Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne Page B

Instead, Madison’s colleagues voted to refer the matter to a select committee of eleven members (the Committee of Eleven), one from each ratifying state (North Carolina and Rhode Island had refused to ratify the Constitution without a bill of rights and were, therefore, not members of the union in 1789). The committee would review Madison’s proposed draft, canvass the large number of amendments recommended by the state ratifying conventions, and report back to the full House with a formal proposal. To his discomfort, Madison had his first set of congressional editors.
    The Committee of Eleven met from July 21 to July 28, 1789, but kept no written records. By and large, they were an unimpressive group. It’s hard to imagine them editing James Madison’s work. The two leading members were Madison himself, representing Virginia, and Roger Sherman from Connecticut. Sherman, who had been a member of the Committee of Five that had drafted the Declaration of Independence, was the Founders’ version of Leonard Zelig. He was the only person to sign all four of our foundational documents—the Continental Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1781), and the United States Constitution (1787). The ubiquitous Sherman is also the only person to serve on the three editorial committees that produced the Bill of Rights—the Committee of Eleven, the three-person Committee on Style, and the three-person House delegation to the House/Senate conference committee. Madison served on the Committee of Eleven and the House/Senate conference committee, but was not a member of the Committee on Style.
    But that’s getting ahead of the story. The other nine earnest back-benchers on the Committee of Eleven were John Vining (Del.), Egbert Benson (N.Y.), Abraham Baldwin (Ga.), Aedanus Burke (S.C.), Nicholas Gilman (N.H.), George Clymer (Pa.), Benjamin Goodhue (Mass.), Elias Boudinot (N.J.), and George Gale (Md.). Boudinot had served in the ceremonial post of president of the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1783. As president, he had signed the Treaty of Paris formally ending the Revolutionary War. He went on to head the United States Mint. Egbert Benson became one of John Adams’s short-lived Article III “midnight judges,” appointed to the Second Circuit in 1801 and serving until his post as chief judge was abolished by the Jeffersonian Congress in 1802. George Gale went on to become superintendent of distilled spirits for Maryland.
    Roger Sherman turned out to be Madison’s editor in chief, not because he was much help in conceiving or drafting the rights-bearing provisions, but because he was so committed to listingthem in a single coherent document. During the Committee of Eleven’s deliberations, Sherman actually drafted a handwritten version of a proposed bill of rights, but Madison, acting like any stubborn author, would have none of it. Madison insisted on his original June 8 model of interpolating freestanding protections into the Constitution’s text, and persuaded the Committee of Eleven to go along over Sherman’s objections. No signs of poetry yet.
    The Committee of Eleven’s first task was to sift through the blizzard of proposed amendments that had accompanied many of the state ratification documents. The editors made short work of them. In fairness, Madison had already carefully reviewed the existing state bills of rights, the old colonial charters, and the four historic English bills of rights, beginning with the Magna Carta, as well as the state ratifying materials, and in his June 8 proposals he had included a proposed rights-bearing amendment on any issue raised by at least three of the source documents. Although Elbridge Gerry (immortalized as the inventor of the gerrymander) would later demand that every amendment proposed by the state ratifying conventions be debated on the floor of the House, the obvious care with