[TigersEye]

My understanding is that Madison did indeed draft the First Amendment (he certainly drafted the version that originally passed the House of Representatives but was defeated in the Senate).

Are you sure about that?

Taken from the book description of "Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution."

James Madison admitted it after Gouverneur Morris died: Madison held the title "Father of the Constitution," but the "finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris." The author of the great Preamble to the Constitution and much of the rest of the document was a wealthy, raffish New Yorker who was above all things a loyal son of the American Revolution.

[kesg]

Thanks for posting this information. I didn't mean to imply that only Madison was involved in the drafting process, although I am still pretty sure that he drafted the original version of the establishment clause (which Congress later changed to its present version).

[Congressman Billybob]

An interesting item is that Madison did not claim the title of "Father of the Constitution" until after all the other Framers from Philadelphia had died. A very interesting book was written by a retired federal judge about 1920, entitled "The Mystery of the Pinckney Draught."

It advanced, persuasively, that the document the "Committee on Stile" used as the text from which to draft the Constitution had been submitted by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina. That original document was missing from the papers of the Convention, kept very sloppily by Major Jackson, its original Secretary.

As for the Amendments, James Madison, a Member of the House in the First Congress, was tasked with distilling the 200+ demands for items in a Bill of Rights into a specific set of amendments. He drafted 17 amendments, which passed the House. The Senate then reduced those to 12 Amendments, which were sent out for ratification.

Of those twelve, the third through twelfth were quickly ratified, and became the Bill of Rights. What was the Third Amendment as submitted, became the First Amendment as ratified. The original Second Amendment, concerning congressional pay raises, did not get ratified until 1992, as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. The original First Amendment was defeated.

I have all this history in one of my books. I wrote the Introduction to the facsimile reprint of Robert Yates' Secret Procedings and Debates of the Convention to Form the US Constitution. Trust me, I know these things.

Congressman Billybob

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