There has been much speculation over the years as to whether Mr. Colvin's note had entirely the desired effect, and whether it might not have been a bad idea to include Article XIII at all, in advance of its ratification. It is not clear as to whether there was some concern that the quick completion of the ratification process might just as easily have had the opposite undesired effect of promulgating a copy of the Constitution that was incomplete. However, the note is clear as to its content as well as its intent. We must take from its early date and the fact that Mr. Colvin was an attorney editing a body of law, that he used the term defective in the purely legal sense of the word. That is, meaning that the record would be legally perfect upon completion of ratification, rather than implying that there was anything wrong with the way the records were being kept.

We can see that the Secretary did, in fact, have a generally acknowledged responsibility of eventually collecting the certifications of the several States, even before 1818. In most cases, the certifications did eventually arrive at the State Department, by one route or another. The only exceptions to this are South Carolina, which did not complete the legislative process of ratification or rejection, but which did send in certified copies of its activities to date when asked to do so by the Secretary, and Virginia.⁶⁴ Such announcements by the Secretary, when they were made at all, were carried in the journals of the body receiving the announcement. Of the method of announcing the final result of a proposed amendment, those announcements had already varied 4 times with the 4 ratifications thus far seen by the nation. For example:

The Constitution itself was ratified in convention, signed by the President of the Convention, and ordered sent directly to Congress. The Bill of Rights is notated in some detail, as having been communicated to Congress by the President. Lack of evidence of ratification by 3 states is also included.⁶⁵

In the case of the 11th Amendment, on the final page of the state's resolutions we see

NOTE: --The eleventh amendment was declared by the President, in a message to Congress dated January 8, 1798, to have been ratified by three-fourths of the States.⁶⁶

In the case of the 12^th Amendment, in the same manner, we see

Note. --The twelfth amendment was declared in a circular letter of the Secretary of State to the Governors of the several States, dated September 25, 1804, to have been ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States.⁶⁷

The original 13^th Amendment carries no note whatsoever.

The next amendment (also called 13^th, and not proposed until 1860, was not ratified and carried no note.

The amendment following that one (and again called 13^th) was formally announced by the Secretary of State in a declaration and "approved" by the President in 1865.⁶⁸

Referring again to the Table of Notifications, we very quickly see that in the case where the transmittal and resolution were passed directly to the Congress, the Secretary of State made no announcemnt at all.

John Quincy Adams, having already lost track of at least one State's answer (South Carolina) to the question, apparently did not see anything from Virginia, or else did notice, but followed the customary rule of not announcing to the Congress what it already officially knew. Otherwise, by his own records, he would have had to continue monitoring the status of the 13^th Amendment for its conclusion in Virginia, even if he never did realize his mistake concerning South Carolina - but he did not.

This apparent lack of consistency can still be called entirely proper, because the President's or Secretary's personal interactions with the States and the Congress had exactly no legal bearing on the actual status of the law (US Const., art. v).^69,70 Only the State's decisions themselves carried the weight of determination. In some cases, the transmittals or cover letters refer within their text to various communiqués received from the State Department, but those original communiqués were never included.⁷¹  "The Documentary History of The Constitution of The United States" states on its frontispiece that the contents are "DERIVED FROM THE RECORDS, AND ROLLS DEPOSITED IN THE BUREAU OF ROLLS AND LIBRARY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE." [Emphasis theirs.]

One can certainly ask many questions as to what any one Secretary might have been thinking at the time or what any one Secretary understood to be true. However - one cannot question the actual content of the certifications themselves, even if they sometimes arrived in an unexpected or belated fashion. While the Constitution gave Congress an ability to determine by what exact means a state might "by general laws prescribe the manner, in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.", it did not do so until April 20 of 1818.⁷²

The Act of April 20, 1818, did not, appropriately, make any attempt to dictate to the states exactly how they would address their resolutions regarding constitutional amendments (or anything else). But it did, finally, place absolute responsibility for knowing and publishing the law of the land on the Secretary of State. The Act, entitled An Act to provide for the publication of the laws of the United States and for other purposes, is not reprinted here in its entirety, but is notable for two reasons. First, the Act requires the Secretary to publish no less than 11,000 copies of the laws, with explicit instructions as to whom those copies should be directed. Second, and more to the point here, specific instruction is given as to what steps the Secretary must take with regard to constitutional amendments. This is laid out in Section 2., as follows:

And be it further enacted, That, whenever official notice shall have been received, at the Department of State, that any amendment which heretofore has been, or hereafter may be, proposed to the constitution of the United States, has been adopted, according to the provisions of the constitution, it shall be the duty of the said Secretary of State forthwith to cause the said amendment to be published in the said newspapers authorized to promulgate the laws, with his certificate, specifying the states by which the same may have been adopted, and that the same has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the constitution of the United States.

The Act does not specify in any way what the States, themselves, should do concerning constitutional amendments, but it makes the responsibilities of the Secretary abundantly clear. Apparently, Congress had no wish to overstep its responsibility to enact laws in support of the states' constitutional rights. But at the same time, it could not in any way prescribe, or proscribe, those rights as defined in Article V of the Constitution by manipulating the provisions in Article IV, Section I of the Constitution. The states had been coincidentally provided with what was intended as a consistent means of making their decisions on constitutional amendments known, because the 1820 Act made no distinction whatsoever between amendments which had been proposed by the Congress, and those which had been proposed by the States themselves. The act also made specific the inclusion of all amendments proposed before the Act was passed. However, there is no evidence that the States chose to take any particular advantage of that feature of the Act, at least where state-proposed amendments were involved. There is no known complaint from any of the states themselves that they were having any trouble keeping abreast of one another's activities.

Only five days after the 1820 Act was passed, the session acts of the Congress and the previously-referenced article mentioning the 13^th amendment appeared in the Niles Register. Since the Niles Register article notes that the information was forwarded from the National Intelligencer, we simply cannot find enough intervening time to state that the April 20 Act could have been put into motion so quickly. The Department of State had suddenly been turned into the precursor of the Government Printing Office in use today. Given that most of the postmarks for the state notifications regarding the 13^th Amendment run about 10 days before the known receipt date, it is highly doubtful that the Niles Register article could have appeared in response to the Act of April 20 within a mere 5 days. If that were true, then Department of State would have had to find a way to contract with the National Intelligencer under the very particular stipulations for doing so described elsewhere in the Act. It would also have to create the text of the article, have it hit the streets without proper attribution (the Secretary's certificate was required by the Act), and still leave time for the Niles Register to pick up and publish the story within the week. Communications were really quite good in those days, but they simply were not that fast, and bureaucratic action of any kind has never been that quick, no matter the speed of communications.

What we do know with great exactitude, is that there had been a tremendous inconsistency to date in the way the records were kept and announcements made concerning constitutional amendments. When the Act was passed on April 20, it had only been a few weeks since Secretary Adam's misleading report as to South Carolina's status had been laid before the same Congress, and subsequently carried in the newspapers. Over the previous several years, a number of state-proposed amendments had been entirely disregarded by the State Department, and the Congress had found itself about to print a constitutional amendment it wasn't even sure had been ratified. So, Congress finally exercised its constitutional prerogative to specify how the laws were to be disseminated, and chose the State Department to perform that task.

Given the sudden order to publish no less than 11,000 copies of the law, along with (in another section of the Act) announcing in no less than 3 newspapers in every state and territory, it could not be surprising if the State Department might suddenly buckle under the avalanche of work. However, just over 11 months had passed by the time Virginia ratified the 13^th Amendment, also using a very similar means to that enacted by Congress for recodification of the law.

At this point, we can only examine Secretary Adams' lack of apparent action on the 13^th Amendment by demonstrated habit and by inference. A copy of the 1819 Revised Codes shows that the federal government did, in fact, receive at least one copy of the book, which is still extant, and is marked on its title page as property of the Department of State. (Other copies are presently in the possession of the federal government as well. Refer to the Library of Congress catalogs.)

As stated earlier, whether Adams took due notice of the ratification or not does not in any way affect the validity of the law itself, but it does open the question as to what the Secretary might have known at the time. We have only two alternatives from which to choose - either Adams received the book at a later time and did not realize what it was, or he knew, and because of that fact, also knew that all the proper authorities had already been noticed. Either case would account for the apparent outward lack of activity or further concern on his part, but for the fact that Congress had explicitly given him firm direction regarding such matters. Had Secretary Adams checked, he would have known that the date of the 1818 Act predated ratification by Virginia by nearly a year.  Had he ever actually read the books shipped to him by Virginia, he would have known both of the ratification and Virginia's pointed effort at making sure the State Department was duly notified.⁷³

Secretary Adams himself was a native of Massachusetts, and may not have been previously aware of Virginia's peculiar method of certifying and publishing its law all in one piece. There is particular reason to believe that Secretary Adams was not cognizant of this, because it is readily apparent in Virginia's official records that the methods for codifying and publishing the body of law were still being worked out. This was strongly evidenced by Governor Tyler's 1810 address to the Virginia General Assembly.⁷⁴ (In that same address, Governor Tyler goes on at some length to admonish the Virginia courts against continuing to rely on British precedents no longer having any weight in America.) British rule had only fallen away 34 years before the 13th Amendment was proposed, and reliance on its law did not simply evaporate all at once. The process actually took many years to accomplish, the 1819 Revised Codes of Virginia also having been in part an effort to expunge and replace what remained of it. Adams himself was educated in Europe at the University of Leyden. At the approximate time of Congress' proposal of the 13th Amendment and Governor Tyler's address, Adams was serving as U.S. Minister to Russia beginning in 1809. Adams later served as Minister to Great Britain, returning in 1817, and so had not even resided in the United States for any great length of time prior to his return in 1817. Upon his 1817 return, he became Secretary of State.⁷⁵ Adams actually lived in Europe for a total of 18 years between 1794 and 1817, not including the years he had spent living there as a youth. Amongst his many assignments, there was one to the Treaty of Ghent, which was meant to settle the War of 1812. Though the repudiations of the British at Ghent by the Virginia Assembly were loud, long, and placed into their official resolutions, there is no particular evidence of any personal animosity between Adams and Virginia. Nor is there any reason to believe that Adams took any keen interest in how the state of Virginia internally dealt with the law.

None of the foregoing, however, gives cause for a presumption that Secretary of State Adams did not know that Virginia had ratified the 13th Amendment. If he did not personally know it (using an extreme possibility), then the rest of the world certainly did, as evidenced by the official distribution list for Virginia's Revised Codes, eventual purchase and usage of same by several thousand buyers, and continued publication of the ratified amendment for over 60 years thereafter.

What must still be explained is the apparent lack of internal State Department records. Where we might take this a step further, is in stating that while all the other pertinent documents from the states had arrived on single sheets (letters and resolutions), this one document arrived in book form, and apparently was not sent directly to the State Department. We know that the State Department eventually came into possession of a copy, but whether that copy was the same one sent to James Monroe, or some other, we can't say. In any case, it was not likely to have been physically stored along with the other documents, and so was not likely to be compiled into any collections along with the other documents later collected. In modern times, of course, the collection of official documents such as this has grown exponentially. According to The Gazette" (1/10/91), the Library of Congress had 349,402 uncataloged rare books and 13.9 million uncataloged rare manuscripts.⁷⁶

The National Archives cannot even be housed under one roof. In studying the Library of Congress catalogs, we also find that a great many early documents are listed as being in boxes in various separate collections housed in various libraries, and in very many cases are never separately accounted for at all. It is also the case that in the early part of the 19th century, there simply was no National Archives and Records Administration. Records of various federal departments, however precious, were kept by and in those departments for many years, subject to whatever care various occupants might deliver over the years. At the present time, such documents are expected to be turned over to the National Archives at least every several years, on a set and highly complex schedule designed to insure that the significant records of every office are securely preserved.⁷⁷

It is impossible to calculate how many documents the State Department was keeping during those early years. The task of maintaining those records must have been overwhelming, because the results from Connecticut, South Carolina, and Virginia all became provably subject to either mis-reporting, non-reporting, or both. This happened both within the States themselves and within the federal offices. These events had all taken place even before the passage of the 1818 Act, and might conceivably have even prompted the Act itself. In the final analysis, we can still only speculate as to why John Quincy Adams failed to take measures to see that Virginia's recorded ratification was noted along with that of every other State and published as required by the law. It is entirely possible that Adams himself did not create the eventual difficulty with regard to internal State Department records, but that the book was physically moved at some later time. (However, this is not documented as having occurred.) In any case, the Revised Codes again and again escaped the notice of later compilers and editors, owing to the lack of a separate letter or entry of Virginia's decision, in addition to the apparent failure of the Secretary to have Virginia's response published as required by the April 18, 1818 Act of Congress.

Since we do know that President Monroe received a copy of the Revised Codes from Virginia, the question of the federal government having been duly notified of the amendment's status is moot. But there we are completely stuck, because we have no way of determining when, or if, James Monroe ever again discussed the amendment's status with John Quincy Adams, or whether he personally passed over his copy of the Revised Codes to Adams.

We do know that Monroe himself was aware of the amendment throughout its ratification period, first as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, then as Governor of Virginia, then as Secretary of State himself, and finally as President. We know he was certainly no stranger to the amendment itself, nor to the sentiments that produced it, as evidenced by his very public quarrel with Colonel Timothy Pickering in 1799. At that time, Monroe had been recalled as Minister to France, and his associations with foreigners had been called into question by then Secretary of State Pickering. Both were veteran officers of the Revolutionary War, Monroe having been severely wounded in the battle at Harlem Heights. Monroe's bitter indignation at having his loyalties questioned incited a new battle of many correspondences, which was later published in the Annals of Congress.⁷⁸ Given the tone and content of Monroe's side of the argument (not reprinted here due to its length and ancillary nature), it would be entirely surprising if he did not both strongly support the amendment and have a wish to be publicly witnessed doing so. Ironically, Monroe later became Secretary of State himself, and Pickering served on the congressional committee assigned to bring in the proposal for the amendment we discuss here.

So, there is no question at all as to Monroe's involvement with the amendment. He made official inquiries as to the amendment's ratification status more than once over the years - both as Secretary of State and as President. But he would have been in the same position in 1819 as Secretary Adams. Had he not known that Virginia had ratified, or if he had thought that the ratification was still to be answered, then he, too, would have had to monitor Virginia and South Carolina for their response. There is no further record from Monroe on this subject, either, and this makes perfect sense in light of the fact that the amendment's ratification was already common knowledge. As with the Secretary of State prior to 1818, there was no special tradition or legal requirement for the President to make any such announcement, and in fact, there was already a specific Supreme Court ruling to the effect that his consent was in no way required for passage.⁷⁹

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