resolution offered by Mr. Patterson being among the preserved papers,) and by a consequent resort for a copy to the rough draught, in which erasures and interlineations, following what passed in the Convention, might be confounded, in part at least, with the original text, and, after a lapse of more than thirty years, confounded also in the memory of the author.
There is in the paper a similarity in some cases, and an identity in others, with details, expressions, and definitions, the results of critical discussions and modification in the Convention, that could not have been anticipated.
Examples may be noticed in Article VIII. of the paper; which is remarkable also for the circumstance, that, whilst it specifies the functions of the President, no provision is contained in the paper tor the election of such an officer, nor indeed for the appointment of any executive magistracy, notwithstanding the evident purpose of the author to provide an entire plan of a federal government.
Again, in several instances where the paper corresponds with the Constitution, it is at variance with the ideas of Mr. Pinckney, as decidedly expressed in his propositions, and in his arguments, the former in the journal of the Convention, the latter in the report of its debates. Thus, in Article VIII. of the paper, provision is made for removing the President by impeachment, when it appears that, in the Convention, on the 20th of July, he was opposed to any impeachability of the executive magistrate. In Article III., it is required that all money bills shall originate in the first branch of the legislature; which he strenuously opposed on the 8th of August, and again on the 11th of August. In Article V., members of each House are made ineligible to, as well as incapable of holding, any office under the Union, &c., as was the case at one stage of the Constitution,—a disqualification highly disapproved and opposed by him on the 14th of August.
A still more conclusive evidence of error in the paper is seen in Article III., which provides, as the Constitution does, that the first branch of the legislature shall be chosen by the people of the several states; whilst it appears that, on the 6th of June, according to previous notice, too, a few days only after the draught was laid before the Convention, its author opposed that mode of choice, urging and proposing, in place of it, an election by the legislatures of the several states.
The remarks here made, though not material in themselves, were due to the authenticity and accuracy aimed at in this record of the proceedings of a public body so much an object, sometimes, of curious research, as at all times of profound interest.[1]
No. 3
Project communicated by Mr. E. Randolph, July 10, as an accommodating Proposition to small States.
See page 317.
I. Resolved, That in the second branch each state have one vote in the following cases:
1. In granting exclusive rights to ports.
2. In subjecting vessels or seamen of the United States to tonnage duties, or other impositions.
3. In regulating the navigation of rivers.
4. In regulating the rights to be enjoyed by citizens of one state in the other states.
5. In questions arising in the guaranty of territory.
6. In declaring war, or taking measures for subduing a rebellion.
7. In regulating corn.
8. In establishing and regulating the post-office.
- ↑ Striking discrepancies will be found on a comparison of his plan as furnished to Mr. Adams, and the view given of that which was laid before the Convention, in a pamphlet published by Francis Childs, at New York, shortly after the close of the Convention. The title of the pamphlet is, "Observations on the plan of government submitted to the Federal Convention on the twenty-eighth of May, 1789, by Charles Pinckney," &c. A copy is preserved among the "Select Tracts," in the library of the Historical Society of New York. But what conclusively proves that the choice of the House of Representatives by the people could not have been the choice in the lost paper, is a letter from Mr. Pinckney to James Madison, of the 28th of March, 1789, now on his files, in which he emphatically adheres to a choice by the state legislatures. The following is an extract: "Are you not, to use a full expression, abundantly convinced that the theoretical nonsense of an election of the members of Congress by the people, in the first instance, is clearly and practically wrong—that it will in the end be the means of bringing our councils into contempt—and that the legislatures [of the states] are the only proper judges of who ought to be elected?"
