The Bill of Rights Didn't Protect You From Your Own State for 135 Years — and the Constitution Never Says So Out Loud

United States — Citizen Rights Profile

📅 Bill of Rights Ratified	December 15, 1791
🏛️ Total Amendments in Bill of Rights	10 (of 12 originally proposed)
🌍 Capital	Washington, D.C.
⚖️ Originally Applied To	Only the federal government — not states
🛡️ Fix Arrived	1868 — Fourteenth Amendment, applied gradually case-by-case
🚨 Still Not Fully Incorporated	A handful of Bill of Rights provisions still don't bind every state

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For 135 years, the Bill of Rights did not protect Americans from their own state governments — and the document never once says so. The First Amendment opens with "Congress shall make no law," and for over a century, the Supreme Court read that sentence exactly as literally as it sounds: a limit on Congress, full stop. A state legislature could restrict your speech, your religion, your right to a jury — and the Bill of Rights had nothing to say about it.

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Ten Amendments, Born From a Last-Minute Political Trade

The Bill of Rights wasn't part of the original 1787 Constitution at all — it was a concession, added after the fact to settle an argument the Founders hadn't resolved. The Bill of Rights emerged as a compromise between Federalists, who supported a strong federal government, and Anti-Federalists, who feared a concentration of power and wanted explicit protections written in. Congress proposed twelve amendments on September 25, 1789; only ten were ratified by the states on December 15, 1791, becoming the Bill of Rights we know today.

The other two had stranger fates. One of the original twelve, concerning congressional pay raises, wasn't ratified until 1992 — 203 years later — when it became the 27th Amendment. The very first proposed article never passed at all. The "Bill of Rights" most Americans picture as a single, simultaneous founding act was, in reality, assembled piecemeal, with one piece still in legislative limbo for two centuries.

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A Document Built on Tension Between Two Camps That Never Fully Agreed

The fight over whether a bill of rights was even necessary reveals something about how differently the founding generation thought about government power. Federalists believed a strong central government was essential and initially saw an explicit bill of rights as unnecessary — even redundant, since the federal government had no power to violate rights it was never granted in the first place. Anti-Federalists weren't convinced, and they had leverage: several states had only ratified the Constitution on the understanding that a bill of rights would follow.

The Bill of Rights itself was significantly influenced by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written in 1776 by George Mason — meaning the document Americans now treat as a singular national achievement was, like so much of the Constitution, a synthesis of state-level ideas that already existed, stitched into federal law under political pressure rather than philosophical consensus.

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"Congress Shall Make No Law" Was Taken Completely Literally — Against the States

Here's the detail most civics classes skip entirely: for well over a century, the Bill of Rights did not protect Americans from their own state or local governments at all. When the Bill of Rights was ratified, courts held that its protections extended only to the actions of the federal government, not to the authority of states and their local governments. This doctrine was formally established in the 1833 Supreme Court case Barron v. Baltimore, which held the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government.

That meant a state legislature in 1840 could, in theory, restrict speech, ban a religion, or deny a jury trial, and the First, Sixth, or any other amendment offered no federal recourse whatsoever. For much of American history, the Bill of Rights simply didn't play the central role in everyday legal life that it plays today — it was a leash on Washington, not on Albany or Sacramento.

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One Clause in 1868 Quietly Rewrote What the Bill of Rights Actually Covered

The fix didn't come from a new bill of rights — it came from a single clause buried in an amendment written for an entirely different purpose. Following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the Supreme Court eventually held that its Due Process Clause prohibits states from depriving citizens of certain privileges and protections contained in the Bill of Rights.

But "eventually" is the key word. In the Slaughter-House Cases of 1873, the Supreme Court read the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause extremely narrowly, closing off what might have been the most direct route to applying the Bill of Rights to the states. The amendment that was supposed to settle the question instead opened a century-long argument about exactly how much of the Bill of Rights it actually carried with it.

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The Rights Came Back One at a Time, Decade After Decade — Not All at Once

What followed wasn't a single ruling that fixed everything. It was a slow, case-by-case accumulation that took most of the twentieth century to complete. The Supreme Court built incorporation through a series of Fourteenth Amendment rulings that gradually struck down state laws restricting speech, press, and assembly — later expanding to include the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause in 1940 and its Establishment Clause shortly after. Modern doctrine calls this selective incorporation — the Court deciding, right by right, whether a given provision of the Bill of Rights binds state governments too.

Two Supreme Court justices, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, argued the Court was overcomplicating things and pushed for total incorporation of the first eight amendments all at once — Black wanted every enumerated right applied to the states immediately, without the case-by-case approach the rest of the Court preferred. He lost that argument. The piecemeal approach won, and it is still, technically, how the doctrine works today.

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Even Now, the List Isn't Completely Finished

It's tempting to assume this story wrapped up decades ago, with every right eventually applied to every state. In strict legal terms, a Bill of Rights provision is only formally incorporated once a specific Supreme Court decision says so — and a handful of provisions have simply never received that ruling, leaving their status against the states technically unresolved more than 150 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.

It's a strange feature for a document most Americans assume operates as a single, unified shield. In practice, the Bill of Rights has always been less like ten rights granted on one day, and more like ten separate legal arguments, each settled — or not yet settled — on its own timeline.

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Constitution at a Glance

Detail	Information
Amendments Originally Proposed by Congress	12 (September 25, 1789)
Amendments Ratified as the Bill of Rights	10 (December 15, 1791)
Unratified Until 1992 (Became 27th Amendment)	1 of the original 12
Barron v. Baltimore (Bill of Rights Binds Only Federal Govt.)	1833
Fourteenth Amendment Ratified	1868
Slaughter-House Cases (Narrow Reading of 14th Amdt.)	1873
First Amendment Speech/Press/Assembly Incorporated	1920s (via Gitlow and related rulings)
Free Exercise Clause Incorporated	1940 (Cantwell v. Connecticut)
Establishment Clause Incorporated	Shortly after (Everson v. Board of Education)
Incorporation Doctrine Today	Selective — decided right-by-right, case-by-case

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📥 Read the U.S. Bill of Rights

Read the complete, official text of the Bill of Rights at the National Archives:

👉 Read the Bill of Rights — Full Text (National Archives)

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Ten rights, ratified on a single day in 1791 — and then, for 135 years, meaningless against your own state government. A 1973 ruling that narrowed the very clause meant to fix that. A list of incorporated rights still, technically, not complete. What part of America's citizen rights surprised you most? Tell us in the comments below.

This article reflects an editorial reading of publicly available constitutional text and reporting, intended for general understanding rather than legal interpretation. Readers are encouraged to consult the original constitutional text linked above to form their own view.