The Constitution was written with the intention that it would define the explicit powers of the federal government, along with a framework for how it would operate (election of office holders, functions of key positions, etc.). The powers afforded the government were called “enumerated powers” because if the ability to do something wasn’t explicitly included in the Constitution, the government wasn’t entitled to do it.

Beyond that, there were a number of other things that the authors of the Constitution were concerned that, since they weren’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution itself, they might eventually and very slowly be infringed upon. So they wrote the first ten Amendments, calling them the Bill of Rights. What is interesting about these Amendments is that they do not grant rights to the People, they acknowledge that these rights exist outside of government, therefore the government may not legislate to diminish or deny these rights. These are called “negative rights” because they require the government to refrain from acting to harm the holders of those rights. In other words, the First Amendment right to free speech requires the government to refrain from abridging public speech.

Later Amendments are the more traditional form, where the Amendment is intended to alter, add or remove something in the Constitution. For instance, the Constitution originally considered negro slaves to constitute 3/5 of a person for purposes of calculating population that determined how many Representatives the southern states would get, but the Fourteenth Amendment ensures that all people born in the United States are full citizens, thus overriding the three-fifths clause.

give it a little shorter