Notes on the Committee of Detail
Commentary
Information on the activities Committee of Detail is limited. Farrand provides a set of documents, largely taken from the papers of James Wilson, which provide some idea of what went in to the Committee of Detail (the Virginia Plan as amended by the Convention, Pinckney's Plan, the New Jersey Plan, and Mason's instruction) and what their deliberations, private and collective, produced (miscellaneous drafts of the Constitution).
What we lack is any record of their meeting-times; of their precise deliberations in the form of proposals, debates, or votes; and, thus, of the intermediary stages and connections between the various documents which survive. Our reconstruction of the Committee's activities is, therefore, necessarily speculative.
The documents referred by the Convention are shown here as entering the Committee as soon as possible after their referral: it is assumed that the Committee met every day during the adjournment, except Sundays. Nonetheless, it would be disingenuous to invent session timelines for each of those 10 days, given our lack of any record. For this reason, all of the documents produced by the Committee will be "created" on the day of the last possible session, Saturday 4th August.
Where possible, links between documents will be shown. Unlike the rest of the Convention, it is not possible, here, to show the evolution of a text as it actually happened: these "proposed amendments" will simply suggest links between texts based on the evidence available.
Charles Pinckney's Plan - Outline from Wilson's Papers was proposed
on 04 August 1787
Notes on the Committee of Detail
Research Assistants' Commentary (1787 Constitutional Convention)
Cite as: Grace Mallon, ‘Notes on the Committee of Detail’ in Research Assistants' Commentary (1787 Constitutional Convention), Quill Project at Pembroke College (Oxford, 2016), item 31.