Congress sent twelve amendments to the states
On this day · 25 September 1789
On September 25, 1789, Congress proposed twelve amendments to the new Constitution; ten of them became the Bill of Rights.
On September 25, 1789, the First Congress passed a joint resolution proposing twelve amendments to the freshly ratified Constitution and forwarded them to the states for ratification. The push owed much to Representative James Madison, who had once doubted a bill of rights was necessary but came to see it as the price of winning over skeptical Anti-Federalists.
The number is the part everyone forgets: not ten, but twelve. The original first article, governing the size of the House, never cleared enough states. The original second, barring Congress from giving itself an immediate pay raise, sat unratified for 202 years before finally becoming the 27th Amendment in 1992.
The document on permanent display in the National Archives Rotunda proposes twelve — not ten — amendments.
The remaining ten were ratified by three-quarters of the states on December 15, 1791, securing freedoms of speech, religion, and the press, and the rights of the accused. We now call them, collectively, the Bill of Rights.
Sources & references
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