December 15, 1791

United States Bill of Rights

Virginia's ratification puts the U.S. Bill of Rights into force

The First Amendment began life as Article Three: two other proposals stood ahead of it on the parchment sent to the states, and one of them waited more than two centuries.

15 December 1791: Virginia supplies the last vote

On 15 December 1791 the Virginia General Assembly completed its approval of proposed Articles Three through Twelve. That action supplied the three-fourths of state legislatures the Constitution requires, making those articles valid as Amendments One through Ten.

No presidential signature was involved. Article V assigns proposal to Congress and ratification to the states; Washington had distributed the twelve proposed articles in 1789, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was responsible for receiving ratifications and later issuing official notice of adoption.

Twelve proposed, ten ratified

Congress had sent twelve articles to the states, so the numbers everyone recognizes are a renumbering: what became the First Amendment was originally Article Three.

The two proposals left behind that day were not rejected — they remained pending. The Library of Congress counts Virginia as the eleventh state to approve the ten amendments; tallies differ between sources because some legislatures accepted only subsets of the twelve and because Vermont entered the Union while ratification was underway.

The article that waited two centuries

The first of the two orphans concerned apportionment of the House of Representatives and remains unratified. The second concerned congressional pay — and it stayed alive until 7 May 1992, when it was ratified as the Twenty-seventh Amendment.

The amendments as ratified constrained the federal government. Their application to state and local governments came later and selectively, through Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence developed provision by provision.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 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 →

What the sources leave uncertain

The 15 December date and legal threshold are firmly documented. Formal federal notice to the states followed later, but the amendments became valid when the necessary state ratification was completed.
Historical sources sometimes count state approvals differently because some legislatures accepted only subsets of the twelve proposals and because Vermont entered the Union while ratification was underway. This does not alter the established 15 December effective date for Amendments One through Ten.