Stony Ridge Convention and the Bill of Rights
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
In seventeen eighty-eight, a group of frontier Anti-Federalists gathered at James Bell's tavern, which stood at this site along the Cumberland frontier. Led by Robert Whitehill, they came to oppose the newly written United States Constitution on a straightforward ground: it contained no bill of rights, no written guarantees of individual liberty or state power.
The Stony Ridge Convention added its voice to a chorus of dissent that echoed from Pennsylvania to Virginia to New York. That pressure worked. James Madison drafted twelve proposed amendments. Ten were ratified in seventeen ninety-one as the Bill of Rights. Anti-Federalist currents like this one fed into the Democratic-Republican Party that followed. The arguments that frontier farmers made at a backcountry tavern shaped the document that defines American civil liberties to this day.
