Got an email this morning from a good friend of mine who helped found ConSource, the post-partisan effort to collect and digitize primary source documents related to the creation of the American Constitution. It seems a heretofore unknown/identified early draft of the Constitution has been found by Lorianne Updike-Toler, also a friend of the blog.
(It would be more accurate to say that she's a friend of the blog's author as I have no idea what she thinks of the blog as such.)
Anyway, here's the story:
Researcher Lorianne Updike Toler was intrigued by the centuries-old document at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
On the back of a treasured draft of the U.S. Constitution was a truncated version of the same document, starting with the familiar words: "We The People. . . ."
They had been scribbled upside down by one of the Constitution's framers, James Wilson, in the summer of 1787. The cursive continued, then abruptly stopped, as if pages were missing.
A mystery, Toler thought, until she examined other Wilson papers from the Historical Society's vault in Philadelphia and found what appeared to be the rest of the draft, titled "The Continuation of the Scheme."
[...]
"This was the kind of moment historians dream about," said Toler, 30, a lawyer and founding president of the Constitutional Sources Project (www.ConSource.org), a nonprofit organization, based in Washington, that promotes an understanding of and access to U.S. Constitution documents.
"This was national scripture, a piece of our Constitution's history," she said of her find in November. "It was difficult to keep my hands from trembling."
As other researchers "realized what was happening, there was a sort of hushed awe that settled over the reading room," Toler said. "One of them said the hair on her arms stood on end."
Two drafts of the Constitution in Wilson's hand had been separated from his papers long ago. One of them included the beginning of still another draft and was apparently seen as part of a single working version, instead of a separate draft.
Toler said "The Continuation of the Scheme," including its provisions about the executive and judiciary branches, completes that draft, making it a third.
As always, if you're interested in learning more about or supporting the efforts of ConSource, please click the link.
