1789 Draft of Bill of Rights Discovered
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WASHINGTON — A never-published “working draft” of the Bill of Rights turned up in the back of a volume of the James Madison Papers during research for the bicentennial of the Constitution, a Library of Congress scholar said Wednesday.
“I knew it was an important document,” said James C. Hutson, chief of the library’s manuscript division, who found it.
The paper was written during July, 1789, by Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the only one of the Founding Fathers to sign all of the key documents of the new nation--the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
“I was very excited about it because I knew that we don’t have any handwritten copies of the Bill of Rights, as it was passing through Congress,” Hutson said.
“It’s in good condition” with “not much” deterioration for a document nearly 200 years old, Hutson reported in a telephone interview.
“The content of the paper was quite interesting,” Hutson said. “The really interesting thing is that it was Madison who wanted to incorporate what became the Bill of Rights into the Constitution.
“It was Sherman who argued all along that the Bill of Rights be separate. This document reflects Sherman’s determination.”
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