& personal friends. Of those who belonged to N. Y. I recollect no one so likely to have recd. a Copy as Rufus King. If that was the case, it may remain with his Representative– and I would suggest an informal resort to that quarter, with a hope that you will pardon this further tax on your kindness.
CCCLXXXIII. James Madison to Jared Sparks.[1]
June 27, 1831.
I have received your letter of the 16th. inst., inclosing a copy of the letter of Mr. Charles Pinckney to Mr. Adams, accompanying the draft of a Constitution for the United States, and describing it as essentially the draft proposed by him to the Federal Convention of 1787.[2] The letter to Mr. Adams was new to me.
Abundant evidence I find exists of material variance between the two drafts, and I am sorry that the letter of Mr. Pinckney is far from explaining them. It does not appear, as you inferred, that the draft sent to Mr. Adams was compiled from his notes and papers; but that it was one of the several drafts found amongst them, and the very one, he believed, that he had presented to the Convention, all the drafts, however, being substantially the same.
Some of the variances may be deduced from the printed journal of the Convention. You will notice, for example, that on the 6th or 7th of June, very shortly after his draft was presented, he proposed to take from the people the election of the Federal House of Representatives, and assign it to the legislatures of the States, a violent presumption that the latter, not the former, was the mode contained in his draft.
It is true, as Mr. Pinckney observes and as the journal shows, that the Executive was the last department of the government that received its full and final discussion; but I am not sure that he is free from error in the view his letter gives of what passed on the occasion, or that the error, with several others, may not be traced by a review of the journal.
I am at a loss for the ground of his contrast between the latter period of the Convention and the cool and patient deliberation for more than four and a half months preceding. The whole term of the Convention, from its appointed commencement, was short of that period; and its actual session, from the date of a quorum, but four months, three days. And the occasion on which the most serious and threatening excitement prevailed (the struggle between the
