them to be printed.[1] They are still in the keeping of the Bureau of Rolls and Library of that department.
President Monroe requested the Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, to take charge of the publication of the Journal. The task proved to be a difficult one. The papers were, according to Adams, “no better than the daily minutes from which the regular journal ought to have been, but never was, made out.”[2] Adams reports that at his request William Jackson, the secretary of the Convention, called upon him and “looked over the papers, but he had no recollection of them which could remove the difficulties arising from their disorderly state, nor any papers to supply the deficiency of the missing papers.” With the expenditure of considerable time and labor, and with the exercise of no little ingenuity, Adams was finally able to collate the whole to his satisfaction. General Bloomfield supplied him with several important documents from the papers of David Brearley; Charles Pinckney sent him a copy of the plan he “believed” to be one he presented to the Convention; Madison furnished the means of completing the records of the last four days; and Adams felt that “with all these papers suitably arranged, a correct and tolerably clear view of the proceedings of the Convention may be presented”.[3]
The results of his labor were printed at Boston in 1819 in an octavo volume of some 500 pages, entitled, Journal, Acts and Proceedings of the Convention, … which formed the Constitution of the United States.[4] As Adams had nothing whatever to guide him in his work of compilation and editing, mistakes were inevitable, and not a few of these were important.
- ↑ Appendix A, CCCXXIII.
- ↑ From certain letters that have been preserved (Appendix A, VI, VIa, XVI, XXI, LXXIV), it would seem that Jackson may have owed his appointment as Secretary rather to influence than to any special fitness for the position. It would seem also that he had taken notes of the debates (Appendix A, CCCXXV, CCCLX) in addition to his formal minutes, and it is possible that he somewhat neglected his official duties in order to make his private records more complete.
- ↑ Appendix A, CCCXXIV–CCCXXVI, CCCXXVIII–CCCXXX.
- ↑ The Journal was reprinted in 1830 as volume IV of the first edition of Jonathan Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. In the second edition, 1836, and in all subsequent editions, it appears as volume I. The Bureau of Rolls and Library of the Department of State, in 1894, reprinted with scrupulous accuracy as volume I of the Documentary History of the Constitution the papers which Adams had used in preparing the Journal. Volume I originally appeared in two installments as appendices to Bulletins 1 and 3 of the Bureau of Rolls and Library. Only 750 copies were printed. The Report of the Public Printer for the year ending June 30, 1900, Cong. Docs., 4029; 19, p. 161, shows 250 copies printed upon requisition of the Department of State. In 1901 Congress ordered to be printed 7,000 copies of volumes I–III of the Documentary History. In this Congressional edition there are some minor changes in type, spacing, etc., and Charles Pinckney’s letter of December 30, 1818, to John Quincy Adams, is inserted in volume I, pp. 309–311, changing the page numbering of the pages following.
