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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: History
Topic: The American Revolution and Constitution

CCLXVIII.: John Quincy Adams: Memoirs. 1 - Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 3 [1911]

Edition used:

The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911). Vol. 3.

Part of: The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols.

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CCLXVIII.

John Quincy Adams: Memoirs.1

[1830, May] 4th. Mr. Sparks called . . . Sparks said he had been spending a week at Mr. Madison’s, who spoke to him much of the proceedings and published Journal of the Convention of 1787. He said he knew not what to make of the plan of Constitution in that volume purporting to have been presented by Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina. He said there was a paper presented by that person to the Convention, but it was nothing like the paper now in the book. It was referred to the committee who drafted the plan of the Constitution, and was never afterwards in any manner referred to or noticed. In the book it has the appearance as if it was the original draft of the Constitution itself, and as if that which was finally adopted was Pinckney’s plan, with a very few slight alterations. I told Mr. Sparks that Rufus King had spoken to me of C. Pinckney’s paper precisely in the same manner as he says Mr. Madison now does; that it was a paper to which no sort of attention was paid by the Convention, except that of referring it to the committee, but when I compiled the Journal of the Convention, Charles Pinckney himself sent me the plan now in the book, as the paper which he had presented to the Convention; and with it he wrote me a letter, which obviously held the pretension that the whole plan of Constitution was his, and that the Convention had done nothing more than to deteriorate his work by altering some of his favorite provisions. Sparks said Mr. Madison added that this plan now in the book contained several things which could not possibly have been in Pinckney’s paper, but which rose out of the debates upon the plan of Constitution reported by the committee. He conjectured that Mr. Pinckney’s memory failed him, and that, instead of a copy of the paper which he did present, he had found a copy of the plan reported by the committee with interlined amendments, perhaps proposed by him, and, at a distance of more than thirty years, had imagined it was his own plan.

[1 ]Vol. VIII, 224-225.