<P> There are several original engrossed copies of the Bill of Rights still in existence . One of these is on permanent public display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. </P> <P> Prior to the ratification and implementation of the United States Constitution, the thirteen sovereign states followed the Articles of Confederation, created by the Second Continental Congress and ratified in 1781 . However, the national government that operated under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to adequately regulate the various conflicts that arose between the states . The Philadelphia Convention set out to correct weaknesses of the Articles that had been apparent even before the American Revolutionary War had been successfully concluded . </P> <P> The convention took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania . Although the Convention was purportedly intended only to revise the Articles, the intention of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York, was to create a new government rather than fix the existing one . The convention convened in the Pennsylvania State House, and George Washington of Virginia was unanimously elected as president of the convention . The 55 delegates who drafted the Constitution are among the men known as the Founding Fathers of the new nation . Thomas Jefferson, who was Minister to France during the convention, characterized the delegates as an assembly of "demi - gods ." Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the convention . </P> <P> On September 12, George Mason of Virginia suggested the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution modeled on previous state declarations, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts made it a formal motion . However, the motion was defeated by a unanimous vote of the state delegations after only a brief discussion . Madison, then an opponent of a Bill of Rights, later explained the vote by calling the state bills of rights "parchment barriers" that offered only an illusion of protection against tyranny . Another delegate, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, later argued that the act of enumerating the rights of the people would have been dangerous, because it would imply that rights not explicitly mentioned did not exist; Hamilton echoed this point in Federalist No. 84 . Because Mason and Gerry had emerged as opponents of the proposed new Constitution, their motion--introduced five days before the end of the convention--may also have been seen by other delegates as a delaying tactic . The quick rejection of this motion, however, later endangered the entire ratification process . Author David O. Stewart characterizes the omission of a Bill of Rights in the original Constitution as "a political blunder of the first magnitude" while historian Jack N. Rakove calls it "the one serious miscalculation the framers made as they looked ahead to the struggle over ratification". </P>

Who were the main proponents of amending the constitution to include a bill of rights