It is not to be inferred that the members of the Committee of Detail were mediocre men or that they were negligent of the grave duty assigned to them. Yet the work which they actually did only demonstrates that for them to have produced a complete draught of the Constitution--as complete as the one which they reported--entirely the work of their own hands, in the limited time allowed them would have been an impossibility. The reduction of the Constitution to a written form with all its details required research, reflection, patient work and unhurried thought. Through the wide field of State and Federal relations, through State constitutions and the Articles of Confederation the framer needed to search, weighing State prejudices and national necessities, taking what was desirable, but with equal care leaving what was objectionable. There were not five men in the world working in each other's way, discussing each other's work, who, unassisted, could have drawn up a constitution in which so much was embodied and so little overlooked and have brought their patchwork contributions into one harmonious whole within the time prescribed. The country was well filled with men of talents, of ability, of energy, of patriotic fervor, with men who knew the conditions of our national affairs, the difficulties of acting, the perils of inaction, and yet the fact, undeniable, is that only one man foresaw the coming necessity of the situation and had the forethought to prepare a draught of the Constitution for the use of the Convention. The more I have surveyed the situation, the greater has appeared the necessity for some such work at the time; the more I have studied the work of Pinckney, the more perfectly adapted to the necessities of the situation does it appear to have been.
When Pinckney, foreseeing that a national Convention would be held and that if it failed to frame a constitution which would give to the waning Confederation the character and authority of nationality, the nationality of the Confederated States might disappear, he resolutely assigned to himself the task of framing one in which nationality should be secure and a national government above and independent of the States be the result. While yet a member of Congress he saw plainly these things--that the government of the Confederated States was drifting toward insolvency, for New York and Massachusetts alone had paid in full their quota of the Federal expenses; that it was drifting towards war; for at least one of the States was flagrantly violating the treaty of peace with Great Britain; that the Congress could neither raise money nor maintain a treaty; for the only power which it practically possessed was to beseech the States to pay their respective shares of the Federal expenses, and to pass as recently as March 21, 1787, resolutions urging on the States a repeal of all laws contravening the treaty of peace with Great Britain.