The Quill Approach to the Bill of Rights

The Quill Bill of Rights project is a detailed model of the debates that took place in Congress over the wording of the particular provisions in the Bill of Rights. The project not only captures, using primary source texts, the ways in which the text evolved throughout the first congressional session, but also the various procedures that were created and/or followed throughout the process, enabling a reader to understand the context within which certain decisions were made.

Unlike negotiations modelled in other Quill projects, the Bill of Rights negotiation took place amidst discussions on other topics (such as duties and tonnage), meaning that the editors had to make choices about what to include in the model. We have included days on which the members of Congress took their seats to show the considerable amount of time it took for Congress to assemble, some discussions on how the business of Congress should be conducted, as well as the actual debates and proposals pertaining to amending the Constitution.

To create the model, we used various primary sources and first-hand accounts of the congressional session. To construct the House timeline, we consulted the House Journal, Annals of Congress, the Congressional Register, and several newspaper accounts of the proceedings. As the Senate met in secret, accounts of its proceedings were sparse. Its entries in the Senate Journal and the Annals of Congress provide an outline of its workings but offer little detail of the contents of debates or proposers of specific motions. Regrettably, notes on the committee meetings do not survive, or perhaps never existed in a formal manner, so committee timelines have been constructed so far as the record allows, using extant documents, the journals, and newspaper accounts.

Tip for Using Quill

• Amendments began in the House of Representatives, so begin there.

• Several sessions in both the House and the Senate show only the arrival of members to Congress and represent the considerable amount of time it took to achieve a quorum. A quorum is achieved on 1 April 1789 in the House and on 6 April 1789 in the Senate.

• In this model, Congress determines how it will convey messages and reports between Houses and Committees. Refer to the ‘Related events’ tab in the right-most column of the event information to show the descendants of a particular event. Refer to the ‘Document complexity tab’ to see the ancestors of that document.

• Whenever the ‘report/refer’ icon (dark purple, arrow icon) appears, a document has left one committee and entered another. The aforementioned ‘Related events’ tab allows users to locate the committee into which the document has been moved.

• As this negotiation is bicameral, the ‘Compare tool’, found on the ‘Reader’s Tools’ tab of the navigation bar is especially useful in comparing House and Senate sessions.