Madison rises in the House with a list of amendments; rivals are still calling for a second convention
Four months into the first Congress, opponents of the new Constitution were still demanding a second constitutional convention — a gathering that Madison feared would unravel the compromises of 1787. On June 8, 1789, Representative James Madison rose in the House of Representatives and introduced a series of proposed constitutional amendments, having studied more than two hundred proposals submitted by state ratifying conventions. After months of revision by House and Senate, ten of those amendments were ratified on December 15, 1791, and became the Bill of Rights.
Madison had originally opposed a bill of rights, calling state declarations "parchment barriers." His reversal was tactical as much as philosophical: by shepherding the amendments through Congress himself, he preempted a second constitutional convention that could have reopened — and potentially destroyed — the entire constitutional settlement of 1787. The ten amendments he steered to ratification have since defined the boundaries of American civil liberty for every generation that followed.
QWhy did Madison initially argue that writing a bill of rights would actually be dangerous to American liberty?
Madison believed that listing specific rights would imply that any right not on the list simply did not exist. Since he held that natural rights are too numerous and varied to enumerate completely, a partial list would, in his view, do more harm than protection. He resolved his own objection by drafting what became the Ninth Amendment, which explicitly states that the enumeration of certain rights cannot be construed to deny others retained by the people — a clause he devised specifically to neutralize the trap he had identified years earlier.
QWhat was Patrick Henry's role in making Madison write the Bill of Rights?
Henry controlled the Virginia legislature in 1788 and used that power to gerrymander Madison out of a Senate seat and then draw Madison's House district to run roughly three-to-one Anti-Federalist, recruiting James Monroe as the opposing candidate. Facing that hostile electorate, Madison issued a public letter pledging to introduce constitutional amendments if elected. He won with 57 percent of the vote. Without Henry's political maneuvering, Madison might never have made the campaign pledge that committed him to drafting the Bill of Rights at all.
QHow did one undergraduate student's term paper eventually lead to the ratification of a 1789 Madison amendment in 1992?
Gregory Watson, a University of Texas at Austin undergraduate student, recognized that Madison's unratified proposal limiting mid-term congressional pay raises — Article Two of the original twelve amendments sent to the states in 1789 — had never actually expired, because Congress had attached no ratification deadline. Watson launched a letter-writing campaign to state legislatures to push for its ratification. Watson launched a letter-writing campaign to state legislatures anyway. By May 1992, enough states had ratified to push the amendment over the threshold, and it was certified as the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution.
