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Drawing of Federal Hall, New York, where the first United States Congress met in 1789
United States Bill of Rights 1789
The Bill of Rights was written in the summer of 1789 by the newly elected Congress, two years after the Constitution itself had been written. By the summer of 1789, all states had ratified the Constitution, aside from Rhode Island and North Carolina, though several state ratifying conventions had included in their forms of ratification a list of concerns and proposed amendments. It was the hope of several members of Congress that writing a Bill of Rights would induce these final two states to ratify the Constitution and inspire among the states that had already ratified a greater sense of confidence in the 1787 document.
On 28 September 1789, following the report of the Committee for Enrolled Bills, the amendments agreed by both houses of Congress were referred to the individual state legislatures. Of the twelve amendments referred, ten were ratified by the states and comprise the text known today as the Bill of Rights.
The Quill model of the Bill of Rights is the result of eighteen months of work by the Pembroke College based members of the project. It brings together the most complete set of primary-source material published in any format that covers the work of the 1789 Congress in writing the Bill of Rights for the United States, and uncovers proposed wording for the various provisions not typically mentioned in prior publications that have attempted to trace the work of Congress on the Bill of Rights. This project was published in spring 2019, and has already been cited in articles written by legal historians (Stephanie H. Barclay, Brady Earley, and Annika Boone, ‘Original Meaning and the Establishment Clause: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis’ in Arizona Law Review, 61:3 (Fall 2019)). We understand we are cited in several similar papers yet to appear.
It is hard to imagine many modern political controversies that do not turn in some respect upon elements of the Bill of Rights, and this collection lays out in the most precise detail possible exactly how that language was created.
“If all power is subject to abuse, [...] then it is possible the abuse of the powers of the General Government may be guarded against in a more secure manner than is now done.”