whereas they are in reality to be stated upon the authority of the Journal alone.
But Madison went even one step farther and actually changed his records of votes in the Convention in order to bring them into conformity with the Journal. This might involve the change of the vote of a single state, or of several states, or even reverse his record of the decision of the Convention. On what basis or for what reasons Madison felt justified in changing his records of votes is not to be ascertained conclusively. Sometimes it seems to have been done because the records of Journal and Yates were in accord in their disagreement with him; sometimes he probably saw that subsequent action in the Convention proved the record of Journal to be correct, and his own to be wrong; sometimes it was done because the vote of a state as recorded in Journal harmonized better with the sentiments of the delegates from that state as expressed in their speeches; and sometimes there is no apparent reason.
The matter might be merely of antiquarian interest, were it not for the fact that the printed Journal is itself unreliable, and that there are not a few cases in which Madison has made corrections from the Journal that are undoubtedly mistaken: Votes ascribed in the Journal to the wrong questions were used, in several cases, to change records that were probably correct as first made. Questions and votes were copied into his manuscript from the printed Journal without observing that these same questions and votes were recorded in other places, sometimes even on the same day; an examination of the original records shows that in most of these cases the questions were not to be found in the body of the Journal, but were incorporated into the text by John Quincy Adams; they are only to be found in the Detail of Ayes and Noes, and their relative position in the proceedings could only be inferred from the order in which the votes happened to be recorded.
It is not surprising, indeed, to find that Madison was thus misled by the mistakes in the printed Journal, for if his own records were correct, these would be the very points in which the discrepancies would occur. It is only necessary then to recognize Madison’s evident acceptance of the Journal as
