When the Constitutional Convention participants finished their work, it went to the state assemblies for ratification. According to Article VII of the Constitution, nine of the thirteen states needed to approve it in order for the document to replace the Articles of Confederation and become law.
Not all states were in favor of the Constitution. There were two sides in the debate over the ratification of the Constitution. The people who supported the Constitution were called Federalists. Their opponents were called Anti-Federalists. Learn more about each group by clicking on the side of the Constitution below.
The Anti-Federalists' most vigorous objection to the Constitution was a lack of a bill of rights. Interactive popup. Assistance may be required. But rulers have the same propensities as other men; they are as likely to use the power with which they are vested for private purposes, and to the injury and oppression of those over whom they are placed, as individuals in a state of nature are to injure and oppress one another. It is therefore as proper that bounds should be set to their authority, as that government should have at first been instituted to restrain private injuries. This principle, which seems so evidently founded in the reason and nature of things, is confirmed by universal experience. Those who have governed, have been found in all ages ever active to enlarge their powers and abridge the public liberty. This has induced the people in all countries, where any sense of freedom remained, to fix barriers against the encroachments of their rulers.
. . . in all the constitutions of our own states; there is not one of them but what is either founded on a declaration or bill of rights, or has certain express reservation of rights interwoven in the body of them. From this it appears, that at a time when the pulse of liberty beat high and when an appeal was made to the people to form constitutions for the government of themselves, it was their universal sense, that such declarations should make a part of their frames of government. It is therefore the more astonishing, that this grand security, to the rights of the people, is not to be found in this constitution.
Brutus, Anti-Federalist #84
to read an excerpt from an essay by “Brutus,” an Anti-Federalist who used the man who assassinated Julius Caesar as a fictitious name. After reading it, answer the following questions using your notes.
..These points had their effect. When Massachusetts voted to ratify the Constitution, it did so on the condition that a bill of rights would be added. The next five states to ratify the Constitution also made the same request. The great Anti-Federalist George Mason went so far as to propose a bill of rights of 20 amendments, which became the basis for the final 10 that made the Constitution.
The Federalists thought that a bill of rights was unnecessary. They believed they constructed a government with enough checks and balances that it would not infringe upon the rights of the people. In the end, it was an easy call to add the Bill of Rights as a compromise.
The fact that the Federalists added the Bill of Rights does not mean they did not make numerous valid points about the virtues of the Constitution. In the next section, you will read about them.