On this day in 1789, the Bill of Rights was sent to the states for ratification. With the right to free speech still hotly contested 300 years later, Eliot Wilson goes back to the start

There is currently intense and passionate debate in the United States over free speech. It was stoked further with the murder three weeks ago of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a political rally in Utah, but it is only the latest chapter in a long story going back to the country’s earliest days. Yesterday marked one of them, when the Bill of Rights was sent to the states for ratification.

In 1789, the United States Congress, which had only come into being six months earlier, had been in session in New York City’s Federal Hall, at the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street, through the summer. George Washington had been inaugurated as the first President on the building’s second-floor balcony that April. But the Senate and the House of Representatives were kept busy effectively creating a nation.

The Constitution had been drafted in 1787, but it was a bare-bones institutional framework, dry and bureaucratic compared to the soaring language of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. It had been pared down to ensure its........

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