The Pelatiah Webster Myth

Authors

Edward S. Corwin

Abstract

For several years Mr. Hannis Taylor has been endeavoring to persuade the American public that the Constitution, instead of being the work of the Convention of 1787, acting under the guidance of men like Madison, Hamilton, Pinckney, Patterson, Ellsworth, and others of similar caliber, was really the invention of a single individual, Pelatiah Webster by name, whose fame, till Mr. Taylor's resurrection of it in The North American Review for August, 1907, had dropped quite out of historical notice. Since this first publication of his discovery, Mr.Taylor has returned to the attack time and time again, now in a memorial to Congress urging some sort of national recognition of Webster' s services, now in a volume on "Jurisprudence, " again in an imposing work on "The Origin and Growth of the American Constitution," and more recently, and compendiously, in the New York Evening Post of January 10th last, where he attempts to answer Mr. Gaillard Hunt's very pointed criticism in an earlier issue (December 30, 1911 ) of the same journal, of his method of handling historical evidence in one or two instances. Thus if asseveration and reiteration could establish the truth of history, Mr. Taylor would by this time have put his thesis beyond all question. But has he in fact succeeded in doing so? This is the subject of our inquiry.

Recommended Citation

Edward S. Corwin, The Pelatiah Webster Myth, 10 Mich. L. Rev. 620 (1912).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol10/iss8/2