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Introduction to this Guide

When we talk about our "rights" as Americans often times a great many people misread, misinterpret or simply insert their own rights into those that exist for us. This is often done through ignorance, a desire to win an argument, or to simply advance their own vision of what are their "rights".

The truth however is that there are only 2 documents signed and agreed to by the whole of the United States (or by those states that existed at the time of its founding and subsequently to those that came later). These 2 documents are the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. That's it. And as these are the only agreed upon documents by the whole of the United States, this is where we are required to look when examining our true "rights" as Americans. Some will argue that the Articles of Confederation (1778) or other documents should be included as they were an agreement by the colonies to initially form the United States of America and/or propagate the union prior to the signing of the U.S. Constitution. However it is my view that the Articles and other documents were all superseded by the implementation of the formal United States Constitution. These fore fathers to the Constitution can be used as a supplemental source, but not as a root source because of this. The Constitution trumps the AoC because it clearly states that the purpose of the Constitution was signed to "form a more perfect Union" than previously existed.

But we also too can not completely over look other documents. These documents include state constitutions, writings such as The Federalist Papers; pretty much anything that is either based upon or was used as a basis for the writing of these two core documents. In and of themselves they can not be used to insert rights that do not appear in the Constitution of the Declaration of Independence. They can however be used to back up the assertion that these are truly what are and what are not our rights.

This listing will not include items from these other documents that do not appear in our 2 main sources. They will, however, be included to produce historical reference to the rights and help to understand the limitations and the meaning of the words used to pen these rights.

After reading this list of "rights" many people may be shocked as to how few actually enumerated rights we have as American citizens but will be amazed at how broad ranging and encompassing these rights actually are. Some may also be surpassed to see which ones were often deemed the most import by their repeated citation across many of the founding documents.

Remember too that ultimately any power not granted to the Federal Government in the Constitution are ultimately reserved to "the people" or "the States". This list is only compiled to list the "Federal" rights of citizens of the United States.