http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/03/pearls-of-james-madison-part-ii.html
As a prime mover behind the writing of the Constitution and as a champion of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, as a Representative from Virginia, attended the first sitting of the new Congress in New York and Philadelphia in 1789-1790. While nine of the thirteen states had ratified the Constitution, allowing Congress to hold its first sessions, a strong desire to explicitly secure the freedom won by a long and costly war of independence made appending a bill of rights to the Constitution a first concern of many Americans and critics of the “charter.” The absence of such a security in the wording of the Constitution and from the enumerated powers of the federal government did not assure the document’s critics that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were adequately protected from abuses of power.
What the critics saw was a document which detailed the limitations of federal government power (the enumerations), but no written assurances that, should individuals in that government overstep or abuse their powers, they could be opposed and charged with tyranny or corruption in the pursuit unlimited power. Defenders of the Constitution dismissed these concerns, saying, on one hand, that their absence from the document was instead an assurance of their inviolability; and, on the other hand, that a “bill of rights” questioned the legitimacy of any powers granted to the federal government in its enumerated powers (and, by implication, a questioning of the legitimate powers of the state governments), or would leave other, unnamed rights open to violation and government mischief.
The call for a “bill of rights” to be incorporated into the federal constitution was inspired by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in the summer of 1776 before the proclamation of the Declaration of Independence. George Mason was its principal author. As noted in “Pearls of James Madison, Founder,” Madison was originally dubious about the value and function of a bill of rights in the federal scheme of things, but eventually saw their necessity and carried the fight for a bill of rights to the Congress’s deliberations on a host of post-ratification matters. As did George Mason. The Constitution Society noted:
As passed, the Virginia Declaration was largely the work of George Mason; the committee and the Convention made some verbal changes and added Sections 10 and 14. This declaration served as a model for bills of rights in several other state constitutions and was a source of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, though its degree of influence upon the latter document is a highly controversial question. The reference to “property” in Section I may be compared with the use of the word by John Locke, its omission by Thomas Jefferson from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and its use in the Constitution, Amendments V and XIV.