The Story of How The Bill of Rights Came to Be: The Story of America [Ep. 13]

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Visit eBay.com for terms. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app to Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next, another installment of our series about us.

The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of the fantastic book, Land of Hope, Dr. Bill McClay. Opponents of the Constitution called Anti-Federalists had serious concerns and despite their loss in stopping the Constitution, those concerns had to be heard. Let's get into the story.

Here's Bill McClay. Now the Anti-Federalists, they were defeated in the big game of stopping the Constitution, but they were not entirely defeated. They raised really important issues.

You read them now and they're very, they read Brutus now, read them, and many of them are well worth reading now in the same way the Federalist Papers are because they foresaw problems that we have had to face. Some of the problems of centralized government are problems we now face and they were concerned about the protection of rights, of fundamental rights as Englishmen since nothing is said about them other than a brief allusion here or there. There's no spelling out of rights. There's no undergirding of rights.

There's no guaranteeing of rights. So one of the compromises that was struck in the ratification was that there would be 10 amendments to the Constitution. Eventually they were, they whittled it down to 10, which we call the Bill of Rights and quite rightly see as part of the original Constitution, even though they are amendments.

And the reason it was done that way was simply that it was going to be too difficult to reassemble a Constitutional Convention, redraft the document, would open all these cans of worms that had been sealed off by the debate. So rather than do that, an agreement was struck and the agreement was held to that the new government once established would in the first order of business adopt these 10 amendments as part of the Constitution. Many of them are really expressions of rights that were considered rights of Englishmen. Trial by jury, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the quartering of troops, these are all things that recall the American Revolution. They recall the list of complaints, the grievances in the Declaration of Independence.

They're directly related to that. They are negative liberties, which means they're protections against the government doing things. For example, freedom of religion is not declared in a positive way, it's declared in a negative way. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Two parts to that event. And what it really says is Congress won't establish a national treaty and what it really says is Congress won't establish a national church. There will be no church of the United States as there was a church of England and nothing, no law that will prohibit the free exercise of religious faiths that Americans chose in their liberty. So that's how the principle of religious liberty is. It doesn't define what a religion is, what the liberty of religion is.

It takes off from the existence of a diversity of religious faiths and offers a protection to them against incursions against their rights of free expression or imposition upon them of a national church that would subsume all the other churches under it or would become the favored church of the nation and the others would be disfavored. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Bill of Rights are important too, even though I think they're unfortunately much neglected in current political practice. And these were designed to make the point that if something, a right was not in the Constitution, that was not to be taken as an indication that that right ceased to exist. One of the things that the Bill of Rights set off alarm bells for some people in the sense that what if you had a right that you didn't think to include in the Bill of Rights? Does that mean because it's not enumerated that it's no longer a right? The right of marriage, right of having children, you know, any number of other rights that one would assume were unaffected by the adoption of the Constitution. So the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are efforts to underscore the idea that the rights of the national government are enumerated. They're the things that are enumerated, not our rights, not our liberties. The rights and powers of the national government are limited. And if the Constitution doesn't spell them out, it should not be taken as an indication that those rights are not still operative.

So there you have it. There you have the not entirely clean, unmessy process by which our Constitution became law. What were the odds it was going to last? Even George Washington didn't expect it to last more than half a century or so, if that. Thomas Jefferson, who didn't really care for the Constitution and didn't have much of a role in drafting it, said, perhaps in jest, perhaps not, that there ought to be a revolution, periodic revolutions, to cleanse things and open the possibility for a new way of organizing ourselves.

He didn't have a veneration for the Constitution particularly. So what were the odds it was going to last 50 years? What was the odds that it was going to last 240 some odd years?

The odds of the American nation would be lasting for 250 years. There was a lot of skepticism about that. And yet, it has lasted. It has lasted all that time. It has endured.

Even coming out of a process that seems very makeshift, a lot of compromises I've been describing. And yet there's a larger set of principles that the Constitution, I think, does not fail to uphold and endorse. And this notion that conflict, the legitimate forms of conflict, are not going to last for a long time. This notion that conflict, the legitimate forms of conflict that arise out of the exercise of liberty by a free people, that this conflict can be managed in a way that promotes the public good and ensures the legitimate legitimacy of the things that government does. That was something the Constitution protected. But we didn't know what it was going to look like.

In specifics, until it took effect. When we return more of Professor Bill Maclay, the story of us, the Story of America series, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day, we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life, doing extraordinary things. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.

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Shop Pandora Jewelry today and make this holiday season sparkle. And we return to Our American Stories and Our Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor Bill McClay, author of Land of Hope and the Terrific Young Readers Edition. When we last left off, Bill McClay was telling us about how the Bill of Rights were the first 10 amendments to our Constitution and well he talked about how they came to be. The Constitution though had not yet been tested off the paper, at least not yet.

Let's return to the story here again is professor Bill McClay. We didn't know what it was going to look like until real human beings, flesh and blood human beings started to inhabit those offices that were just being described on paper. A comparison I like to use is a comparison between sheet music and real music. Now you can have a beautiful symphony, sonata, whatever written out in musical notation with attention to every detail and it's not going to amount to anything until someone sits down at the piano or picks up the violin or the sits down at the harp organ whatever and plays it performs the music puts it into practice and that's the case with the Constitution. Nobody really could know what the Constitution would look like and what some of these provisions of the Constitution would actually amount to in practice once you actually have the the thing going and running. How easy would it be to protect the rights the Constitution protects? How easy would it be to form a government that would be conscious of its own limitations?

How easy would it be to manage the conflicts within that government? What was it all going to look like when the music starts playing when somebody sits down and starts to play the notes? The moment when that really begins is April 6, 1789. George Washington, surprise, what a surprise that George Washington would be the first president, not a surprise at all.

George Washington took the oath of office at the Federal Hall in New York City. He gave the first inaugural address and a mighty and beautiful and meaningful address it was and is. Let me repeat some of it for you. I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my country can inspire since there's no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven, which he capitalized, so he's making a reference to the supreme bear here, we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained. And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered perhaps as deeply as finally state on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. Wow, that is what an amazing sentence.

It's a rather long sentence. Let me review the points he makes, though, that there is in nature itself in the economy and course of nature a link between virtue and happiness. A nation that ignores virtue will sacrifice any prospect, any hope of being a happy nation. Virtue is the basis of happiness. This is an adage that again goes back to Aristotle to one of the most consistent themes of the greatest philosophers, that virtue, right conduct, conduct in accord with natural law, the dictates of God.

This is the key to personal and collective happiness. So doing the right thing is the right road, the royal road to having the greatest felicity. The genuine maxims, he says, of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. So you have a magnanimous policy, magnanimous means great souls, and the rewards of public prosperity.

They have a great soul and wealth. These are things that go together. And then he says this at the very end of this long sentence, and this harkens back to Federalist One, harkens back to John Winthrop. The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered perhaps as deeply as finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. So America is an experiment.

It begins, Washington begins the life of the nation under the Constitution, presenting it to us as an experiment. Yeah, experiments can succeed and experiments can fail. And an experiment in this case doesn't mean just trying any old thing. It's to see if the Constitution, a document formulated on the basis of reflection and choice, can be a success. Can that experiment succeed?

Or will it fail? And by having failed, will unfortunately seem to show to the world that it can't be done. All this is being staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people and the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of republican model of government. There it is, liberty and self-rule. To have liberty and to have the ability to rule ourselves.

That idea is the heart of the Constitution and it is this experiment that we're entrusted with. Washington was not as eloquent as Jefferson or many others in American history, but boy did he say the thing that needed to be said when it needed to be said. He was a leader who lived his life with an acute awareness of how important every gesture, every move he made would be to the establishment of the precedence of the habits and customs, the vision of this new nation, of what the music would sound like once it was put into motion, once the keyboard was being struck, once the strings were being plucked, once the violin was being bowed, once the conductor had picked up the baton. He understood everything he did would be consequential.

It made him a rather uncomfortable man and aren't we grateful for that. He couldn't just do as he pleased. He had to think how will this look, what precedent will this set. History is watching this bold new experiment and talking about the indispensable man, George Washington, who was admired all over the world for his willingness to give up the prospect of being a king and also give up the prospect of a happy private life after having led the country through war and through the travails of the formulation of a workable constitution. But he had to see it through. The nation needed him to see it through. So he was, as his biographer called him, the indispensable man. But still unknown was what kind of a president under this new experimental constitution would George Washington make. He'd been a great success as a military man in a variety of contexts.

He was the man that the nation looked to for prudential wisdom repeatedly in following its path forward. He had presided over a constitutional convention that could easily have ended up disrupting into chaos and of total failure. But now he had a new challenge. Now he had to assume in a role he'd never assumed before because nobody in the world had ever assumed it. President of the United States, everybody that came after him, he knew would have to look back to his example. So it was a fraught moment. And yet Washington, as always, proved to be equal to the challenge.

We'll see how. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery. The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor Bill McClay here on Our American Story. Tis the season of making the perfect wishlist and the perfect playlist with Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra Earbuds and headphones. Breakthrough immersive audio uses specialized sound to bring your fave holiday classics to life. And world-class noise cancellation ensures a not so typical silent night and an epic holiday party of warmth. It's everything music should make you feel, taken to new holiday highs.

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