On the 14th of August Pinckney had so far modified his own views that he was then in favor of making the members of each House incapable of holding executive salaried offices while they continued members, with a provision that "the acceptance of such office shall vacate their seats respectively." This having failed in Convention, he on the same day urged a general postponement of the subject "until it should be seen what powers should be vested in the Senate" "when," he said, "it would be more easy to judge of the expediency of allowing officers of State to be chosen out of that body." This postponement was agreed to nem. con. It is manifest that the idea of the Senate being an appointing power was still uppermost in his mind. He gave good reasons for not making ineligibility absolute; but he consistently adhered to the idea that the same person should not be both a Legislator and an officer of State.
On the 14th of August Pinckney proposed to make members ineligible to hold any office by which they would receive a salary. This was merely a restriction on the original proposition of the draught, a limiting of its application to salaried offices but leaving members eligible and capable of filling honorary positions. To say that his original proposition was thereby "highly disapproved" by him is certainly an abuse of the term "highly disapproved." The objection of Madison when tested by his own record, the Journal, comes down to this: that three months or more after Pinckney wrote the draught, he thought it better to limit the Constitutional prohibition to "salaried offices." This restriction was a trivial and a sensible modification. To infer from it that Pinckney then "highly disapproved" his own original proposition merely marks the nervous excitement which seems to have impelled Madison to exaggerate every little deviation of Pinckney from the strict letter of his draught into conclusive evidence that this draught never existed.
This brings us to the extrinsic evidence on which Madison relied, the testimony of Pinckney against himself.
The Observations of Pinckney, in Madison's estimation, fully sustained his arguments and justified his attacks on the verity of the draught in the State Department. The publication so entitled is a small pamphlet of 27 pages. It has the following title page: