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

REFERENCES. - James Madison, The Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution in the Convention held at Philadelphia in 1787, vol. 5 (Debates in Congress, Madison’s Notes, Misc. Letters) [1827]

Edition used:

The Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution in the Convention held at Philadelphia in 1787, with a Diary of the Debates of the Congress of the Confederation as reported by James Madison, revised and newly arranged by Jonathan Elliot. Complete in One Volume. Vol. V. Supplement to Elliot’s Debates (Philadelphia, 1836).

Part of: The Debates in the Several State Conventions of the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 5 vols.

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The remarks here made, though not material in themselves, were due to the authenticity and accuracy aimed at in this record of the proceedings of a public body so much an object, sometimes, of curious research, as at all times of profound interest.*

REFERENCES.

[* ]Striking discrepancies will be found on a comparison of his plan as furnished to Mr. Adams, and the view given of that which was laid before the Convention, in a pamphlet published by, Francis Childs, at New York, shortly after the close of the Convention. The title of the pamphlet is, “Observations on the plan of government submitted to the Federal Convention on the twenty-eighth of May, 1789, by Charles Pinckney,” &c. A copy is preserved among the “Select Tracts,” in the library of the Historical Society of New York. But what conclusively proves that the choice of the House of Representatives by the people could not have been the choice in the lost paper, is a letter from Mr. Pinckney to James Madison, of the 28th of March, 1789, now on his files, in which he emphatically adheres to a choice by the state legislatures. The following is an extract: “Are you not, to use a full expression, abundantly convinced that the theoretical nonsense of an election of the members of Congress by the people, in the first instance, is clearly and practically wrong—that it will in the end be the means of bringing our councils into contempt—and that the legislatures [of the states] are the only proper judges of who ought to be elected?”