The Bill of Rights
411
[Amendment X.]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to
the people.
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Some of the State constitutions drawn up during the Revolution included bills of rights. The most famous and influential of these was Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason in 1776. (Mason
also had a large hand in writing the Virginian Constitution at about the
same time. Strictly speaking, the Declaration of Rights was not part of that
constitution.) It is upon Mason’s Declaration of Rights that much of the
Bill of Rights of the Constitution is founded. The principal author of the
Bill of Rights, however, was James Madison.
All early Americans with any serious interest in politics knew something about the English Bill (or Declaration) of Rights of 1688. But, as in
many other matters, American leaders tended to be influenced more by
recent or colonial American precedents and example than by those from
British history. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both earnestly supported the idea of a national bill of rights, and so did many other leading men.
We shall now examine those ten amendments, one by one, with a view
to grasping their original purpose or meaning. For people of our time,
the phrases of those amendments, like the phrases of the original Seven
Articles of the Constitution, sometimes require interpretation. What did
those words mean, as people used them near the end of the eighteenth
century? One way to find out is to consult the first great dictionary of the
English language, Samuel Johnson’s, published at London in 1775; or,
later, Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
It is important to understand precisely, so far as possible, the meanings
intended by the men (chiefly James Madison and George Mason) whose
phrases are found in the Bill of Rights, because many important cases of
constitutional law that affect millions of Americans are today decided
on the presumed significance of certain phrases in the Bill of Rights. As
the English jurist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote in Victorian times,