December 15 is the anniversary of our Bill of Rights. On that date in 1791, Virginia’s ratification of Articles I through X of our Constitution incorporated them permanently into our nation’s basic law. Americans, of course, did not invent individual liberty or write the first document to guarantee it. The basis of human freedom can be found much earlier in such disparate sources as the Bible; the political culture of the classical world; the natural-law and natural-rights doctrines as formulated by ancient, medieval, and early modern writers; the rhetoric and the rationale of such movements as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment; social-contract philosophy; and, especially, England’s common law, its Whig libertarian tradition, and its great freedom documents – Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689).

Despite these impressive antecedents – all of which influenced the development of personal freedom in America, the actual experiences of Americans, as colonists, rebels, and constitution-writers, were at least as important in the formulation, assertion, expansion, and institutionalization of our individual liberties as any remote or foreign source. The American colonial and Revolutionary struggle for freedom and self-determination was the major influence in the shaping of our Bill of Rights.

That struggle took many forms: The colonists against the British government; dissenting individuals or sects against established churches; slaves against their masters and against the codes that bound them; apprentices against Guild masters; the poor and middle class against the wealthy; the underrepresented back country against the dominant coastal areas; second-class citizens against freemen; popularly elected legislators against autocratic royal or proprietary governors; or simply those out of power against those who held it.

The contest for liberty also advanced on many fronts. Americans inserted rights into their colonial charters; they extracted them from proprietors; they enacted them in their legislatures; they expanded or defended them in their courts; and they asserted freedom in the press. During the Revolutionary era, political pamphleteers demanded rights; delegates in Congress petitioned the Crown for them and then asserted them in declaring their independence; and legislatures and constitutional conventions enshrined liberties in the basic laws of those eleven states that scrapped their royal charters to frame written constitutions.

Liberty and self-government grew more quickly in some colonies than in others. In a few, like Rhode Island, it grew because their charters almost thrust autonomy upon the colonists. In some colonies – Rhode Island, New Jersey, and especially Pennsylvania – benevolent founders or proprietors like William Penn provided their settlers with substantial rights; but in less fortunate colonies, incompetent, arrogant governors engendered fear and animosity and inadvertently stimulated the development of self-government and an increasing demand for the protection of rights.

The ruling elite ensconced in some colonial assemblies and councils refused to share power equitably with the new and growing backcountry, thereby creating intra-colonial divisions that occasionally erupted into armed rebellion. No matter what form the oppression took, once resistance developed to counter it, the rhetoric of rights often took on a life and reality of its own.

The story of how liberty developed in the English-speaking colonies of North America is complicated by the fact that there were really thirteen different stories (fourteen when Vermont is included after entering the United States in 1791). Therefore, we should examine the evolution of American liberty in each colony and state. This approach reveals not only that the formulation of rights was more indigenous than imitative, but also that the development of freedom in the various states was different and uneven.

Self-government grew sporadically throughout colonial America. There was no central coordination – no general theme carried out in one colony and then transmitted to another and

another. The situation was more individualized and amorphous than that. Rights prominent in one colony, for example, could be ignored in another, while certain colonies and states nurtured particular rights.

New Yorkers championed freedom of expression; Rhode Islanders passionately defended religious liberty and church-state separation; Delaware showed an unusual preoccupation with the right to keep and bear arms; Massachusetts stoutly objected to unreasonable searches and seizures; Vermont led the way in abolishing slavery; Rhode Island and North Carolina exalted states’ rights as an antidote to centralized power; and Pennsylvania and Virginia pioneered in asserting a broad range of individual freedoms.

Colonial Americans had a seemingly irresistible urge to codify their rights and privileges. Only occasionally did their English forefathers attempt such an audacious act; only when pushed to the extreme by the perceived despotism of the monarch did the English commit their rights to paper. For the most part, the rights of Englishmen remained enshrined in the common law, where they were known and available to trained lawyers who regularly drew upon them.

Perhaps because of the lack of a written authoritative commentary on the common law and the lack of trained attorneys, Americans wanted their rights codified. Even before some immigrants left England, but usually within a

decade after settlement, colonists drafted fundamental documents outlining the rights of individuals.

These compilations were not meant to enlarge or supplant the common law; they were meant, rather, to be expressions of the ancient rights embodied in it. By compiling these rights, the colonists made them more accessible, and thus the people might be better able to restrain the arbitrary acts of governors, courts, and legislatures.

In 1776, Virginia’s George Mason codified many of these liberties in a Declaration of Rights. Other states followed Virginia’s example. In 1788, during the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, many state ratifying conventions, especially in Rhode Island, responded to Antifederalist demands by proposing amendments to the Constitution protecting liberties from the power of the new federal government.

James Madison and the first federal Congress reformulated these proposals in 1789 in drafting a federal bill of rights for state approval. That necessary process was completed on Dec. 15, 1791, when Virginia became the eleventh state to ratify, thus providing the necessary assent of two-thirds of the states required by the Constitution to amend it.

Patrick T. Conley was chairman of the United States Constitution Council, 1988-1991 and is Historian Laureate of Rhode Island.