A short list of things the government is not allowed to do: silence your speech, dictate your worship, search your home without cause, or jail you without a fair trial. Drafted by Madison and ratified in 1791 as the price of the Constitution's acceptance, the first ten amendments wrote these limits into supreme law. At ratification they did not protect the enslaved, women, or Native peoples, and they bound only the federal government. The Fourteenth Amendment and twentieth-century court rulings slowly extended these guarantees against the states. The promise was written first; making it real took two centuries, and is not finished.
These are among the most quoted words in American law — yet for its first century the promise was mostly on paper. When the list became law in 1791 it reached only a fraction of the governments that actually ruled people’s lives, and it left the enslaved, women, and Native nations outside its protection entirely. Not until the Fourteenth Amendment and generations of court fights could it be enforced at all.