The Capitol Dome

Summer 2016

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31 THE CAPITOL DOME Notes 1. The legislative history of the Amendments that became the Bill of Rights, the House debate on them, and contemporary correspondence and newspaper articles related to their adoption by Congress, are conveniently compiled in Helen E. Veit, Ken- neth R. Bowling, and Charlene Bangs Bickford, eds., Creating the Bill of Rights (Baltimore and London, 1991) from Char- lene Banks Bickford, Kenneth R. Bowling, Helen E. Veit, and William C. diGiacomantonio, The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 1789-1791 (20 vols. to date; Baltimore, 1968-present), vols. 4, 11, and 15-17. The most comprehensive scholarly article on their adoption by Congress is Kenneth R. Bowling, "'A Tub to the Whale': The Founding Fathers and the Adoption of the Federal Bill of Rights," Journal of the Early Republic 8(Fall 1988):223-51. I am bemused that, like most Americans of his generation, the author assumed that by 1792 the first Ten Amendments were "widely referred to as the Bill of Rights" soon after their ratification by the states (p. 250), and I am grateful to the late historian Pauline Maier for calling this error to my attention and thereby launching the research that led to this article. 2. At least one scholar did call it the Bill of Rights before 1900 (Albert O. Wright, An Exposition of the Constitution of the United States (Madison, Wis., p. 263 in both the 1884 and 1898 editions). Wright states that the First Congress prepared a list of Amendments "to form a bill of rights" but this is an assumption on his part and is not what the First Congress thought it was do- ing. For an account of the non-controversial ratification process, see Kenneth R. Bowling, "Overshadowed by States' Rights: Ratification of the Federal Bill of Rights" in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, The Bill of Rights: Government Proscribed (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), pp. 77-102. 3. David Howard, Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic (Boston and New York, 2010), Ch. 4. In the 1970s and 1980s the document hung on an Indianapolis continuing care retirement community wall (p. 189). 4. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 15 March 1789, Charles F. Hobson, Robert A. Rutland, William M. E. Rachal and Jeanne K. Sisson, eds., The Papers of James Madison 12(Charlottesville, Va., 1979):13. 5. The debate over this issue arose almost immediately after the war ended and continued beyond the so-called 1901 insular cases; see among numerous examples 13 Dec. 1898, 25 Jan. 1900, 9 Aug. 1900, 16 Dec. 1900, 16 June 1901, 21 Feb., 4 June, federal government's copy of the Bill of Rights was. When the train arrived back in Washington in 1949, the now iconic federal Bill of Rights returned to the National Archives where it had resided since 1938, when the State Department transferred a large body of official records. It has been on display alongside the Constitution and Declaration of Independence since 15 December 1952. 24 KENNETH BOWLING, a sometimes board member of the Society, received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1968. He is the author of "'Tub to the Whale': The Founding Fathers and the Adoption of the Federal Bill of Rights," Journal of the Early Republic 8(Fall 1988), and "Overshadowed by States' Rights: Rat- ification of the Federal Bill of Rights," Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., The Bill of Rights: Government Proscribed (Charlottesville, VA and London, 1997). Along with his colleagues at the First Federal Congress Project, he edited Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, 1991). The author would like to acknowledge several indi- viduals who assisted his research for this article: Stan V. Klos, Helen E. Veit, Peter Samson, Gaspare J. Saladino, John P. Kaminski, Ed Papenfuse, Mary Jo Blinker, William C. diGiacomantonio, Alice Kamps, and Jessie Kratz at the National Archives and, in particular, Elizabeth E. Fuller and Kathy Haas at the Rosenbach Foundation.

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