The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787

The American Historical Association, Project ’87, and the Permanent Com­mittee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, of which the Librarian of Con­gress is chairman ex-officio, are togeth­er sponsoring the project to publish a supplement to Max Farrand’s The Rec­ords of the Federal Convention of 1787. Leonard Rapport described the genesis of that project in the April 1986 issue of Perspectives. There Mr. Rapport record­ed his travels to repositories in every corner of the nation in search of docu­ments, illustrating the creation of the Constitution, which did not appear in Farrand’s Records. The “large body of material” that Mr. Rapport acquired is now being sifted and edited for inclu­sion in the Farrand supplement. What editorial principles inform this effort? What can the reader expect to find in the new volume, which was submitted to the Yale University Press in May 1986 for publication next year, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the meet­ing of the Philadelphia Convention?

Recall that the Yale University Press first published Farrand’s Records in three volumes in 1911. The press reis­sued the Records in 1923, 1927, and 1934. In 1937 it reprinted them again with the addition of what Farrand called a “fourth, supplementary volume.” One of the first editorial decisions made in planning the present work was that it would not be a fifth volume of Farrand’s Records, a supplement to his 1937 sup­plement. Rather it was decided that the relevant parts of Farrand’s 1937 supple­ment would be incorporated into a new work, creating a revised and expanded fourth volume to supplement the earlier three which would be. reissued, un­changed, by the Yale University Press.

In choosing for publication docu­ments discovered since the appearance of the 1937 supplement, the editor has adhered to Farrand’s principles of doc­umentary selection. Though nowhere explicitly stated, they are clear enough. Farrand confined himself, as rigorously as possible, in selecting his documents to those that illustrated what occurred in Philadelphia between May 14, the day the Convention was called to meet, and September 17, the day it adjourned. Except for the delegates’ credentials and instructions he published little from the pre-Convention period.

For example, Gaillard Hunt’s new multi-volume edition of Madison’s writ­ings was available to Farrand, but he included none of what might be called Madison’s constitution planning let­ters—those of March and April to Ran­dolph, Jefferson, and Washington—nor did he include Madison’s “Vices of the Political System.” It became apparent, during the preparation of this volume, that Farrand published little pre-Con­vention material because, aside from the familiar Madison documents, little sur­vives that reveals the delegates’ thinking about the task before them in Philadel­phia. There are, to be sure, pre-Con­vention resolves of state legislatures re­lating to the appointment of delegates as well as letters written by delegates to friends and family as they traveled to Philadelphia, but these reveal nothing about the writing of the Constitution. Following Farrand’s practices, they will not be included.

The editor hoped that letters written in transit as well as vouchers for reim­bursement of travel and subsistence ex­penses, submitted to state legislatures after the delegates returned from Phila­delphia, would permit the compilation of a more accurate attendance log than Farrand published at III, 586-90. But such vouchers as exist are imprecise, reckoning attendance only by months or total days present, and do not improve Farrand’s statistics. When these can be corrected, footnotes or other editorial devices will be employed to do so.

Farrand approached the post-Conven­tion years with the same discrimination as he did the pre-Convention period. He was interested in documents generated by the ratification debates only in so far as a member of the Convention, participat­ing in those exchanges, revealed some­thing about what had occurred at Philadelphia. These revelations he published; exhortations and polemics he omitted. Farrand also published reminiscences about the Convention by delegates in private correspondence and public de­bate, in some cases decades after 1787, but he was careful to ascertain the credi­bility of these remarks before including them. This volume contains a consider­able amount of retrospective material that meets Farrand’s criterion for inclusion.

In his preface to the 1937 supple­ment, Farrand mentioned two recently discovered collections of Convention documents, those of John Lansing, Jr., and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, that were unavailable to him but which he assumed would become accessible to scholars “in the course of a few years.” Farrand was correct about Lansing’s notes, for they were published by Jo­seph R. Strayer in 1939 under the title, The Delegate from New York. They will be included in their entirety in the present volume. Pinckney’s papers were given, in due course, to the Library of Con­gress. They comprise, principally, work­ing documents of the Convention  such as the Committee of Detail report and some notes of proceedings in the South Carolina Ratifying Convention. Only one document met the requirements for publication. Convention papers—notes of debates, draft speeches, resolutions, and plans—of several other delegates have been discovered and will be print­ed. Some are copious, others consist of only a single document. Delegates rep­resented by newly discovered docu­ments are: John Dickinson, Pierce But­ler, Gunning Bedford, George Mason, James Wilson, and Elbridge Gerry.

Scores of letters, written by delegates during the Convention and touching on its business, have been found and will appear for the first time in this supple­ment. Obviously, not every delegate let­ter written at Philadelphia will be pub­lished, since many deal exclusively with personal business or family matters. Some letters that are primarily personal, those of Elbridge Gerry to his wife, for example, will be included to convey the flavor of the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia and to illustrate the context in which the Constitution was written. A few communications written by “out­side” groups to the membership of the Convention, i.e., an anti-slavery petition from a society of Pennsylvanians and a letter from Rhode Island merchants to an “unofficial” delegate at the Conven­tion, will be included to illustrate the variety of interests that confronted the delegates. But in every case the princi­ple of documentary selection remains the same: only documents that illumi­nate the activities of the Convention or its members between May 14 and Sep­tember 17, 1787, will be printed.

Research has disclose a number of what appear to be relevant letters that the editor has been unable to locate, i.e., Nicholas Gilman to John Gilman, July 28, 1787, Connecticut delegates to Sam­uel Huntington, June 20, 1787, and others. A more regrettable omission is Robert Yates’ Convention notes, which Evarts B. Greene and Richard B. Mor­ris, A Guide to the Principal Sources of Early American History (1600-1800) in the City of New York (New York, 1929), p. 187, identified at the New York Public Library. A search in that repository by Mr. Rapport did not discover these notes nor has the staff of the library been successful in finding them. The editor hoped to find Convention Secre­tary William Jackson’s notes of debates, which he took in addition to  keeping the “official” records that were published in 1819 at Congress’ direction, as the Jour­nal, Acts, and Proceedings of the Convention (printed in full by Farrand). Jackson informed Timothy Pickering on August 11, 1827, that he took notes of the debates in a form of shorthand and was at that moment transcribing them. Al­though some scholars have presumed that the notes may be extant, the editor has not located them.

The present supplement will not, then, include all Convention documents that may exist. Perhaps no compilation of eighteenth-century documents can be considered definitive, because even af­ter two centuries new manuscripts con­tinue to surface with surprising regular­ity. Farrand recognized that his own work might require revision; at some time in the future this supplement may need to be merged into a newer, more comprehensive volume. The editor would not regret such an event, because it would mean that new material had been discovered that would enhance our understanding of the Constitution.