“In the earliest days of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates agreed their proceedings would be secret.” The secretary, William Jackson, kept an official journal, but his papers were in disorder, and he had not dated the votes. John Quincy Adams, who published them in 1819, called them “no better than the daily minutes from which the regular journal ought to have been, but never was, made out.”
James Madison chose a seat in front of the presiding officer and took his own notes every day. He kept them private until he died in 1836. In 1837 Congress paid $30,000 for his papers, and the notes were published in 1840. “Madison’s notes of the Debates have remained the standard authority for the proceedings of the Convention.”