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.
There is a curious provision in his draught relating to the compensation of Senators: "The wages of Senators shall be paid out of the treasury of the United States; those wages for the first six years shall be —— dollars per diem. At the beginning of every sixth year after the first the supreme judiciary shall cause a special jury of the most respectable merchants and farmers to be summoned to declare what shall have been the averaged value of wheat during the last six years, in the State where the legislature shall be sitting; and for the six subsequent years, the Senators shall receive per diem the averaged value of —— bushels of wheat."
This extraordinary provision for the benefit of Senators only illustrates the crudity of Randolph's intentions at the time and the incompleteness of his plan.
The annotations of Rutledge are few but they are valuable for they authenticate the paper; they prove it was the very paper upon which Randolph and Rutledge worked; and that it was all which they had then prepared toward a draught of the Constitution.