this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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[โ€“] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago

The final, official copy of the Constitution was copied by Jacob Shallus, a professional calligrapher, from the rough copy that had been already been approved (after months of debate) by the Constitutional Convention. At that point, the text was already finalized; so this corrected line must have been a scribal error by Shallus, not an active revision.

[โ€“] charonn0@startrek.website 11 points 5 days ago

After he finished, [official scribe Jacob] Shallus had to deal with several mistakes that he had made during that rushed weekend of exacting labor. [...] But he also used a penknife to scrape away an entire line of text near the bottom of page one, leaving behind a roughed-up band that now appears gray from grime.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/const-errors.html

So it would seem to have been a transcription error that was scraped off.