ABSTRACT
A few important rights were secured in the main body of the Constitution they drafted. But in the first 15 weeks of the 16-week convention, the idea of a general guarantee of rights was not raised, even though eight of the 13 states had such bills in their constitutions. The most human reason that can be suggested is exhaustion. Madison later said haste and fatigue were among the reasons the convention rejected Mason’s suggestion. A higher-minded reason, and one that the framers used later during the ratification debates, was that a bill of rights was unnecessary and might do more harm than good. South Carolina delegate C. C. Pinckney gave the most audacious and least appealing justification. He said a bill of rights in the Constitution would have made a hypocrite of slaveowners like himself since bills of rights “generally begin with declaring that all men are by nature born free.
