The foundation of any structure is more than a hole in the ground. It is the difference between a pile of bricks and a house built to weather a storm.
The First Amendment to the Constitution carries that weight for every change that follows.
While the Constitution is where the Founding Fathers laid out the blueprint for the workings of government, the amendments translate design into craftsmanship. The First Amendment is where they poured the concrete.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It says something about this opening statement of the Bill of Rights that none of its principles are rights at all, but freedoms. They are not permissions to be requested or debated. They are simpler than that. Like the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness described in the Declaration of Independence, they are presented as facts of the nation — as basic and inescapable as gravity.
It started with religion. Keeping the government’s grasp away from praying hands established the soul of a country open to any expression of faith — or none at all.
It is a freedom of thought and belief — and therefore makes perfect sense to come before expression.
It is speech, however, that sits at the heart of the amendment.
Speech, in the First Amendment, is not just speech. It is the human need to form ideas, to hold opinions and to share them — aloud, in writing, in protest, in prayer, in print. Every freedom that follows grows out of that same impulse: to speak, to be heard and to connect individual thought to the wider world.
We know that was the intent because James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, told us so with his original text.
“The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments,” he wrote.
It is crystal clear that whether spoken alone, written in a letter or shouted in chorus, speech was to be protected.
During somewhat limited debate on the amendment, Madison said he found a broadly covered rather than narrowly constrained freedom of expression would be easily passed by the individual state legislatures — and he was right.
Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, still sees why that is true today.
“There really isn’t American society without the freedom of speech,” she said.
Freedom of assembly is speech in a group. While it may be most easily identified as protest — with its chants and picket signs and crowds that can shut down traffic — that is only part of the story. Assembly is conversation. It is the sharing of fears and the recognition that your concerns do not exist alone.
“What’s important to remember is the framers recognized there is power in numbers,” Melewsky said. “If you don’t have the freedom to assemble but you have freedom of speech, you would essentially be shouting into the void.”
The freedom of petition is speech directed at the government. Whether alone or en masse, people must be able to tell their leaders when they disagree with the direction. That, too, was likely an easy sell, given that voting on the Bill of Rights came just 13 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence — the world’s most famous redress of grievances.
Press freedom is speech directed at the world.
“The press in most cases stands in the shoes of the public they serve. The framers recognized that without a fully functioning free press, democracy will suffer,” Melewsky said.
By gathering information, preserving it and sharing it widely, the press extends individual speech beyond the limits of time, place and power.
This is another freedom clearly grounded in its importance during the Revolution and the nation’s founding. Newspapers and broadsheets were instrumental to that moment, especially in the hands of figures like Benjamin Franklin.
James Madison and Alexander Hamilton used newspapers to publish what would become known as the Federalist Papers, making their case for ratification directly to the public through the press.
These stabilizing piers do more than brace legal theory. They hold up the platform on which all rights rest, and they are exercised daily in every corner of the country.
The fact that these freedoms do not merely exist, but are in constant use, is what makes them relevant and powerful.
“Government functions best when it is aided by an involved and informed community,” Melewsky said. “That’s the cornerstone of democracy here in the United States.”
None of this was about America having uniformity of thought. It was not even a framework for surviving disagreement. It was an elemental understanding that the country was born of expressed concerns and voices raised in dissent.
The First Amendment was built to carry that weight — to support the constant motion of ideas, arguments and challenges without letting the structure fail.