The Mystery of the Pinckney Draught

by Charles C. Nott

CHAPTER III

OF THE ISSUE OF FRAUD

On this issue of fraud we must first look at the circumstances as they existed in December, 1818.

Pinckney had been a Senator of the United States, Governor of South Carolina, Minister to Spain and had just been elected to the important Congress which was to grapple with the National questions involved in the Missouri Compromise. He may have been a vain man as Madison thought him—(most men of great ability and prominence are egotistical; it is egotism ordinarily which impels them to the front) but no one has intimated that Pinckney could have been guilty of an act which from moral and historical points of view was little better than a crime. Some one contributed the many provisions which are to be found in the Constitution, and it would have been infamous to filch the honor from the real author. The most felicitous sentence in the Constitution, "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States," if it was Pinckney's, passed through the Committee of Detail, the Committee of Style and the Convention without the change of a single word. It was one of those rare sentences of which everybody approved; and it is not lightly to be assumed that in 1818 Pinckney would steal such a conspicuous sentence from the Constitution and place it at the head of one of his own articles.

Moreover if the draught was a tissue of fraud detection was always possible; and detection would have blasted the life of Pinckney nowhere with greater severity than in his own State. In 1818 sixteen other members of the Convention were still living, and three of them had been members of the Committee of Style, and two of them (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Pierce Butler), had been delegates from South Carolina. Letters too from members might disclose the fatal truth. A son of some member might come forward with his father's draught of some of these provisions. Autobiographies, diaries and personal reminiscences of members might exist. Detection was possible, and in the ordinary course of human events, certain. Conversely it is proper here to note the fact that in all these years not a line of writing has been found to thrown a shade of discredit upon the Pinckney draught.

The temptation, too, was relatively small. The Constitution was not then in the estimation of the American people what it is now. No one then had proclaimed it to be "the greatest work ever thrown off by the brain and purpose of man." In 1818 the first work on the Constitution (Rawle's) had not yet been written. Monroe was President, and the country was just emerging from the poverty which followed the war of 1812-15. Pennsylvania and Georgia had defied the federal power and the latter had passed a statute making it a crime punishable with death to enforce the process of the Supreme Court of the United States. State feeling was always stronger in the South than in the North and out of State feeling had grown the doctrine of State rights. The South at that time could cherish no warm regard for the man who had first written "all acts made by the legislature of the United States, pursuant to this Constitution, and all treaties made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land."

It must also be noted that Pinckney was not a volunteer in this matter—that he did not thrust his draught upon the Secretary of State—that he never came before the public claiming to have contributed this or anything to the Constitution. The subject was introduced by Mr. Adams and not by Pinckney; and the draught was produced in response to Mr. Adams' inquiries concerning it. Pinckney showed no great solicitude about it then. His letter is slovenly and careless and manifestly not written for posterity, and it contains no indication of his regarding it as any thing more than a personal explanation. It was due to Mr. Adams to tell him that this draught which he inclosed was not a literal duplicate of the one which he had placed before the Convention; and it was due to himself to say that it contained provisions of which he had subsequently disapproved and which he had opposed in the Convention. Pinckney certainly did not suppose that he was writing history or biography when he wrote that letter.

The letter demonstrates how inadequately Pinckney estimated the greatness of the Constitution and overestimated his own part in the work, and how poorly the Constitution was then esteemed. At the beginning it had been but an experiment and in the opinion of many men an experiment that would fail. Under the moulding hands of Jay and Marshall it had become to Southern statesmen more and more an object of distrust and dislike. It seemed then a growing menace to the rights of the South and the sovereignty of South Carolina. For Pinckney to have asserted publicly that he was the chief author of the instrument and of its most offensive provisions would have inclined his fellow citizens in Charleston to say that instead of boasting of his work he ought to be ashamed of it; that where State rights were involved it was at best ambiguous; and that, if he was the author of the draught, he more than any other man had enabled the judges to interpret the Constitution in favor of Federal supremacy.

Certainly if this issue of fraud had been involved in a criminal case Pinckney would have been able to establish two things—good character, and the absence of a motive to defraud.