Mistakes in the Original Signed US Constitution A
LTHOUGH the US Constitution gave birth to a form of govern- ment that has served as a model for governments all around the world, the original signed document, which is housed in the rotunda of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washing- ton, DC, is not without errors. The most obvious of these mistakes, which involve things like missing words, erasures, and misspellings, are attribut- able to Jacob Shallus and Alexander Hamilton.
Jacob Shallus was an assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania State Assem-
bly who was given the job of engrossing the Constitution (copying it out on parchment in a large, legible hand). Given that he only had a short time to complete his work—from the close of the second-to-last session of the Constitutional Convention on Saturday, September 15, 1787, until the opening of the final session on Monday, September 17—it is not surprising that he made a few mistakes. Evidence of some of his mistakes can be found in the form of words written in between the lines of the Constitu- tion. Known as interlineations, these are words that Shallus accidentally left out while transcribing the Constitution and then inserted between the lines of the text rather than start over with a clean sheet of parchment. A remnant of another of Shallus’ mistakes can be seen close to the bottom of the first page of the Constitution, where it appears that he needed to remove some words and may have used the edge of a knife to scrape the ink off the parchment. This area now appears as a gray smudge because of the dirt the abraded parchment has picked up over the years. Alexander Hamilton’s contribution to the mistakes that appear in the original signed Constitution occurred after Jacob Shallus was finished engrossing the document. As each of the state delegations came forth to sign the Constitution, it is believed that Hamilton wrote the name of each delegation’s state on the Constitution next to the delegates’ signatures. Unfortunately, when he wrote out Benjamin Franklin’s state’s name he wrote “Pensylvania” instead of “Pennsylvania.” —JS
the proceedings a sense of his- torical significance. The presence of men like James Madison from Virginia and James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris from Pennsyl- vania provided the convention with an additional solid intellectual core. Neither Thomas Jefferson nor John Adams attended the con- vention. Jefferson was unable to attend because he was in Paris serving as the United States’ min- ister to France, and Adams was unable to attend because he was serving as the United States’ en- voy to Britain.
A Veil of Secrecy
Once under way, the meetings of the Constitutional Convention were held behind closed doors
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
Gouverneur Morris was one of the Constitutional Convention’s leading intellectuals and has been credited with having worded the US Constitution.
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