 The Federalists, Anti-Federalists are very important to understand. The Federalists are the Nationalists who in the 1780s criticized the structure of government under the Artist Confederation and argued that there had to be a stronger central government. The people who become the Anti-Federalists are the state's rights advocates who are generally happy with the state sovereignty of the Artist Confederation. The Federalists were opposed to the Bill of Rights for several different reasons. Led by Alexander Hamilton, who was an author of the Federalist Papers, and by James Wilson, who was a leading Federalist in Philadelphia, they argued that the Constitution was a document of enumerated specific powers. To enumerate means to write out, to elaborate. Therefore, since in Article I, Section 8, there was no enumerated power in Congress to regulate the press or restrict religion or do anything, there was no danger. Isn't it dangerous to sit down, specify all those rights that are identified with the liberties of the people, and then sign the document? What about those that were forgotten? The Federalists argued that the Bill of Rights was unnecessary because individual liberty was protected by your state declaration of rights. And so as a Marylander, I could rely on a very broad definition of individual rights in the Maryland Constitution of 1776, and that was the appropriate place. There was no danger from the national government. The state declaration of rights obviously are different. So Delaware is different from Maryland. New York doesn't have one. Rhode Island would be different. And so the idea is that the citizens in each of these states have the right to create whatever government they want. And so there is no need for a national Bill of Rights when the Artisan Federation is formed because it is nothing more than the creation of the states, the sovereign states. One of the frustrations in studying the Bill of Rights is that you would expect to go to the annals of Congress and find a full discussion of people defending the freedom of religion or attacking the fact that it's too expansive, a guarantee of individual liberties and things like that. That's not the case. There seemed to have been a consensus at the first Congress as to what a Bill of Rights should be, similar to the Declaration of Rights on the States. So Madison is elected to the Congress and becomes an outspoken advocate of the adoption of Bill of Rights by Congress. What he did was to take all of the proposed amendments, something like 200 proposed amendments, and he separated them out. So what he cleverly did was to take all of those that went to the structure of the government and ignored them. And he went to the others that guaranteed individual liberty and he incorporated them into his proposals. Madison doggedly insists that this thing be done and ultimately prevails. I think Congress sent something like 17 amendments to the Senate in the final report and then the Senate, which met in secret sessions, so we had no idea what they said. They stripped off, for instance, those amendments proposed by Madison to limit the states to protect such things as trial by jury, freedom of press and freedom of conscience. There were 12 amendments that were proposed by Congress and only 10 of which were immediately ratified in 1791.