It is comprehensible that if the provision of the veto power had started wrong as it did in Pinckney's draught, it might have continued wrong, and its misplacement might have remained unnoticed; but it is incomprehensible how the error could have been known to at least the two leading members of the Committee and have been actually and plainly corrected by one of them and the provision then have relapsed into the condition in which Pinckney left it, unless the Committee found about the end say of the seventh day that they must forego either the completion of Wilson's carefully prepared work or their bringing into the convention printed copies for the use of members, and that they then determined to use Pinckney's draught as copy for the printer, letting Wilson work into it, so far as he could, the corrections that he had embodied in his own and the changes which the Committee had agreed upon. The incompleteness with which this was done shows very plainly that toward the end of the ten days the Committee worked in haste. There are too many errors in the draught which would be both inexcusable and inexplicable if the Committee had had ordinary time to do their extraordinary work.
There is a curious omission in Wilson's draught which indirectly brings to the light the composite authorship of one section of the Constitution.
In 1777 the punishment of treason had been a delicate subject in the United States more likely to be avoided than discussed. In 1787 the members of the Convention had not forgotten that within a dozen years they had had a personal interest in that subject. Pinckney in article 6 had given Congress twenty-two specific unrestricted powers but when he came to the power to declare the punishment of treason he paused and defined what treason should consist in and provided that no person should be convicted of the restricted crime but by the testimony of two witnesses. He threw all this into a distinct paragraph which ultimately, with additional restrictions, became section 2 of article VII of the Committee's draught. But neither the paragraph of Pinckney nor the section of the Committee is in the draught of Wilson.
Wilson did not overlook the subject, "The Legislature of the United States shall have the power," his draught says, "to declare what shall be treason against the United States," and, having attached no restriction to the power, he properly placed it among the specified powers immediately after the one "To declare the law and punishment of piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and the punishment of counterfeiting the coin of the United States, and of offences against the law of nations."