Also bear in mind that the Bill of Rights was actually pushed by the states themselves, as further restriction on the government - something they would never have wished if it had been intended to affect their own powers negatively.
With due embarrassment for failing to recall the matter before this point, four of the Amendments proposed by Madison were vetoed by the states before the remaining twelve even went before Congress for a vote - chief among them one that would have applied the First Amendment's protections against state action.
There were two main issues that caused people to argue against the Bill of Rights. First, it made the constitution sans these amendments appear to give the govt. too much power. Those who know better, can see that it did. Second, the enumeration of some rights might be misconstrued to only include those rights thus other rights would be fair game. The Bill of Rights clearly enumerates rights. The reason states wanted a Bill of Rights is that some states were mostly episcopalian and others were of other Christian denominations. Without the 1st amendment, some states could gang up on the others and force a national religion. While I talk about the 1st here, similar issues are true for the remaining ones as well.
But that was still in relation to action by the federal government. It had no bearing on intrastate practices.
Ah, but the nature of ratification of the constitution was a series of compromises. A not so well popularized one is the compromise over slavery - no new slaves imported after ~20 years and the 3/5ths that gave slaves representation and gave incentive to slave states to free the slaves to get the whole 5/5ths. Similarly, it is well known that Virginia had a clear separation of church and state in its constitution. Many other states indeed did have official state religions. These provisions were phased out within 30 years in all those states.
True on both counts. Another interesting thing to note is the fact that Madison, called the Father of the Constitution, found many of his theories set aside in favor of others. (See, generally, Richard B. Morris, <u>Witnesses at the Creation: Hamilton, Madison, Jay and the Constitution</u>) In fact, much of the language of the text itself is markedly similar to the prose of Gouverneur Morris. Of course, Viriginia's religion clause had much to do with two of it's native sons, one of whom was Madison.
Madison is called the father of the constitution because he had the only blueprint for a government when the constitutional convention met. Virginia would naturally carry the most sway because it was the most populous and its territory covered most of the south and went all the way to the west coast
Madison wasn't the only one with a blueprint. There were a number of plans at the time; his was characterized as being the most open to compromise - for which reason it was (somewhat) adopted. The term itself is something of a misnomer, actually.
From what I've read, there were no other blueprints for a government until after the Virginia Plan was offered. The New Jersey Plan was to bring back the Articles of Confederation, which they had voted to do away with already. And that, at best, was just a way of the smaller states negotiating for power in the new govt.
It's true that the initial plan, also known as the Randolph Plan, was the only one created prior to the Convention. However, it was met by the New Jersey Plan a mere few weeks later. (May 25-June 15) While generally identical in effect to the Articles of Confederation, it differed markedly in that it granted Congress the right to tax and to regulate interstate commerce, as well as binding the states (including state courts) to the laws and treaties of Congress.
I think there was a lot of talk of instituting a monarchy and perhaps other forms of govt., but there was no actual blueprint per se. Again, from my reading, the constitutional convention was basically a mess. They dissolved the articles of confederation and then were basically stuck without anything to implement in its place. Madison was really young (about 25 years old), so people didn't really pay attention to him. But then they realized he had the only plan, and they worked on it from there. One should realize, as well, that they wanted to pass the constitution and bill of rights at the same time, but one of those compromises along the way was to enact the constitution and then use the amendment process to act on the bill of rights. The articles of confederation were the antithesis of federal government. It's clear that the central govt., no matter how weak, needs certain powers - like to collect taxes and raise an army. Madison's plan was absolutely a federal arrangement with much more than the few necessary improvements on the articles to make the system work. The effect was to create an actual United States instead of a loose arrangement between nation states. Getting back to states' rights... Congress enacted the first official version of the U.S.C. in 1878, and it took a huge amount of work to gather all the legislation together in one place. As the sum of all statutory law in the USA, it clearly is the federal govt. enacting legislation that the states must abide by, and has been so since Congress first convened
