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 Great Britain. Whereas Magna Carta had promised rights to a few and transferred some power from the Crown to the parliament, newly minted American citizens hungered for much more. Their sentiments were egalitarian. Many of the working-class artisans, farmers and traders--called "the poor and middling sort" by the 18th century aristocracy (Wilentz, 1991, p. 32)--yearned for institutional protection against the abuses of government and the ruling classes to which ...