The Bill of Rights, I would say, amplified the original text of the Constitution, rather than changed the terms of the document. In fact, in convention, when George mason suggested a "Bill of Rights," every state voted against him.
The Federalists had argued that "too precise an enumeration of the people's rights was dangerous, 'because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the Government without usurpation.'" (I'm sure you see here the inspiration for the 9th Amendment.)
Gordon Wood wrote, "In a crucial sense the Antifederalists had lost the struggle over the Constitution when the New Jersey Plan, embodying the essential character of the Articles of Confederation, was rejected in the Philadelphia Convention in favor of a national republic stemming mostly from and acting on individuals. Faced with this national republic instead of a league of independent states, the Antifederalists were compelled to argue its merits on Federalists terms.... the question could no longer really be the one the Antiffederalists would have lied: should America have a national republic or a confederated system? but necessarily had to be the one the Philadelphia Convention had dictated: what should be the structure and powers of this proposed national government?"
It remained, then, for the Antifederalists to do their best to limit the powers of the "general" government. To this end, they agitated for a Bill of Rights. Once the Constitution was ratified, Madison was more than happy to change course in the 1st Congress and present a Bill of Rights on his own terms, rather than those of the Antifederalists. It was a political calculus and it worked. Madison was careful to propose nothing that substantially altered the intent of original text.
"The virtue that classical republicanism encouraged was public virtue. Private virtues such as prudence, frugality, and industry were important but, said Hume, they only made men 'servicable to themselves, and enable them to promote their own interests'; they were not 'such as make them perform their part in society.' Public virtue was the sacrifice of private desires and interests for the public interest. It was devotion to the commonweal. ...."Republicanism thus put an enormous burden on individuals. They were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness--the term the eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue: it better conveyed the increasing threats from interests that virtue now faced....
"Precisely because republics required civic virtue and disinterestedness among their citizens, they were very fragile polities, extremely liable to corruption. Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or force, by patronage or honor. In republics, however, each man must somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries, for the sake of the public good." [Emphasis supplied.]
Notice how he regrets the lack of social or other controls over the citizen. Somehow I don't think Wood is a republican, or much of a democrat; what I smell here is a Hamiltonian pragmatist. Well, let's see what he has to say about Jefferson -- that should help:
"Even Jefferson, sanguine and optimistic as he had always been, was reduced to despair in his last years and to what seems to us today to be an embarrassing fire-eating defense of his South and states' rights. He hated the new democratic world he saw emerging in America--a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity that he thought he had laid to rest. ....More than any of the revolutionary leaders, he had relied on the future to take care of itself. Progress, he thought, was on the march, and science and enlightenment were everywhere pushing back the forces of ignorance, superstition and darkness. The people in a liberal democratic society would be capable of solving every problem, if not in his lifetime, then surely in the coming years."But Jefferson lived too long, and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Jefferson was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed by the new paper-money business culture sweeping through the country and never appreciated how much his democratic and egalitarian principles had contributed to its raise. Ordinary people, in whom Jefferson had placed so much confidence, more than his friend Madison, were not becoming more enlightened after all." [Emphasis supplied.]
Ah, now it becomes clear. Jefferson disappointed.....Jefferson disillusioned....Jefferson old, sad, and irrelevant......no, I don't need this fellow to jump up from his seat to shout out, "But Hamilton was right!!" to know where he's coming from now.
This man's as thoroughgoing an oligarch as any interviewed by Socrates. Which explains a lot about why you're quoting him to us.
While running down the republican Antifederalists, however, Wood fails to notice something on the other side of the scales which brings us very precisely to the point of the argument between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism. An exact contemporary of and participant in the great debate (as "A Columbian Patriot"), Mrs. Mercy Warren wrote to a friend, Mrs. Catherine Macauley in August, 1787, while the Convention was meeting, "every man of sense is convinced a strong efficient government is necessary," but while "old patriots wish to see a form established on the pure principles of republicanism," others favored aristocracy [oligarchy, as I was saying] or a monarchy and called for a standing army precisely to suppress the few patriots who still esteemed revolutionary liberty. Thus a member of the numerous, politically active, and pro-Federalist Warren family, talking about the kind of dry-eyed pragmatists who gathered around Hamilton and the Federalist cause in 1787.*
The Federalists had argued that "too precise an enumeration of the people's rights was dangerous, 'because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the Government without usurpation.'"
Yup. Channeling Hamilton.
*Quoted in The Antifederalists, Jackson Turner Main, 1961.
That's because a tiny minority of the convention delegates were Antifederalists.
The need for amendment became obvious later, even to some of the Federalists (Nationalists)......which means that it was the Federalists who blinked and split, not the Antifederalists, on the issue of a Bill of Rights.
That isn't how it happened. The consensus for amendment grew up before ratification, and it amendment became, not a sop as you mischaracterize it, but the sine qua non, the essential concession needed for ratification. The Federalists could not have pulled the votes they needed in the ratification conventions, without promises to amend.
If the Antifederalists failed to predict the future role of the Supreme Court, they did anticipate the concentration of power in the federal government, and they were alarmed. The rights and liberties of all Americans were in danger from encroachments from above....How could these rights be protected?....The vast majority of Antifederalists and some of the Federalists became convinced that a bill of rights was essential. Three "rights" were especially emphasized: freedom of religion, or conscience; the right to a trial by jury; and freedom of the press.
The right to a jury trial is not guaranteed by the Constitution -- and even today, the appellate and Supreme Court benches operate without juries, so there is no place for the People in the highest reaches of the federal judiciary, which is useful to remember whenever the Supreme Court produces one of its abominable decrees as in US vs. Miller, Roe, Bakke, and Lawrence. It required the Bill of Rights to guarantee jury trials in civil cases, e.g.,; and on the whole the Bill of Rights, as I've quoted Elaine Scarry arguing, introduced an important means of redistributing power from the Government, as imagined by the Hamiltonians, back to the People. The Second Amendment did the same thing with respect to possession of the power of lethal force.
Therefore the amendment process, sine qua non to ratification, substantively changed the nature of the Government and of the social compact offered by the Constitution.
Finally there was the promise of amendments without which the Constitution could never have been ratified....The Federalists did not have to worry about those who wholly rejected the Constitution; they needed only enough votes for ratification -- a dozen or so here, a handful there. They themselves did not admit the need for any alterations. Publicly they preached that the Constitution was perfect, and wherever they had control (as in South Carolina) they proposed no amendments. But when the technique of conceding amendments to the opposition first proved its value in Massachusetts, winning over some waverers and enabling others who had already been convinced to violate their instructions with a clear conscience, it became the most valuable weapon in the Federal arsenal.
-- Op. cit., p. 255.