Arguably James Madison's manuscript notes of the debates in the 1787 Constitutional Convention constitute the single most important U.S. historical document.
Its importance is based on the fact that the Congress, the Supreme Court, and others seeking to interpret the Constitution often have to determine the intent of the framers--what they did in their sessions, what they said in their debates. Because they adopted a rule of secrecy, never lifted, interpreters during the first thirty years of the Federal government had only the text of the Constitution itself for guidance. Even the publication in 1819, by order of the Congress, of the official journal of the Convention--truly a barebones document--offered little enlightenment.
After Madison's death in 1836 Congress purchased from his estate the manuscript notes he had taken down of the debates, amounting to several hundred thousand words, and ordered them published. As Max Farrand, editor of the three volume Records of the Federal Convention (1911), wrote: "...at once all other records paled into insignificance.... From the day of their publication until the present, Madison's notes...have remained the standard authority for the proceedings of the Convention."
But almost at once there were those who suspected Madison had made many changes to bring the record of the Convention into line with the political thinking of his later years, and such suspicions have persisted.
In the 1890s a significant piece of evidence surfaced, unrecognized, at an auction of documents. Early in this century two young historians recognized its significance, but their report was generally overlooked or ignored. A key to the importance of their discovery involved a ream of watermarked paper that Madison bought apparently in the spring of 1789 and exhausted that fall. That watermarked paper proves almost conclusively that Madison made many of his changes not after the publication of the journal in 1819 but within several years of the Convention, before his political thought changed.
The results of research under the auspices of an NEH grant in 1970-71--during which I examined the manuscript copy of Madision's notes (now in the LOC) and all of the watermarked paper in the LOC's voluminous Madison papers collection)--uncovered an intriguing story, with a cast that includes a doting mother, a wastrel son, some other odd 19th-century characters, and a flavoring of chicanery.
This conference will constitute the first public presentation of my findings and conclusions about the Madison document.