The Mystery of the Pinckney Draught

by Charles C. Nott

This section he subsequently cancelled and over it he wrote, "Insert the 11 article."

Where then is this article 11 which would restrict the powers of the States and render their laws, if repugnant to the Constitution, void?

It cannot be article XI of the Articles of Confederation; for it provides only for the admission of Canada as one of the States of this Union. It cannot be article XI of the draught of the Committee of Detail for it relates only to "The judicial power of the United States"; to the judges, to jurisdiction; to the trial of criminal offences; and there is not a line which limits the power of a State or declares a statute void. Moreover the restrictions upon the States in the Committee's draught are divided and placed in two articles which are numbered XII, XIII. It cannot be Article XI of Wilson's draught for it relates to the powers of the Senate, the power to make treaties, to appoint ambassadors and judges, to adjudicate controversies between two or more States, and controversies concerning lands claimed under conflicting grants from different States, it being article IX of the Committee's draught. There is, however, an article 11 which places restrictions upon the States, and meets the requirements of Randolph as exactly as if it had been framed to effect his purpose, and it is article 11 of the Pinckney draught. We know too that it is Pinckney's own, for it is described in the Observations.

With the 11th article in Wilson's draught and the 11th article in the Committee's failing to respond to the requirements of the reference, and with Pinckney's article 11 responding fully and exactly to it, there is but one conclusion left which is that Randolph when he wrote "Insert the 11 article" intended article 11 of the Pinckney draught.

When the fact is established that the Committee of Detail had before them the Pinckney draught and took from it a single excerpt, though of not more than four lines, the burden cannot rest on Pinckney to account for identities and resemblances. The onus probandi will then be upon the other side; and the issue being whether the Committee used the Pinckney draught or Pinckney copied from the Committee's, the presumption must be, until the contrary be shown, that all identical provisions in the two draughts originated in Pinckney's.

If James Wilson were now living, and asserting that he was the true and unassisted author of the Committee's draught these papers would be strong, though not conclusive, evidence to maintain his claim; and if Pinckney had never prepared a draught of the Constitution and his draught had never been presented to the Convention, and had never been referred to the Committee of Detail for the express purpose of assisting them in drawing up a draught of the Constitution, these papers would justify historical scholars in saying that Wilson should occupy the place which Pinckney occupies, and that the alien member of the Convention was the chief individual contributor to the Constitution of the United States. But the defect of these papers is that we know nothing about them, save that they are in the handwriting of Wilson and Rutledge. That they are original matter; that they are not made up of excerpts from Pinckney's draught: are propositions which are now sustained only by conjectures.

Against such conjectures, there stand the consistent silences of all the members of the Committee. Gorham lived nine years and said nothing of his colleague's great work. Wilson lived eleven years and saw the government which, conspicuously, he had helped to form firmly established, and became a judge of the Supreme Court, yet while he lived gave no intimation of having drawn up the most important document of the Convention, and when he died left no statement showing the manner in which the work of the Committee of Detail was done. When Wilson passed away it behooved Ellsworth and Rutledge and Randolph to testify to posterity, if not to the men of their own time, of the great part which Wilson had secretly played in the drama of the Constitution, if he was the author of the draught. But Rutledge lived two years, and Ellsworth nine years, and Randolph fifteen years, and gave no sign.

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?