1791: The bill of rights: the constitution might never have been ratified without a promise to add safeguards of fundamental, rights.

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: TIMES PAST

The Constitution, John Adams once said, was the result of "the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen." Indeed, it created a wonderfully calibrated structure for the new American nation, balancing the relationship between the three branches of government, as well as the relationship between the federal government and the states.

But at the time, a lot of people thought the Constitution was woefully incomplete.

It lacked, detractors claimed during the ratification debates in 1787 and 1788, protections for fundamental rights like free speech, religious liberty, jury trials, and due process. It lacked, in other words, what we now know of as the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

That shortcoming was so grave, critics known as anti-Federalists said, that the states should refuse to vote for ratification of the Constitution. Had ratification failed, it would have left the 13 states bound together only by the weak national government created by the Articles of Confederation, possibly jeopardizing the very existence of the country.

In response, James Madison and other supporters of the Constitution--the Federalists--promised that they would propose a set of constitutional amendments in the first session of Congress to address these concerns.

With Madison's promise in mind, key states like Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, and New York voted for the Constitution, which took effect in March 1789.

Later that year, Madison was elected to the first House of Representatives, and he promptly introduced a series of amendments based on declarations of rights in state constitutions and in other foundational legal documents from around the world.

Recalling the recently concluded Revolutionary War, Madison said the amendments were meant "to extinguish from the bosom of every member of the community any apprehension that there are those among his countrymen who wish to deprive them of the liberty for which they valiantly fought and honorably bled."

Though he kept his word to the anti-Federalists, Madison actually thought that the amendments were "unnecessary and dangerous." They were unnecessary, he said, because the Constitution had not granted the government the powers that the Bill of Rights would guard against. And they were dangerous because any rights not on the list might be thought to be unprotected.

Despite those misgivings, Congress agreed, by the required two-thirds majorities of the...