Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify the first ten amendments, satisfying the three-fourths threshold and putting the Bill of Rights into force. Drafted largely by James Madison to answer Anti-Federalist fears of federal overreach, the amendments protected speech, press, religion, assembly, and the rights of the accused. The document has since anchored nearly every major American civil liberties battle.
James Madison had once argued a bill of rights was unnecessary, since the Constitution granted the federal government no power to violate individual liberties in the first place. Anti-Federalists disagreed loudly, and several states ratified the Constitution only on the promise that amendments would follow immediately. Madison, elected to the new House of Representatives partly to keep that promise, drafted the amendments himself, drawing heavily on George Mason's 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights.
Congress sent twelve proposed amendments to the states in 1789; the states ratified ten. One of the two rejected amendments, concerning congressional pay raises, was finally ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendment. When Virginia's legislature approved the ten amendments on December 15, 1791, it triggered no fanfare or parades; newspapers barely noted it. The phrase 'Bill of Rights' itself only became common usage decades later.
The amendments' vague, elastic language—'due process,' 'unreasonable searches,' 'cruel and unusual'—has allowed each generation to argue over their meaning, from Prohibition-era wiretaps to modern debates over digital privacy and gun ownership.
Key people: James Madison, George Mason