Betty,
One little detail, is the Bill of Rights does create any Rights. If you read all 10 of the Ammendments, they secure your Rights from Government intrusion. Kind of like a "we're just making sure you understand" kinda thing. All they tell the government is that you can't, you can't you can't, all the way down to the 10th Ammendment which in plain terms basically tells government, if we forgot anything else, you can't do that either.
Our Rights are only mentioned in Declaration as to where they come from. That all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Freedom of speech, and religion were not European beliefs. There was a long entrenched aristocracy that kept peasants peasant, and royalty royalty with virtually no way for a common man to climb the ladder of success for himself or his family.
I would also suggest to you the Federalist, and Anti-Federalist Papers as references to democracy by the Founding Fathers. For if one reads them, one learns that to the Founding Fathers democracy was the worst form of government ever conceived of by man.
John Adams quotes:
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams quotes:
no good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'
James Madison:
Such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
Alexander Hamilton Speech June 21, 1778
It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
Elbridge Gerry quotes (From the debate on Representation):
The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.
"Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it." John Adams
Here's a good link on some good words from the framers.
http://www.dojgov.net/Liberty_Watch.htm