The convention that drafted the Federal Constitution operated under its rule “that nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published or communicated without leave”—leave the Convention never granted. The Convention’s final resolution authorized its presiding officer, George Washington, to “retain the journal and other papers, subject to the order of Congress, if ever formed under the Constitution.” On adjournment the secretary, “after burning all the loose scraps of paper which be longed to the Convention,” delivered to Washington the Convention’s journal and a handful of “other papers.”
Almost at once interested citizens, including the legislators and judges who had to interpret the Constitution’s provisions, sought the meanings of these provisions and the intent of the drafters; but for several decades they had little to go on except for the Constitution itself and occasional glimpses, seldom substantive, of the proceedings and debates that resulted in these provisions.
In 1818 the Congress authorized publication of the official journal. Thereafter, notes of several members appeared in print. Then in 1840, after James Madison’s death, the several hundred thousand words that he recorded in Convention were published; and, quoting Max Farrand, “at once all other records paled into insignificance. . . . From the day of their publication until the present, Madison’s notes of the Debates have remained the standard authority for the proceedings of the Convention.” More than half of Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 is given over to Madison’s notes.
Farrand’s Records is a landmark in documentary editing. From 1902 to 1909, on the West Coast and geographically far from the documentary sources and at a time when guides to repository holdings were almost nonexistent and before microfilm, Farrand compiled a three-volume documentary history of such quality that in the 1987 bicentennial year the Yale University Press (which in 1911 published these three volumes) will reprint them with the addition of a supplement.
To Madison’s notes, Farrand added the official journal, other official Convention documents, the notes of other delegates, and pertinent portions of their diaries and letters during the Convention, and any relevant correspondence, speeches, and other writings during the remaining years of their lives. For much of this material, Farrand had to rely on nineteenth-century life-and-letters publications and on the Annals of Congress. For a record of what happened in the state legislatures that selected the delegates, Farrand was limited to three states that had published selections of their official records of the period. Of the many hundreds of items about the Convention and its members that appeared in the nine contemporary Philadelphia newspapers, Farrand included a total of six items. (There were probably no files of these newspapers available on the West Coast: a single Philadelphia paper printed more than 130 items.)
The best single find was a six-page set of Gunning Bedford, Jr.’s notes, the first unrecognized set of Convention notes to surface in more than half of a century.
From 1958 to 1969, I was associate editor and researcher for the Ratification of the Federal Constitution documentary history. In collecting documents for that project, I inevitably encountered, and began to collect, Convention documents not in Farrand’s Records. The occasional inquiries I received about these documents made me aware of research and other interests in the Convention and its members that Farrand had not been able to include in his selection criteria.
In my searching I gave priority to the kinds of documents Farrand gave priority to—those that recreated what was said and done in the Convention. But I also broadened the search. For example, I attempted to locate all the correspondence written by or to delegates during the Convention, whether or not it related to the happenings within that body. For delegates such as Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and the Morrises, for whom there are projects systematically collecting and publishing their papers, I made no effort to get copies of documents other than those bearing on the happenings in the Convention. For the more obscure members I collected all their papers of the period that I could find, whether or not directly pertinent (the quantity of such documents was not forbidding). These have the value of showing what else other than the Convention was on their minds (much of it financial) and what they were hearing from outside Philadelphia. Though I did not seek them out, if I ran across a contemporary letter or diary of an outsider expressing an opinion about the Convention, I obtained a copy.
This broad concept of collecting resulted in the gathering of many more documents than had been anticipated. It supplies the editor of the supplement, James Hutson, with a large body of material from which to select those documents that will constitute the supplement to Farrand’s Records. The remaining documents—the majority—that will not appear in the supplement will be available in one form or another in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The existence of this unpublished material will be made known and it will be available to researchers with specialized interests and to researchers whose interests are not presently conceivable.
The best single find was a six-page set of Gunning Bedford, Jr.’s notes, the first unrecognized set of Convention notes to surface in more than half a century. My greatest disappointment was not locating Secretary William Jackson’s shorthand notes taken down in the Convention and which he was transcribing just before he died in 1828, and which were known to exist as recently as the 1880s. I located a collection of papers that would have been in Jackson’s possession when he died (including three letters he received during his final months). I talked with the person who seven years ago donated them to a repository. The donor had salvaged them forty years ago when they were being discarded in a Westchester County, New York storage warehouse. I’m continuing to follow several leads on the notes.
The earliest document is the September 14, 1786 report of the Annapolis Convention calling for a convention to meet in Philadelphia; the latest document is the manuscript draft of an 1856 talk on the Northwest Ordinance by Madison’s young presidential secretary in which he reminisces about Madison telling him of a deal reached whereby the southerners in the Continental Congress in New York accepted the Ordinance with its ban on slavery in exchange for the northerners in the Convention in Philadelphia accepting the Constitution’s fugitive slave provision.
The search produced a number of documents that help restore to the demi-gods of the Constitution their human attributes:—ten letters of a delegate married the previous year to a bride less than half his age expressing his frustration with the slow pace of the Convention; a delegate’s 1787 dream (“I thought I was sailing upon the ocean in a ship, with many people on board, when a violent storm arose, and it was much feared that the vessel would founder. . . .”); the jesting of a host, entertaining the delegates, proposing to match his son with a delegate’s teen-age daughter; a delegate’s excuses to the Library Company for failing to return a book (Jones’ Asiatic Poems, for which he eventually paid); a delegate’s explanation of his six-weeks’ delay in arriving by stage (piles).
I travelled about 8,000 miles, from New Hampshire to Georgia (mostly, and appropriately, in a 1952 DeSoto, who 450 years ago travelled through some of the same territory), visiting about seventy repositories. Altogether I collected, by earlier efforts, or by other means, approximately 2,000 documents from about ninety US and foreign repositories. This count does not include the newspaper items. I am completing the search of the newspapers on my own time.
It was an early American Historical Association president and long-time editor of the American Historical Review, J. Franklin Jameson, who inspired Farrand, and it was to Jameson that Farrand dedicated the Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. We are confident that jurists, legislators, historians, political scientists, researchers, and ordinary citizens interested in returning to those sources that provide the truest account of the making of the Constitution will increasingly turn to the bicentennial edition of the Records, with its supplement of documents collected under this grant. And it was another AHA president, Frederick Jackson Turner, who in 1911, writing to Farrand, expressed something of our feeling about the outcome of this project:
No one knows better than I do that such work as yours will permanently associate your name with the record of one of the enduring documents in the world’s political history, and that my interpretations will become airy nothings as time goes on, and what I have seen discerningly becomes a commonplace, and what I thought I saw and didn’t really see, becomes happily lost in the ruck. . . . A long line of scholars will be your debtors for this collection of sources and I’d envy you your monument if I didn’t feel a sort of partnership in it by reason of our friendship.
In 1985 the American Historical Association, on behalf of Project ’87, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a major archival records search for documents relating to the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787. This effort was to supplement that of Max Farrand’s, in the first decade of this century, that culminated in his edited Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Leonard Rapport served as project researcher. He was, for thirty-five years, an archivist with the National Archives, including eleven years as associate editor of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, an NHPRC project. Much of his archival career had to do with the appraising of federal records for either accessioning or destruction. His report, printed above, offers a delightful—and quite significant—account of what he found.
Dr. James Hutson, Chief of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, is selecting and editing the documents for inclusion in a new supplement to the Records scheduled for publication by Yale University Press in time for the Bicentennial of the US Constitution. A later issue of Perspectives will carry an article by Dr. Hutson.
Leonard Rapport is a project researcher for Project '87.
