Bill of Rights Ratified: American Freedoms Secured

Three-quarters of the states agreed, and Americans gained written protections against the government they had just created. On December 15, 1791, Virginia became the tenth of fourteen states to ratify the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, meeting the threshold required to make the Bill of Rights law. The amendments had been debated, revised, and nearly abandoned in the three years since the Constitution's ratification. The Bill of Rights was born from political compromise. Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and George Mason had nearly defeated ratification of the Constitution itself, arguing that the document gave the federal government too much power without explicitly protecting individual liberties. Federalists like James Madison countered that enumerating specific rights was unnecessary and potentially dangerous, since any list would inevitably be incomplete. Madison changed his mind. Running for Congress in 1789 against Anti-Federalist James Monroe, he promised to introduce amendments protecting individual rights. Drawing from Virginia's Declaration of Rights, English common law, and proposals from state ratifying conventions, Madison drafted seventeen amendments and presented them to the First Congress in June 1789. Congress condensed them to twelve and sent them to the states in September. Two of the twelve amendments failed initially. The remaining ten were ratified by December 15, 1791. They guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to bear arms; protections against unreasonable searches; the right to a jury trial; and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. The Bill of Rights was largely symbolic for its first century, rarely invoked by courts. Not until the twentieth century did the Supreme Court begin applying these amendments to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment, transforming ten brief passages into the backbone of American civil liberties.