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I. DEBATE OVER CONSTITUTION
2. Tilghman probably saw one of the Philadelphia newspaper printings of the Consti-
tution. On 19 September alone, four Philadelphia newspapers printed the Constitution.
On 22 September, Thomas and Samuel Hollingsworth, Baltimore merchants, wrote that
"The Proceedings of the Convention is much approved of" in Baltimore (to Levi Hol-
lingsworth, Hollingsworth Family Papers, PHi).
Editors' Note
The Publication and Circulation of the Constitution in Maryland
22 September-December 1787
The Maryland act of 26 May 1787 appointing delegates to the Con-
stitutional Convention required the delegates "to report the proceed-
ings of the said convention, and any act agreed to therein, to the next
session of the general assembly" (Appendix II, RCS:Md., 805). Some
time after the Constitutional Convention adjourned on 17 September
1787, Maryland's Convention delegates forwarded the "Act of the late
Convention at Philadelphia" to Maryland Governor William Smallwood.
Maryland's Constitutional Convention delegates probably transmit-
ted one or more of the 500 official copies of the Convention's report
that were printed as a six-page broadside by John Dunlap and David
C. Claypoole, printers of the Pennsylvania Packet. This report consisted
of (1) the Constitution, (2) the two resolutions of the Convention, and
(3) the 17 September letter of the President of the Convention (George
Washington) to the President of Congress. Each of the Convention's
forty-one delegates present on 17 September had received several cop-
ies of the broadside, some of which were probably sent to state officials.
Dunlap and Claypoole did not provide a heading to the broadside
(Evans 20818). (For more on this broadside, see CC:76.) On 19 Sep-
tember the Constitutional Convention report was printed in the Penn-
sylvania Packet and three other Philadelphia newspapers. Some of these
printings circulated in Maryland.
All four Maryland newspapers published in the fall of 1787 printed
the report of the Constitutional Convention by 3 October. John Hayes
printed the report in a two-page "Extraordinary" issue of the Baltimore
Maryland Gazette on 22 September under the heading "PLAN of the
NEW FEDERAL GOVERNMENT." (The heading was the same one used
by the Pennsylvania Gazette when it printed the report on 19 September.)
Three days later the report appeared in William Goddard's Maryland
Journal, a semiweekly, under a similar title. Goddard, apparently em-
ploying the same type he used in his Maryland Journal, struck a two-
page, triple-columned broadside of the report. At the bottom of the
second page, Goddard included his colophon (Evans 45176).
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