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Historic Document
The BILL of RIGHTS
The Bill of Rights, so-called, encompasses the first ten amendments to the Constitution, adopted collectively in 1791. Their adoption followed serious concerns - and in some States the condition upon which the Constitution was ratified - that there was no clear statement of individual and collective rights which would be held as sacred by the new central government. This omission was at least partly intentional, as enumerated rights can be interpreted to be exclusive - that there are no others beyond those mentioned. This fear supported the significant resistance to a bill of rights, and led to the inclusion of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
James Madison, the prime mover behind getting the Bill finally assembled and passed, lost his favorite amendment in the final Congressional debate -- it would have bound the states to the same freedoms guaranteed by the Federal government in the First Amendment. That issue was effectively resolved by the Fourteenth Amendment 80 years later, though it would take the courts until well into the twentieth century to put the Fourteenth into action. Interestingly, when the Confederate States drafted their own Constitution in 1861, they did not create a matching Bill of Rights, despite their reverence for the United States Constitution. What they did instead was to incorporate the federal Ninth and Tenth Amendments directly into Article VI of their Constitution, guaranteeing -- albeit not to their unfortunate slaves -- personal rights in the broadest possible sense. The Bill is a symphony of simplicity, considering the massive significance of the freedoms it guaranteed at a time when such guarantees were almost unheard of, and in view of the ensuing two-hundred-year tug of war among disparate interpretations of what should simply say "leave us be!" [The brief Amendment titles are not official, but are either the common usage, where applicable, or the Editors'.] For the later Amendments, click the link.
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