The letter demonstrates how inadequately Pinckney estimated the greatness of the Constitution and overestimated his own part in the work, and how poorly the Constitution was then esteemed. At the beginning it had been but an experiment and in the opinion of many men an experiment that would fail. Under the moulding hands of Jay and Marshall it had become to Southern statesmen more and more an object of distrust and dislike. It seemed then a growing menace to the rights of the South and the sovereignty of South Carolina. For Pinckney to have asserted publicly that he was the chief author of the instrument and of its most offensive provisions would have inclined his fellow citizens in Charleston to say that instead of boasting of his work he ought to be ashamed of it; that where State rights were involved it was at best ambiguous; and that, if he was the author of the draught, he more than any other man had enabled the judges to interpret the Constitution in favor of Federal supremacy.
Certainly if this issue of fraud had been involved in a criminal case Pinckney would have been able to establish two things--good character, and the absence of a motive to defraud.
Having now seen what Pinckney said in 1818 and what he did and where he stood, let us turn to the other party in the controversy, Madison, and examine the testimony which he gave and the evidence on which he relied.
His journal (as edited by Gilpin) after setting forth the speech of Randolph on the 29th of May, and the reference of the 15 resolutions of the Virginia delegates, to the Committee of the Whole, contains this record:
"Mr. Charles Pinckney laid before the house a draught of a federal government to be agreed upon between the free and independent states of America."
"Ordered that the same be referred to the Committee of the Whole appointed to consider the state of the American Union."
But Yates's Minutes give us one thing more: "Mr. Pinckney, a member from South Carolina, then added that he had reduced his ideas of a new government to a system, _which he then read_."
Madison's report of Pinckney's speech on the 25th of June stops with the subject of State governments and the propriety of having but one general system. But Yates gives in a condensed form the conclusion of Pinckney's speech and contains the following sentences: