The First Ten (Eleven) Amendments

When the First Congress convened, one of its first promised orders of business was to consider a series of amendments to the Constitution. These amendments were intended to become part of a bill of rights. (Recall that to secure the support of the Anti-federalists in the fight for ratification, the Federalists had promised to add a bill of rights to the Constitution after it was in effect.)

However, once the First Continental Congress was in session, most of its members were more interested in getting down to the business of government than they were in considering amendments to the Constitution. Indeed, if not for James Madison’s persistence, repeatedly rising on the House floor to urge the House to consider the promised Constitutional amendments, it is unlikely that the First Continental Congress would have considered them at all.

The reluctance of the Congress to consider amendments to the Constitution was probably, at least in part, due to the fact that dozens of amendments had been proposed in the various stateratifying conventions. If they were to consider any amendments, members of Congress were likely afraid that nothing else would be accomplished until all of the proposed amendments were considered and voted upon. Madison, however, studied all of the proposed amendments, discarded ones he found distasteful, consolidated similar amendments, and pared the list down to just ten. By a two-thirds majority in each house, the Congress formally proposed Madison’s ten amendments along with two others. They were then sent to the states for ratification, and ten of the proposed amendments were ratified, thereby becoming part of the Constitution. The first ten amendments are often referred to as the Bill of Rights.

While Congress has established a seven-year time limit on the ratification of amendments (beginning with the Eighteenth Amendment), there was no time limit set on the ratification of amendments proposed before the Eighteenth Amendment. One of the original twelve proposed amendments was not ratified until 1992, 203 years after it was proposed by the First Constitutional Congress. Upon ratification, it became the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution.