The 10th Amendment: The Foundation of the Constitution
AT A GLANCE
• The government’s role is to protect natural rights, not to rule over citizens. Ultimate earthly authority rests with the people.
• The Constitution was designed to limit federal power and safeguard individual liberty by granting only specific, delegated powers.
• Ratification of the Constitution depended on promises to add amendments to clarify the limits on the federal government.
• The 10th Amendment reinforces that all powers not given to the federal government remain with the states or the people.
In 1766, the British Parliament made a fatal mistake: Through the Declaratory Act, it claimed power to legislate for the American Colonies“in all cases whatsoever.” That assertion of unlimited, centralized power taught both the British Empire and America’s Founders timeless lessons that would shape the foundation of the U.S. Constitution.
This wasn’t abstract political theory. The Colonists understood the real fight wasn’t over stamps, standing armies, taxation, or tea. Those were, as John Hancock explained, mere symptoms of the deadly disease, examples of how the British “exercised this pretended right” of unlimited power.
James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” later said this clash over the limits of power was about “the fundamental principle on which our independence itself was declared.”
The Fundamental Principle of the Revolution
Madison exposed Britain’s fatal mistake with brutal clarity. “The assertion by G.B. of a power to make laws for the other members of the Empire in all cases whatsoever,” he wrote, “ended in the discovery, that she had a right to make laws for them, in no cases whatsoever.”
By grasping for everything, Britain lost it all. Why? It’s simple.
For more than a century, the American Colonial system worked: Colonial legislatures governed local affairs, while the British Parliament managed external issues such as foreign trade and war. Each stayed in its own lane — neither claimed the other’s turf. Madison explained, “The Legislative power was maintained to be as complete in each American Parliament, as in the British Parliament.”
But when the British Parliament invaded the Colonial sphere with internal taxes and regulations, it shattered this unwritten constitutional balance. The resistance wasn’t over money — it was about defending a structure in which each level of government must stay within its proper boundaries.
As noted above, Madison called this the very principle “on which our independence itself was declared.” But that principle didn’t die at Yorktown. Madison called it the “epoch of our revolution” and the very “basis of our republican constitutions.” The same idea that toppled an empire became the blueprint for a new union: divided powers, defined spheres, and constitutional limits.
Those principles that Britain refused to accept voluntarily, America built a Constitution on; what destroyed an empire gave birth to a republic.
From Revolution to Constitution
The revolutionaries didn’t just win a war. As St. George Tucker made clear, they turned the principle that toppled an empire into written law: “The American revolution seems to have given birth to this new political phenomenon: in every state a written constitution was framed, and adopted by the people.”
Written constitutions adopted by the people — not granted by kings or parliaments, but created by those who would live under them — was indeed a “new political phenomenon.”
Adopted in 1777, the Articles of Confederation made this principle explicit for the entire union: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”
Only expressly delegated powers, everything else reserved: This was the exact opposite of Parliament’s claim to rule in “all cases whatsoever.”
The proposed Constitution of 1787 followed this same principle. Madison laid it out in The Federalist, No. 45: Federal powers would be “few and defined” — war, peace, and foreign commerce. Powers reserved by the people of the several states remained “numerous and indefinite,” covering “all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people.”
But even with that explanation, Anti-Federalists saw a glaring loophole in the Constitution. By early 1788, this loophole nearly killed the whole thing.
The Massachusetts Moment
In January 1788, Massachusetts held the Constitution’s fate in its hands. Delegate counts showed defeat was almost certain. If Massachusetts rejected it, New York and Virginia would likely follow. Game over.
The chief concern of many Anti-Federalists? Unlike the Articles, the proposed Constitution didn’t explicitly say that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states and people.
John Hancock and Samuel Adams understood both the opposition’s fear and the Constitution’s merit. They helped engineer a compromise that ensured ratification — and shaped American federalism forever.
The deal was simple: Massachusetts would ratify the new Constitution, but with recommended amendments. First on the list? “That it be explicitly declared that all Powers not expressly delegated by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several States to be by them exercised.”
There it was: The principle that defined the Revolution, that Madison called fundamental to independence, that the Articles of Confederation had made explicit, was now demanded for the Constitution.
Hancock delivered the closing argument on February 5: The Constitution had defects, yes. But “the powers reserved by the people render them secure.” Ratify now, amend soon.
It worked. Massachusetts ratified by a razor-thin margin: 187 to 168.
The Massachusetts formula spread like wildfire. South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New York all ratified with similar recommended amendments, making the principle explicit in writing. There would be no more vague understandings for power-hungry politicians to ignore — as Parliament had ignored Colonial precedent.
By the time the First Congress convened under the new Constitution in 1789, the message was unmistakable: The states had ratified, but they expected their recommended amendments to be taken seriously — very seriously.
The Foundation of the Constitution
By August 1789, Samuel Adams was getting impatient. Two months after Madison introduced his proposal for the promised amendments, the Federalist-dominated Congress was still dragging its feet.
Writing to Elbridge Gerry on August 22, Adams cut to the heart of the matter: The people “wish to see a Line drawn as clearly as may be, between the federal Powers vested in Congress and the distinct Sovereignty of the several States upon which the private and personal Rights of the Citizens depend.”
Adams understood what was at stake. Without this explicit limit, the Constitution was in danger of sliding “imperceptibly, and gradually into a Consolidated Government” — exactly what they had fought a long, bloody war against the British to secede from.
Even more telling, 10 months before the Bill of Rights was ratified, Thomas Jefferson called the proposal that became the 10th Amendment “the foundation of the Constitution.”
Finally, on December 15, 1791, the 10th Amendment became law: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Those 28 words were the antidote to unlimited, centralized power “in all cases whatsoever.”
The new Constitution made this explicit, so that there would be no more assumptions about limits on power.
Jefferson and Adams understood what modern Americans have forgotten: The 10th Amendment isn’t just about state versus federal power; it’s the constitutional expression of the fundamental principle on which independence was declared.
Rights Before Government
Two days after his letter to Gerry, Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Henry Lee with an even deeper insight. The distinction between federal and state powers wasn’t just about preventing centralized power, it was “the Palladium of the private, and personal rights of the Citizens.”
A “palladium” is a shield, a form of protection. But protection from what?
The answer takes us back to first principles. As James Otis, Jr. declared in 1764,“The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.”
Samuel Adams expanded on this in “The Rights of the Colonists”: “Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to Life; Secondly, to Liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.” While “The Rights of the Colonists” might be one of the least-known documents from the Revolutionary era, its impact was profound.
Life, liberty, property, and the right to support and defend them: These rights don’t come from government. They exist because we exist — derived from what Adams called “the first law of nature.”
Thomas Jefferson embedded this principle in the Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Governments exist not to grant rights, but to protect those rights that the people already possess.
Sovereignty of the People
But if government’s real job is protecting rights that already exist, who is actually in charge?
For most of history, the answer was simple: kings, parliaments, and ruling elites held sovereignty, i.e., final authority. Everyone else obeyed.
The American Revolution shattered this ancient formula. And when it came time to create a new government, the Founders made sure the principle was crystal clear.
As James Wilson explained at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention, “The supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power remains in the people.”
He went further, laying out the true hierarchy of power in America: “As our constitutions are superior to our legislatures; so the people are superior to our constitutions.”
John Jay explained what the Constitution is — a list of tasks the people decided to delegate: “The Constitution only serves to point out that part of the people’s business, which they think proper by it to refer to the management of the persons therein designated.”
The 10th Amendment made this principle a written part of the Constitution. Powers not delegated are “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Foundation
The British Parliament claimed power “in all cases whatsoever.” That assertion destroyed an empire.
The American revolutionaries learned the lesson. They built constitutions on the opposite principle: Governments possess only the powers delegated to them by the people. Everything else stays with the people who created those governments.
The 10th Amendment wasn’t an afterthought. It was, as Thomas Jefferson recognized, the foundation of the entire system. It was, as James Madison understood, built on “the fundamental principle on which our independence itself was declared.”
John Hancock knew why this mattered. Even before the 10th Amendment existed, he told Massachusetts, “The powers reserved by the people render them secure.”
This is as true today as it was then — if the people use those powers.
