Pinckney’s original plan as its basis. Not only does it radically differ from the original plan in several essential matters, it is constructed on an entirely different framework. Indeed, when one notes its striking resemblance to the draft reported by the Committee of Detail on August 6, it is difficult not to agree with Mr. Jameson’s conclusion that if Pinckney had copied “the printed report of the Committee of Detail, paraphrasing to a small extent here and there, and interweaving as he went along some of the best remembered features of his own plan,” the results would have been precisely like the document that was sent to John Quincy Adams.[1] There is no proof, however, it is only a possible hypothesis, that in the points of difference from the draft of the Committee of Detail the document sent to Adams reproduces portions of the original plan. The most that can be said is, that when other evidence con- firms the inclusion of such provisions, a possible reading of those clauses may here be found.
Following the same line of argument, although ignoring the amendments to the Articles of Confederation and treating the Observations with “considerable skepticism,” Mr. Jameson was able to establish the main points of Pinckney’s original plan. By a piece of brilliant criticism Mr. Jameson was thus enabled to identify a document among the Wilson drafts of the Committee of Detail as a series of extracts from the Pinckney Plan,[2] and Mr. McLaughlin was able to identify another document among the same papers as an outline of the entire plan.[3]
Combining all of these sources of information it is possible to obtain a fairly good idea of the Pinckney Plan in its original from. The following is the plan thus reconstructed. (Italics and quotation marks indicate respectively the outline and extracts used by Wilson in the Committee of Detail; statements based upon the “Observations” are placed in parentheses; numbers attached to the different articles have little significance).
The Draught of a Foederal Government to be agreed upon between the Free and Independent States of America.[4]
A Confederation between the free and independent States of N. H. &c. is hereby solemnly made uniting them together under one general superintending Government for their common Benefit and for their
