September 25, 1789

United States Bill of Rights

Congress approves twelve proposed constitutional amendments

The parchment displayed as the Bill of Rights carries twelve proposals, not ten — and one of the two not ratified in 1791 waited until 1992 to become an amendment.

25 September 1789: the Senate agrees

On 25 September 1789, the Senate agreed to the conference version of a joint resolution containing twelve proposed amendments; the House had approved the same text the day before. With two-thirds of both houses concurring, Congress formally proposed all twelve articles to the state legislatures under Article V.

The House had begun with seventeen amendments, which the Senate reduced and consolidated to twelve. The enrolled resolution was attested by Speaker Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, Vice President John Adams, House Clerk John Beckley and Senate Secretary Samuel A. Otis.

Proposed, not adopted

Nothing became law that day. Ratification required three-fourths of the state legislatures, and the articles had not yet been transmitted to the states; President Washington forwarded parchment copies to state executives on 2 October 1789.

Ten of the twelve were ratified, on 15 December 1791.

Why the numbers don't line up

The twelve proposed articles do not map onto today's amendments: proposed Articles Three through Twelve became Amendments One through Ten. What is now the First Amendment was the third item on the list.

The two that failed had long afterlives. The original second article became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992, and the first — an attempt to regulate the population-to-representative ratio — remains unratified.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 3 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →