Against such conjectures too there is the record of the other draught, a series of incontestible facts, each consistent with those that had gone before it and with those which were to come after it. Pinckney prepared a draught; it was presented to the Convention; it was referred to the Committee of the Whole, and thereby made accessible to every member of the Convention; it was referred to the Committee of Detail and thereby placed at the disposal of the committee and brought directly to the notice and knowledge of every member; the Committee never returned it to the Convention and it has not been found among the papers of any one of them; Pinckney published a description of it within a month after the adjournment of the Convention; and a month later republished the description in a newspaper. In 1818 he authorized the publication of a paper which he certified to be a substantial copy of the draught; it was immediately published with the first publication of the secret journal of the Convention and widely disseminated as a public document; at the time of publication 16 members of the Convention were living who must have desired, we must assume, to see the journal of the proceedings in which they had personally taken part; and when they received the journal received with it a copy of Pinckney's draught; and yet when Pinckney died more than six years afterwards no surviving member of the Convention had denied or questioned the verity of the published draught.
There are very few historical papers in the world which have such a record of publicity behind them as Pinckney's draught; and it is idle to attack such a record with one man's suspicions and another man's inferences, and our own prejudices and conjectures. Two incontrovertible facts are that at the time when these papers were written, Pinckney's draught was in possession of these same men, Wilson, Randolph and Rutledge, and that they never returned it to the Convention. This examination brings us round a circle to the question at which we started, Did the Committee rightly use the draught of Pinckney, or did Pinckney fraudulently copy the Committee's draught?
The Randolph and Wilson draughts bring the case into this situation: