madison's attention I have not been able to discover; but on the 5th of May, 1830, Mr. Jared Sparks had been spoken or written to on the subject, for he then replied to Madison, writing from Washington, "Since my return I have conversed with Mr. Adams concerning Charles Pinckney's draught of a constitution. He says it was furnished by Mr. Pinckney." Among Madison's papers there is also a memorandum entitled, for Mr. Paulding in which he says:
"Much curiosity and some comment have been exerted by the marvellous identities in a plan of government proposed by Charles Pinckney in the convention of 1787, as published in the Journals with the text of the constitution, as finally agreed to."
This memorandum is not dated, but is placed chronologically before a letter to Mr. J. K. Paulding dated April, 1831.
On the 21st of June, 1831, he wrote to Jared Sparks: "May I ask you to let me know the result of your correspondence with Charleston on the subject of Mr. Pinckney's draught of a Constitution for the United States as soon as it is ascertained?"