After these ten days of actual and constructive work the Committee appeared in the Convention bringing with them a draught containing fifty-seven articles and sections, and some 200 constitutional provisions. Some of these provisions had been prescribed by the 23 resolutions, and some had been suggested by the Articles of Confederation, but there were others declaratory of the inherent powers of a national sovereignty which had neither been directed by the Convention, nor were contained in the Articles of Confederation. No reflective person beginning the study of the Constitution can read Madison's Journal attentively through to the 26th of July without being astonished by the greater comprehensiveness and detail and breadth and completeness of the draught which the committee produced in a printed form on the morning of the 6th of August.
Besides the provisions in the draught which have passed into, and in a literal or modified form, have become parts of the Constitution, there was some work of the committee which must have involved consideration, discussion, and a waste of time. These hindrances left a perilously narrowed period within which a committee must draught the Constitution of the United States.
It was therefore no time to stand upon trifles or to pause to adjust formal niceties. Within the closed doors of Independence Hall would be impatient men who had given their time since the 25th of May and who were sitting unceasingly through the heat of the Philadelphia summer, defraying in whole or in part their own expenses, though many of them were men of narrow means, ill able to give either their time or their money. To their anxious eyes the end seemed far away, and success far from certain, and they would resent unnecessary delay. It would be just to young, ambitious Mr. Pinckney to return his draught, unsullied, to the Secretary that it might tell the story in future years, unquestioned and unquestionable, of his splendid contribution to the Constitution. It would be proper and according to parliamentary usage for the committee to hand in their draught in writing, covered by a report attested by their signatures, both of which would remain in the archives of the Convention and perhaps in the archives of a future government. But the committee could not linger for these desirable things. Pinckney's draught must be sacrificed to hasten the good work along, to save time, if it were but a day; and their own report and draught must be "delivered in" figuratively, that is to say by the mouth of their chairman and by the means of the printed copies, one for each member. The committee, so all the circumstances unite in telling us, took Pinckney's draught and considered it; some provisions they retained; some they corrected, some they amended, some they changed, some they struck out. The amendments they wrote on the broad margin of the large foolscap sheets or wrote out on separate slips of paper which they wafered to the margin. When they had finished this work Pinckney's draught had become "printer's copy." For one brief week it served a great purpose and was the most useful document in the world. Then it was scrupulously destroyed; and concerning it no man of the men who knew its contents is known to have spoken a single word.