The Bill of Rights was configured by James Madison and George Mason, sent to Congress for approval, and then sent back out to the States for ratification. However, that list of twelve proposals were formed out of a list of more than a hundred proposals sent to the framers by the States after they held a number of conventions to propose their amendments they wanted in the Bill of Rights.
As an interesting side note, James Madison was against a Bill of Rights, arguing that it was unnecessary since those rights the federal government was being warned against compromising by the Bill of Rights were never granted as federal authorities in the first place in the first seven articles, therefore, the federal government already had no authority to infringe on those rights in the first place. However, his companion in the task, George Mason, though present throughout the Constitutional Convention, he refused to sign the Constitution fearing that it created too large of a government. Mason was among the primary proponents for a Bill of Rights, and unlike Madison, believed a bill of rights to be necessary.
The resolution regarding the submission of the twelve proposed amendments makes mention of the States' desire to have a Bill of Rights, but does not articulate that they submitted the proposals that was dwindled down to the twelve that were submitted for ratification. When you peruse the list, you will notice the second article is the one that wound up becoming the 27th Amendment. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/resolu02.asp ...
One has to look deeper to discover the States originally proposed the amendments through convention, a fact that nationalists of the time, and statists of today, wish to keep unknown. They fear an Article V. Convention if it is used by the people and the States, although they have proven they can hijack the Article V. Convention to get what they want for themselves. The 17th Amendment, a progressive amendment that eliminated the States' voice from Congress, was ushered in by the threat of an Article V. Convention, a tool the legislatures used to convince the people that a majority of the population desired to change the Senate from appointments by the legislatures, to a democratic vote by the people - a ruse used by the progressives to further weaken the voice of the individual States in the federal government.
Repeal of the 17th Amendment, by the way, is at the top of my Constitutional wish list.
In Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton recognizes the desire of the Anti-Federalists to have added to the Constitution a Bill of Rights. If you will remember, Hamilton was a nationalist, and perhaps even a monarchist, who was left alone in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when the rest of his delegation, all of whom were Anti-Federalists, walked out, never to return. Because he was alone, though he had a voice of debate during the convention, Hamilton had no vote in the proceedings.
During the Virginia Ratifying Convention, the delegation used the occasion to also propose amendments to the Constitution. The date was June 27, 1788. The action by Virginia stirred the other States into considering using convention between the States to form the proposals.
Though still not being performed in a unified convention, each State began to individually propose amendments through their own local conventions. North Carolina did so on August 1, 1788 through their ratifying convention, a convention that lasted a long time, making North Carolina one of the last States to join the union.
Beginning June 8, 1789, discussions regarding the new amendments to the Constitution began in the House of Representatives. Mr. Jackson of Georgia voiced his concerns of amending the Constitution so soon after ratification, but Madison assured him that though he did not see the need for a Bill of Rights, the people of the States had placed in motion the process of proposing amendments. "If we continue to postpone from time to time, and refuse to let the subject come into view, it may occasion suspicions, which, though not well founded, may tend to inflame or prejudice the public mind against our decisions. They may think we are not sincere in our desire to incorporate such amendments in the Constitution as will secure those rights, which they consider as not sufficiently guarded. The applications for amendments come from a very respectable number of our constituents, and it is certainly proper for Congress to consider the subject, in order to quiet that anxiety which prevails in the public mind."
Granted, the Article V. Process using convention to propose amendments by the States was not used in a manner we would picture it to be, perhaps you could say it was an unconventional method when taking the language of Article V into consideration, but the States did indeed propose them, and a great number of those proposals were repeated from State to State. Each State's vote for each amendment was limited to a single vote per State, as we see in the ratification process, and the numerous proposals that were not necessarily shared by a considerable number of States were the inspiration for what became the 9th Amendment, which essentially says that if a right is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the federal government has no authority to compromise that right, as well. Attempting to organize and ratify over a hundred proposed amendments, obviously, would not be a reasonable endeavor, and that is why the massive number of proposals from the States were organized and put into twelve amendment proposals by Mr. Madison and Mr. Mason.
As Madison gave his testimony on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Jackson continued to be concerned about the proposal of amendments as such an early juncture. Like Madison, his concern over an insertion of a declaration of rights into the Constitution seemed unnecessary, while also questioning Congress' involvement with proposals that originated from the States. Jackson also questioned the need for a Bill of Rights to protect the people from a group of lawmakers who themselves after two years of service will return to their homes and live under any tyranny that they may vote into place. So why, he argued, would members of Congress do such a thing?
Jackson went on to explain that proposing amendments was not right because ratification had not yet been achieved in Rhode Island and North Carolina, meaning that they were not yet a part of the union. In Rhode Island, Jackson explained, an anti-federal interest remained, and they too should have consent over amendments, as well.
Mr. Gerry responded to Mr. Jackson by saying that the amendments needed to be added to the Constitution because the failure of a Bill of Rights being a part of the Constitution was exactly the reason why North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet joined the union. They were waiting for the addition of a Bill of Rights. Mr. Gerry also argued that the proposals would show the people that they had an energetic government, showing "due deliberation" and "efficiency in the execution."
Roger Sherman admitted that the Constitution was not perfect, and additions to it would never make it perfect, but "I do not expect any perfection on this side the grave in the works of man." He then explained that of the eleven States that were a part of the union at that point, only a few had proposed amendments, and most of the States ratified it without proposing amendments. His concern was that the States that had not proposed amendments would not ratify amendments proposed by a minority of States, and that the majority had ratified the Constitution without proposing amendments because they were satisfied with the document as it was written.
On August 18, 1788, the situation had changed, and the number of proposals for amendments by the States had increased dramatically. Mr. Gerry opened his remarks referring to those proposals, moving, "That such of the amendments to the Constitution proposed by the several States, as are not in substance comprised in the report of the select committee appointed to consider amendments, be referred to a Committee of the whole House; and that all amendments which shall be agreed to by the committee last mentioned be included in one report."
Mr. Tucker followed, saying, "That many citizens expected the amendments proposed by the conventions would be attended to by the House, and that several members conceived it to be their duty to bring them forward . . . the States who had proposed these amendments would feel some degree of chagrin at having misplaced their confidence in the General Government."
The ratification conventions had been where the States primarily voiced their desire for a Bill of Rights, and it was through those conventions, and other conventions afterward, that proposals by the States were debated and then proposed. In 1789, after James Madison and George Mason had gone through the proposals and reduced them to 12, the amendments were sent back out to the States for ratification, where all but the first two received enough ratification votes to become official amendments to the Constitution. As stated earlier, one of those amendments was then ratified later in 1992, to become the 27th Amendment.
The language of the amendments also changed many times during the debates in both the House of Representatives, and State conventions. One example of the changing language of the amendments of the Bill of Rights was regarding religious freedom in the first part of what would become the First Amendment. Early language began, "no religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed." If you refer to the First Amendment, as it is today, it reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, ed., The Founders' Constitution, Volume Five, Amendments I-XII, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund (1987)
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