Committee of Detail

The Committee of Detail was a committee established by the United States Constitutional Convention on July 24, 1787 to put down a draft text reflecting the agreements made by the Convention up to that point, including the Virginia Plan's 15 resolutions. The Convention adjourned from July 26 to August 6 to await their report. Much of what was contained in the final document was present in this draft.

The Committee was chaired by John Rutledge (nicknamed "Dictator John" as a reflection of the extraordinary power he had assumed as South Carolina’s governor during the early days of the Revolution), with the other members including Edmund Randolph, Oliver Ellsworth, James Wilson, and Nathaniel Gorham. Although the membership of the committee disproportionately favored the larger states, it was fairly evenly balanced in terms of geographic distribution: Gorham (Massachusetts) representing northern New England, Ellsworth (Connecticut) representing lower New England, Wilson (Pennsylvania) representing the middle states, Randolph (Virginia) representing the upper South, and Rutledge (South Carolina) representing the lower South. Other than Gorham, the committee members had all been lawyers of distinction, and would be leading legal figures in the new government (Randolph would be the first attorney general, while Rutledge, Ellsworth and Wilson would become Supreme Court justices). They had all known one another as delegates to the Confederation Congress, and had seen its weaknesses first hand. With the exception of Randolph, they had all been serving in the Confederation Congress when its fiscal problems had become acute. They also had already played important roles in the Convention: Randolph had presented the Virginia Plan, Rutledge and Wilson had been key in crafting the compromise on representation, Ellsworth had led the small states during the battle over per-state voting in the Senate, and Gorham had chaired the Committee of the Whole, where he called for compromise during the bitter debate over representation.

Overall, the report of the committee conformed to the resolutions adopted by the Convention, though on many clauses the members of the committee left the imprint of their individual and collective judgments. In a few instances, the committee avowedly exercised considerable discretion. For example, the Committee added the phrase "giving them aid and comfort" to the section on treason to narrow the definition from more ambiguous phrases which had been proposed in the Convention. They also added an Electoral College.

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