History of the Bill of Rights

On December 15, 1791, the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution became law. Ratification of the Bill of Rights is now widely viewed as a watershed event in the early history of our nation, as its influence has been far-reaching. Indeed, the First Amendment alone is today cited more often by scholars, lawyers and laymen than is perhaps the rest of the Constitution combined.

Yet in its day the Bill of Rights was considered something of an unwanted child by many of the Founding Fathers, and acceptance and ratification came slowly. First used as a partisan bargaining chip, later dismissed as superfluous, even damaging, to the cause of nationhood, the idea of a bill of rights was ultimately kept alive by the very people whose rights it promised to secure--individual citizens--and by one man in particular--James Madison--who possessed the shrewdness and foresight with which to tailor a document to both the sensibilities of his times and the benefit of ours. This paper will focus on the contentious debate that preceded the ratification of the invaluable Bill of Rights.

The history of the Bill began well before the American Revolution. It had its roots in the Magna Carta as well as subsequent British bills of rights. These documents, however, tended to protect politicians from potentially despotic individuals (i.e., Kings), rather than individuals from potentially despotic politicians. The climate in America in the 1780s was quite different of that in Grea

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iolated (Levy, 1969, p 268). Although these points were not without merit, they failed to take into account many of the possible benefits of a comprehensive, federal bill of rights. For one thing, the argument that states' bills of rights' shortcomings did not bode well for a federal bill was flimsy at best. In fact, the states' bills had failed because they were seriously flawed documents. For example, Virginia's Declaration of Rights omitted several key rights that eventually made up the core of the first ten amendments to the federal Constitution. These included freedom of speech, assembly and petition, the right to the writ of habeas corpus, a double jeopardy clause, and a separation of church and state (Levy, 1969, p. 269). What is more, certain passages in the original Constitution such as the necessary-and-proper clause seemed to give the government (both executive and legislative branches) powers that could only be checked by a strong bill of rights; that is, by the people themselves (Levy, 1969, p. 274). The latter argument obviously got the attention of James Madison, who in 1788 began to be a more ardent supporter of a bill of rights. Madison knew his history, and saw in British bills of rights a helpful, if

Category: Government - H