“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
He thus went about studying hundreds of proposed amendments by the various states and whittled it down to just 10 that he then proposed as the first amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the Bill of Rights. These advocated protecting things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to assemble peacefully, as well as that “No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.”
If this all sounds pretty familiar, in all of this, much like Madison had criticized John Adams’ thoughts on government as including “no original ideas,” neither did Madison’s, with the system he advocated for largely simply mirroring that which Adams’ had already developed in the Massachusetts constitution, and had expanded upon including in his A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, that had been daily reading for the delegates and often loosely quoted in their arguments as they formed the U.S Constitution.
In Madison’s case, this seeming mirroring of ideas is perhaps no coincidence as he, too, had spent considerable time studying the history and philosophy of government the same as Adams’ had, including seemingly reading all the same works, as well as Adams’ thoughts on the matter, seeing how the different systems in the 13 states had worked up to that point, and, in all, seemingly having come to largely the same conclusions as his equally brilliant colleague in Adams.
And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that when John Adams read the U.S. Constitution, he would heartily give his consent, noting in his opinion it was the “greatest single effort of human deliberation that the world has ever seen.”
