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.
3. From an intellectual point of view the final draught of Wilson with the annotations of Rutledge came near to being the draught of the Committee of Detail; but it was not the completed draught of the Committee even from an intellectual point of view; for additional provisions were framed and the arrangement of provisions was changed and the articles were subdivided into sections. From a printer's point of view the material for a written draught which was to be put into type did not yet exist.
4. If a copy of the draught was prepared for the printer (with Rutledge's 43 amendments and the additional provisions and the rearrangement of articles and the subdivision of articles into sections all engrossed therein), it is plain that Wilson, the hard worker of the Committee, was the man who did it. Wilson saved everything that he wrote and, consequently, saved his best. His best is his third, his final draught, but it is not the draught of the Committee. If he had prepared a copy for the printer, it would have been his best—by far the best thing he did. It would have been returned to him by the printer with the proofs; and Wilson we may confidently conclude (knowing how he saved even scraps of his writing) would have preserved it.
5. The evidence relating to the draughts of Randolph and Wilson therefore closes with the draught of the Committee of Detail still undrawn and with very little time left in which it could be prepared for the printer. When we couple together the two significant facts that the Committee's work (i. e. their manual labor) ended before they had prepared a draught for the printer, and that Pinckney's draught which was in their possession and had been used by them, disappeared during the same eventful week, there can be but one inference—that the Committee used it.