[This is the seventh, and last, post in a series about declarations of rights that the newly independent states adopted in 1776. You can read the first post here, the second post here, the third post here, the fourth post here, the fifth post here, and the sixth post here. We are running the posts in the lead up to a conference called “The Other Declarations of 1776.” Co-sponsored with our friends at the Liberty & Law Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, it is an all-day conference (with a free lunch!) in Arlington, Virginia on April 10, 2026. Members of the public—including you!—are very much invited to attend in person. See the details, and register, here!]

In this series we have marched through the declarations of rights that the colonies/new states adopted in conjunction with adopting constitutions in 1776. But there’s more to the story when it comes to those states constitutionalizing rights in 1776 and there’s, of course, more to the story of declarations of rights than just what happened in 1776. In this post we’ll close out that year and bring things forward a bit as well.

The rest of 1776

In addition to the states we’ve covered—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina—three other states adopted constitutions in 1776: New Hampshire, South Carolina, and New Jersey. (Georgia arguably adopted a constitution in April 1776, called the “Rules and Regulations of 1776,” but historians have generally not considered it in the same category. It did not enumerate any rights.)

We’ve already mentioned the first two. They were both short constitutions meant to be temporary and in the end neither lasted all that long. And unless you squint pretty hard you can’t see much in the way of rights in either of them. The next New Hampshire constitution, though, of 1784—which is still in effect, as amended—did have a separate bill of rights. Meanwhile, South Carolina adopted its next constitution in 1778. It did not have a dedicated declaration or article protecting rights but it did have a few rights-specific provisions, including on religious liberty (at least for Protestants), phrases borrowed from Magna Carta guaranteeing proportional punishments and law of the land protections, and language preserving “liberty of the press” and making the military subordinate to the civil power. Thus, you might say it contained an untitled “mini declaration of rights.” And the state’s next constitution, of 1790, had a couple separate articles that essentially count as a declaration or bill of rights.

(Style note: What’s the difference between a declaration or rights and a bill of rights? Not much, if anything, although as a “bill” itself is more of a legal document—think of Bill up on Capitol Hill—it arguably has a more enforceable connotation. Which may be why after 1776 “bill of rights” began to be used more often.)

The last of those three other states to write constitutions in 1776, New Jersey, arguably should be part of our list of 1776 declarations. Adopted at almost precisely the same time as the Declaration of Independence, on July 2, the constitution did not have a section entitled a “declaration (or bill) of rights” but it nevertheless itemized a few rights like the other states were doing, although not as many. There were protections for the criminally accused, against forfeiture of suicides, of religious freedom, and the right to trial by jury. There even was language protecting “every Privilege and Immunity enjoyed by others,” although it only applied to Protestants. This was the first “privileges and/or immunites” clause in any American constitution.

New Jersey’s 1776 constitution was to last it all the way until 1844. With that new constitution the state adopted a full-fledged separate article committed to rights.

Shortly thereafter; or long after

A few states didn’t adopt a constitution in 1776 but got around to it not long after. New York adopted its first constitution in April 1777. Although it did not have a separate declaration of rights, it did include a few liberties, just like its faster-moving neighbor across the Hudson. These included some of the same core language from Magna Carta, protections for the criminally accused, religious liberty, trial by jury, and a guarantee that courts “proceed according to the course of the common law.” It wasn’t until the “second New York Constitution,” in 1821, that there was a separate section of the state constitution committed to rights. (New York is unusual in that although it has changed its constitution a lot over the years, when it has held conventions the changes have technically been lots of amendments instead of a whole new constitution. Nevertheless, the changes in 1821 are often considered the state’s “second” constitution.)

Just a couple months earlier than in New York, in February 1777, Georgia adopted a constitution. It also did not have a declaration of rights but did guarantee religious freedom, protected against excessive fines and bail, and guaranteed habeas corpus, trial by jury, and freedom of the press. The next Georgia constitution, in 1789, was, oddly from our perspective, shorter and still had no separate article committed to rights. The next, of 1798, was a bit longer but still had no separate rights article. In fact, it wasn’t until the confederate state constitution of 1861 that Georgia had a devoted section of its constitution for protecting rights!

Vermont wasn’t even a state in 1777 yet it adopted a constitution and a declaration of rights, modeling much of it off of Pennsylvania’s. The “republic” (which essentially had declared independence from New York as well as from Britain) then adopted a new constitution, with a declarations of rights, in 1786 and then in 1793 it did the same again, after the United States finally accepted it as the fourteenth state in 1791.

As for the other original colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, they did not adopt constitutions until, respectively, 1818 and 1842! Both had declarations of rights.

Conclusion

We could keep telling the story on into the future, of declarations and bills of rights, of rights elsewhere in state constitutions, and, of course, of the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights itself. But for this story of those declarations in 1776 we’ll end things here. What was revolutionary when George Mason sharpened his pen in May of that year became commonplace just a few months later. Declaring rights and making those declarations enforceable law that legislatures and executives cannot violate is something accepted and expected in much of the world today. But it was anything but that 250 years ago.

Anthony Sanders is the Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice.