Yet they weren't. To be clear, most of these rights were already protected under each state's constitution.
The fact remains, before the passage of the 14th amendment and subsequent incorporation decisions, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government.
We've all grown up in the post 'incorporation' world so I know that it seems like a very strange concept that state's could infringe on a person's freedom of speech or assembly but that's the way it was.
Nontheless, citizens/residents/humans have inalienable rights. Sure there may not be explicit legal protection of them ... but that doesn't mean the states may trample those rights. There were arguments against having a BoR on the grounds that inalienable rights didn't need such blatant protection, that they should & would be protected anyway.
Hence the reason the BoR was required: justified fears that if rights were not enumerated, they would be trampled on with "well, we're not forbidden from doing so!" Would that the Founding Fathers were wise enough to require comparable explicit protection at the state level.
Just because a right is not explicitly protected at state level doesn't mean the right may be trampled.