Why Amendments Were Added

A Constitution Without Rights

When the Constitutional Convention adjourned in September 1787, the document it produced contained no bill of rights. This was not an oversight. It was a deliberate choice — and one that nearly destroyed the Constitution before it was ratified.

On September 12, five days before the Convention adjourned, George Mason and Elbridge Gerry raised the question of adding a bill of rights. Mason argued that a bill of rights would "give great quiet to the people." Gerry moved to create a committee to draft one. But the motion failed. Delegates voted against it, 10 states to 0.

The Federalists — those who supported the Constitution — offered two arguments against a bill of rights. First, the federal government was not granted the power to do what a bill of rights would prohibit. Why forbid Congress from restricting the press if Congress had no authority to regulate the press in the first place? Second, a bill of rights could be dangerous: if you listed some rights, future generations might assume those were the only rights that existed.

“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787

Mason, Gerry, and the Fight for Rights

Mason and Gerry were not alone. Across the country, Anti-Federalists — those who opposed the Constitution — made the absence of a bill of rights their central argument. They feared that a distant, powerful national government would trample the rights that Americans had fought a revolution to secure.

The Anti-Federalists were not a unified group. Some wanted to weaken the federal government to the point of returning to the Articles of Confederation. Others simply wanted explicit protections for individual rights. But they shared a conviction: the Constitution, as written, did not adequately protect the people.

Their pressure worked. In several state ratifying conventions, delegates proposed amendments as a condition of ratification. Virginia's convention, meeting in June 1788, proposed a lengthy list of amendments. The Massachusetts convention recommended specific amendments. New York followed. These proposals created a wave of demand that the First Congress could not ignore.

Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris as minister to France, wrote to Madison: "I will now add what I do not like. First the omission of a bill of rights." He argued that a bill of rights was what the people were entitled to against every government.

From Skeptic to Architect

James Madison had opposed a bill of rights at the Convention. He believed the structural protections of the Constitution — the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the division between federal and state governments — were the best safeguard of liberty. A list of rights, he thought, would be a "parchment barrier" that could be ignored.

But Madison was also a practical politician. As he campaigned for a seat in the First Congress, he faced a strong Anti-Federalist challenge from James Monroe. To win, Madison softened his stance on amendments, promising to support a bill of rights if elected.

He won. And he kept his promise.

On June 8, 1789, Madison rose in the House of Representatives and proposed a series of amendments drawn from the state ratifying conventions, from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and from his own thinking. His approach was ingenious: rather than limiting the amendments to the rights of states (as many Anti-Federalists wanted), he framed them as individual rights. This shifted the entire debate. The Bill of Rights would be a charter of personal liberty, not a list of state powers.

Twelve Amendments Proposed

Madison's proposals faced resistance. Some Federalists still argued that amendments were unnecessary. Others wanted to amend the Constitution in ways that would weaken the federal government. The debate lasted through the summer of 1789.

In the end, Congress approved 12 amendments and sent them to the states for ratification. The states ratified 10 of them. The first two proposed amendments — one on congressional apportionment and one preventing congressional pay raises from taking effect until after an election — were not ratified at the time. The second of those became the 27th Amendment in 1992, 202 years later.

On December 15, 1791, Virginia became the 11th state to ratify the Bill of Rights, reaching the three-fourths threshold needed for adoption. The first ten amendments were now part of the Constitution.

From Omission to Ratification