Three documents on how the Bill of Rights became what it is. The Senate Journal recording the vote. The National Archives markup document showing the specific revisions. The Library of Congress statement that no journal of Senate debate was kept.
James Madison introduced his proposed constitutional amendments in the House of Representatives on June 8, 1789. He had worked from more than two hundred proposals submitted by the state ratifying conventions, demands for a Bill of Rights had been a condition of ratification in several states. Madison distilled them into nineteen proposed amendments. The House debated, revised, and passed seventeen amendments on August 24, 1789, and sent them to the Senate.
The House debate on the amendments is partially documented in the Annals of Congress, compiled decades later from newspaper accounts. It is a Tier 2 source: paraphrased reconstruction, not a verbatim transcript. What the House passed is a Tier 1 fact, documented in the House Journal. The text of the seventeen amendments sent to the Senate is in the record.
The Senate received the House-passed amendments on August 24, 1789 and began deliberating on September 2. The Senate met in closed session. No journal of the Senate debate on the amendments was kept. The Library of Congress states this directly: the Senate deliberated on the Bill of Rights in secret, and no record of those deliberations survives.
What survives is the physical document: the Senate markup of the House-passed amendments. It is at the National Archives, NARA ID 3535588. It shows the Senate's specific revisions to the House text in the form of strikethroughs and additions on the printed copy of the House-passed resolution. The Senate voted on September 9, 1789, and sent twelve amendments to a conference committee with the House. The vote is a Tier 1 fact from the Senate Journal. What was said in the chamber is unknown.
The Senate markup document at the National Archives shows the specific changes the Senate made to the House text. The most consequential revision was the deletion of Madison's proposed amendment applying the Bill of Rights to state governments. Madison had included language stating that no state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, freedom of the press, or trial by jury. The Senate struck it. As a result, the Bill of Rights as ratified applied only to the federal government. States could abridge speech, press, and religion until the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states in the twentieth century.
The Senate also combined articles that the House had passed separately, consolidated the religion and speech and press clauses into what became the First Amendment, and made numerous other revisions to the text. The seventeen amendments from the House became twelve amendments from the conference committee. The states ratified ten. Those ten are the Bill of Rights.
The Senate met in secret. No journal of debate was kept.
The conference committee produced twelve proposed amendments. Congress submitted them to the states on September 25, 1789. The states ratified ten of the twelve. The two that failed ratification: a formula governing the apportionment of House seats, and an amendment prohibiting Congress from voting itself a pay raise during a current session.
The pay raise amendment was ratified by Michigan in 1992, 203 years after it was proposed, and became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. The apportionment amendment was never ratified and remains technically pending before the states. The ten amendments ratified by December 15, 1791 are the Bill of Rights.