Here is the email I recently received from Dr. Kenneth Bowling - whose entire team maintains that LaVergne's claim that the House and Senate passed the resolution as "nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons" and its transmission to the states as "nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons" was a "Scrivener’s and Printer’s Error ” is wrong. Dr. Kenneth Bowling, Editor of the First Federal Congress Project (http://www.gwu.edu/~ffcp/) the following email:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tNuxLI_rF-c/Ulhc0_GpQFI/AAAAAAAAHZI/RXpnMuTQtlg/s1600/Bowling+to+Klos.jpg
Addition this team wrote the book : Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress by Helen E. Veit, Kenneth R. Bowling, Charlene Bangs Bickfordo and to not even present their side, which is academically sound, is specious. Additionally, both the Library of Congress and the National Archives have no other working copy of Article the First other than the Broadside used by the Committee shown here.
Your entry merely parrots LaVergne's argument and now you claim there is another version used by the 1789 Joint Committee. Well where is it? Please produce it as not only I, but the First Federal Congress Project, Library of Congress, and the National Archives would be most grateful.
In the meantime, you should at the very least present the more credible claim that there was no clerical error. Stas.klos (talk) 02:21, 23 October 2013 (UTC)
Stan- The house ordered its clerk to "carry to the Senate a fair engrossed copy of the said proposed articles of amendment, and desire their concurrence." http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llhj&fileName=001/llhj001.db&recNum=87&itemLink=D?hlaw:9:./temp/~ammem_MkYl::%230010089&linkText=1 Now today we would understand that an engrossed copy would be a printing of what the House wanted to give to the Senate. But in the 1700's a printing press required the manual setting of the letters and using a large expensive printing press. This required skilled labor and many man-hours. Not something that was to be keep secret from the press like these proposed amendments. Doing all the work of making a printed paper was reserved for large scale distributions of printed material. If it was just a copy or two, it was easier and much less time consuming to write it out. Even the final copies of the bill of rights that went to the several states were handwritten. So when they ordered their lone clerk to make "a fair engrossed copy" it was to be a handwritten one as were all the minutes he kept of the legislative session. Later in the 1800's, all those minutes and correspondences between the House and the Senate were reproduced into print form for a larger audience. If you look at this cover page of these printed versions of the House journals, you will see a print date of 1826. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llhj&fileName=001/llhj001.db&recNum=0&itemLink=D%3Fhlaw%3A9%3A.%2Ftemp%2F~ammem_MkYl%3A%3A%230010089&linkText=1 Now I am not saying your image is definitively that of a later reproduction. But to me it would not make sense for the House clerk to spend many hours assembling a printing for one copy. Even it was his intention to give every Senator their own copy, he would have been able to copy out 2 dozen in less than an hour.