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Note on Sources
Legislative and Executive Records
The legislative records used in these two volumes consist largely of
the votes and proceedings of the House of Delegates and the Senate
that were printed by order of the state legislature by Frederick Green,
state printer and co-publisher of the Annapolis Maryland Gazette. There
is no manuscript record of these proceedings. The proceedings that
the editors used most heavily are for the sessions of November 1786
(Evans 20487, 20489), April 1787 (Evans 20488, 20490), November 1787
(Evans 21224, 21226), and May 1788 (Evans 21225, 21227). Green also
printed the laws and resolutions passed by the legislature, which also
appear in these two volumes. Sessions laws adopted before Green be-
came state printer in 1775 have also been employed, as has a law code
book.
Lists of names of legislators for November 1786, April 1787, Novem-
ber 1787, and May 1788 can be found in the first volume of Edward C.
Papenfuse et al., eds., A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature,
1636-1789 (2 vols., Baltimore and London, 1979-1985). These lists
also include the committee assignments of the delegates. Below the
legislative lists are the names of the members of the Executive Council.
These two volumes also include extensive biographical data on the mem-
bers of the legislature from 1636 through 1789.
Manuscript records exist for the Executive Council (Maryland State
Archives) and these were used since no printed record exists of the
Council's proceedings.
Manuscripts
Manuscript letters and other manuscript sources for the debate about
the Constitution are both concentrated in a few repositories and widely
scattered. The bulk of the material in these two volumes comes from
five repositories: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library of
Congress, the Maryland Historical Society, the New-York Historical So-
ciety, and the New York Public Library. One to three collections at these
institutions represent the bulk of the manuscripts printed in Maryland.
These repositories also contain collections that contribute only one or
two letters. Eleven institutions and a single private individual contribute
collections from which one item is printed in these two volumes.
By far the largest number of letters of any repository are from the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, with twenty letters coming from the
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