Early Draft of U.S. Constitution Found (Just In Time for Supreme Court to Trample On It)

Scribblings of a 1787 draft of the U.S. Constitution, dubbed “The Continuation of the Scheme” and written by “godfather” James Wilson, were found by a researcher at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, hiding in plain sight among some 21 million historical documents. Inquirer: “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. [Researcher Lorianne Updike Toler] said ‘The Continuation of the Scheme,’ including its provisions about the executive and judiciary branches, completes that draft, making it a third. She ‘found a document that was sort of buried in its right place, but not taken out by an archivist for special treatment,’ said [Center for the Study of the American Constitution director John] Kaminski, the constitutional scholar. ‘This is a valuable document. It is in Wilson’s hand, and it was in Wilson’s papers, where it should have been.'”