CHAPTER IV. VIRGINIA'S BILL OF RIGHTS AND
THOSE OF THE OTHER NORTH AMERICAN
STATES.
THE Congress of the colonies, which were already resolved upon separation from the
mother country, while sitting in Philadelphia issued on May 15, 1776, an appeal to its
constituents to give themselves constitutions. Of the thirteen states that originally made
up the Union, eleven had responded to this appeal before the outbreak of the French
Revolution. Two retained the colonial charters that had been granted them by the English
crown, and invested these documents with the character of constitutions, namely,
Connecticut the charter of 1662, and Rhode Island that of 1663, so that these charters are
the oldest written constitutions in the modern sense.1
Of the other states Virginia was the first to enact a constitution in the convention which
met at Williamsburg from May 6 to June 29, 1776. It was prefaced with a formal "bill of
rights",2 which had been adopted by the convention on the twelfth of June. The author of
this document was George Mason, although Madison exercised a decided influence upon
the form that was finally adopted.3 This declaration of Virginia's served as a pattern for
all the others, even for that of the Congress of the United States, which was issued three
weeks later, and, as is well known, was drawn up by Jefferson, a citizen of Virginia. In
the other declarations there were many stipulations formulated somewhat differently, and
also many new particulars were added.4
Express declarations of rights had been formulated after Virginia's before 1789 in the
constitutions of
• Pennsylvania of September 28, 1776,
• Maryland of November 11, 1776,
• North Carolina of December 18, 1776,
• Vermont of July 8, 1777,5
• Massachusetts of March 2, 1780,
• New Hampshire of October 31, 1783, (in force June 2, 1784.)
In the oldest constitutions of New Jersey, South Carolina, New York and Georgia special
bills of rights are wanting, although they contain many provisions which belong in that
category.6 The French translation of the American Constitutions of 1778 includes a
déclaration expositive des droits by Delaware that is lacking in Poore's collection.7
(The translator has reprinted this declaration in an article in the American Historical
Review, of July, 1898, entitled "The Delaware Bill of Rights of 1776".)
In the following section the separate articles of the French Declaration are placed in
comparison with the corresponding articles from the American declarations. Among the
latter, however, I have sought out only those that most nearly approach the form of
expression in the French text. But it must be once more strongly emphasized that the
fundamental ideas of the American declarations generally duplicate each other, so that
the same stipulation reappears in different form in the greater number of the bills of
rights.
We shall leave out the introduction with which the Constituent Assembly prefaced its
declaration, and begin at once with the enumeration of the rights themselves. But even
the introduction, in which the National Assembly "en présence et sous les auspices de
l'Être suprême" solemnly proclaims the recognition and declaration of the rights of man
and of citizens, and also sets forth the significance of the same, is inspired by the
declaration of Congress and by those of many of the individual states with which the
Americans sought to justify their separation from the mother country.
reference:
Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of Citizens: A Contribution to Modern Constitutional
History (1895)