SPJ Addendum:
Bill of Rights
James Madison, the fourth President of the United States and whom many have referred to as the father of the Constitution, was a member of the House of Representatives in 1789 during the First Congress of the United States when he wrote the Articles, the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, or what's simply come to be called the Bill of Rights.
During debate at the Constitutional Convention itself in the spring and summer of 1787, Madison and other delegates did not favor positively listing every natural right citizens had that the new government was prohibited from infringing upon, simply because that list would be infinitely long and, thus, impossible to actually list at all. Rather, in their revolutionary mindset of greatly limited, omnipotent government, those delegates successfully debated that the Constitution should only list all authority the new federal government was empowered with, and whatever authority it wasn't specifically empowered with, was not its to exercise in any way; therefore, all other authority/power naturally resided with the States and the People.
But other delegates, in their own revolutionary mindsets of understanding all governments naturally exist to just as naturally overstep their bounds, were adamant that specific prohibitions against certain unconstitutional government intrusions upon citizens' natural rights must be overtly listed in the Constitution. So adamant were they that many refused to sign the Constitution itself, greatly endangering passage of what was then thought by almost all delegates to obviously be the most fatefully pressing need of the new nation at the time. A Convention compromise was finally reached: let's get our Constitution passed, then get the Congress of the Confederation to instruct the States to call for ratifying conventions,then let's work to get the States to ratify it, and, once the Constitution is ratified as the Law of the Land which we so greatly need at this moment, then we promise we'll start working on amendments to it to satisfy your sincere concerns...
Madison initially just went through the Constitution itself during that First Congress, amending it by simply changing its wording. But several other Representatives strenuously objected, rightly maintaining that Congress had no authority to alter the wording of the Constitution in any way; so Articles to be amended to the Constitution were then brought forth. Originally, the House passed 17 Articles, but those were whittled down in the Senate to 12, all of which had to be approved by the House again, and then had to be ratified by the States before becoming Amendments - following precisely, once more, the Law of the Land's own Article VII.
If you noticed the SPJ notes attached to the text of the original Bill of Rights, you find that Article the first is still pending ratification 226 years later, while Article the second was finally ratified, becoming the 27th Amendment, in 1992, 203 years after it was first offered.
The Constitution became the Law of the Land when New Hampshire became the constitutionally-required ninth State to ratify it on June 21, 1788. The first 10 Amendments to the Constitution were passed on to the States by the First Congress of the United States of America on September 25, 1789, and they were constitutionally enacted into the Law of the Land when Virginia ratified them on December 15, 1791.
Thus it came to be that America's Bill of Rights is a promise kept.