Bill of Rights Proposed: Congress Secures Liberties

James Madison had promised, and now he had to deliver. On September 25, 1789, the first Congress approved twelve proposed amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten would survive the process, becoming the Bill of Rights and permanently defining the boundaries between government power and individual liberty in the United States. The amendments were the price of ratification. During the fierce debates over the Constitution in 1787 and 1788, Anti-Federalists like George Mason and Patrick Henry had argued that the document's lack of explicit protections for individual rights made it a blueprint for tyranny. Several state conventions ratified only after receiving assurances that a bill of rights would be added. Madison, who initially considered such a list unnecessary, recognized that failure to follow through would threaten the new government's legitimacy. Working from over 200 proposals submitted by the state ratifying conventions, Madison distilled the list to seventeen amendments, which the House reduced to twelve. The Senate consolidated them further. The final twelve articles addressed everything from congressional pay and apportionment to freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to bear arms; protections against unreasonable search and seizure; and the guarantee of due process. The first two proposed amendments, dealing with congressional representation and compensation, failed to win immediate ratification. The compensation amendment eventually became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992, 203 years after it was proposed. Articles three through twelve were ratified by the required three-fourths of state legislatures by December 15, 1791, becoming the First through Tenth Amendments. The Bill of Rights initially applied only to the federal government, not the states. Most protections were not extended to state and local governments until the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause was interpreted to "incorporate" them, a process that unfolded gradually through Supreme Court decisions from the 1890s through the 1960s. Madison's reluctant compromise became the most celebrated feature of American constitutional law.