The Bill of Rights
"All power in human hands is liable to be abused." — James
Madison Although
James Madison is often referred to as the "Father of the Constitution"
for his
success in shepherding the document through its various stages to
ratification,
he was also wary of the powers this document granted to the newly
formed government.
Madison, along with Thomas Jefferson, wanted to protect fundamental
human liberties
that he believed could be abridged by the government. This month
EDSITEment focuses
on Madison's Bill of Rights, a series of amendments that secure human
liberties
and impose further checks and balances upon the power of the federal
government.
One such fundamental liberty of concern to
Madison and
others--freedom of speech--is the subject of an EDSITEment lesson, The
First Amendment: What's Fair in a Free Country?. Besides studying
the text
and learning about the historical context of the First Amendment, in
this lesson
students compare Supreme Court cases, available on the
EDSITEment-reviewed Oyez,
Oyez, Oyez: Supreme Court WWW Resource, in order to distinguish
between instances
of free speech that are and are not protected by the Constitution. You
and your
students can also learn about the First Amendment, and about the Bill
of Rights
in general, by reading a paper written by Ira Glasser, The Bill of Rights: A
Brief
History, available through a link from the EDSITEment-reviewed
site, CongressLink.
Another excellent online article, A More Perfect Union: The Creation of
the U.S.
Constitution, is available on the EDSITEment-reviewed website The
Digital Classroom
from the National Archives and Records Administration. James
Madison's inspiration to write a bill of rights was the
anti-Federalists, a group
of men who opposed the Constitution. He agreed with the famous patriot
Patrick
Henry and other anti-Federalists who argued that such a bill was
necessary to
protect citizens from the tyranny that the colonists experienced under
the rule
of King George III and to state the limitations of the government's
power; one
reason the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights was
that, during
the American Revolution, George III had prevented the publication of
newspapers
criticizing his rule. The American colonists'
response
to this and other oppressive aspects of British rule, as well as the
effect of
that response on the eventual shape of the Constitution, is the
subject of another
EDSITEment lesson plan, Balancing
Three Branches at Once: Our System of Checks and Balances. This
lesson helps
students understand the conflicting impulses that the framers of the
Constitution
sought to balance: on the one hand, they attempted to limit the
arbitrary exercise
of power that the colonists had experienced under British rule; and,
on the other,
they addressed a perception, which had become widespread by about
1787, that the
Articles of Confederation had produced a federal government too weak
to effectively
rule the new nation. To learn more about the ways in which the
Constitution sought
to counter the perceived inadequacies of the Articles of
Confederation, written
in 1781 in reaction to years of British rule, see the EDSITEment
lesson plan,
The
Preamble to
the Constitution: How Do You Make a More Perfect Union? Virginian
delegate James Madison believed that the Bill of Rights would ensure
the acceptance
of the Constitution by both the Federalists and anti-Federalists.
Moreover, he
believed the Bill would inspire citizens to unite against any future
attempts
of government to infringe upon natural rights. On October 31, 1788,
Madison wrote
that the Bill would be "a good ground for an appeal to the sense of
community"
and would "counteract the impulses of interest and passion." Today,
this bill
serves not only as a protector of American rights but also as a source
of controversy
as citizens continually attempt to stretch its limitations to include
a wider
range of freedoms.
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