An Intro to the First Amendment

By Sarah Lunsford

The Bill of Rights: A Compromise

Once the revolutionary war was over and American independence had been won, our founding fathers set about to construct a stronger form of government and replace the existing governing document, the Articles of Confederation with our current document, the Constitution of the United States. Without the promise of a bill of rights, however, the Constitution may have never passed.

Some, known as Anti-Federalists, opposed the passage of the Constitution because it didn’t list any specific liberties guaranteed to the American people. Others, known as the Federalists, thought this was unnecessary. The Constitution specifically outlined the jurisdiction of the federal government. Therefore, they thought defining what the government didn’t have the power to do was unnecessary. Besides, it would be impossible to list every right a citizen has and so the Federalists were concerned that by only listing some, it might imply that those were the only rights a person has. However, the founders were wary of the tendency of governments to abuse their powers and infringe upon the people’s rights, and so they finally decided to draft the Bill of Rights to safeguard against this. (They included the 9th Amendment to clarify that the people’s freedoms were not limited to only those listed in the Bill of Rights.)

The First Amendment

The First Amendment lists five fundamental freedoms that serve as the foundation for the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (Emphasis added)

The Importance of These 5 Freedoms

In looking at the Bill of Rights, and specifically the 1st Amendment, I think it’s important to fully understand and appreciate the gravity of what our founders were doing when they stood for these freedoms, and why that matters to us today, over 200 years later. It’s perhaps hard, in our time, to imagine life without these five foundational freedoms. We are, for the most part, very used to them. We forget that the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and the redress of grievances are, relative to the rest of the world and the rest of history, very rare. The founders, on the other hand, realized the value and rarity of these freedoms and risked their lives so that they and their posterity might live in a country defined by them. They realized freedom takes work to retain. It’s important for us to recognize this too, and in the course of our day-to-day lives—at work, at school, when interacting with friends—to take a stand to defend our freedom just as our forefathers did before us.

Sources:

Pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/about-the-first-amendment

http://cojmc.unl.edu/firstamendment/funfacts.php

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/ninth_amendment

Photos:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/christy/

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