History Happens: A Guest Post by Jill Lepore
There are few documents as storied as the Constitution of the United States, but who really understands it? Jill Lepore is here to help, digging into the history and legacy of the Constitution in all of its intricacies and hopes. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jill on writing We the People.
Hardcover
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We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
By Jill Lepore
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$36.99
$39.99
From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.
From the best-selling author of These Truths comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era.
One of the wisest things Benjamin Franklin ever said are the words he spoke at the end of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Of the original seventy delegates who were supposed to attend the convention, only fifty-five showed up and only thirty-nine actually signed the Constitution. Three refused to sign because they disagreed with so much of it. Everyone else had already gone home. Franklin had plenty of his own doubts. I find that there are errors here, he explained, but, who knows, someday I might change my mind; I often do. And so, he said, “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”
Everyone, and Franklin above all, expected that the Constitution would require amending. With the passage of time, conditions would change, ideas would change, technology would change. Opinions would change. And the Constitution would need revision, correction, improvement, the making of amends. But then something strange happened: it turned out that the Constitution’s provision for amendment didn’t really work, or at least it never worked the way the framers hoped it would work.
This feature of American history has always troubled me because it’s so little noticed but it’s such a giant problem. A few years back, I wrote a history of the United States called These Truths. I put a lot of constitutional history in it, because constitutional history had been all but left out of most accounts of American history. Thousands of readers wrote to me about how much they learned about the Constitution from reading These Truths. Those letters really moved me. So I decided to write a new history of the Constitution, one that placed the idea of change, or what I call the “philosophy of amendment” at the center of the story where, I think, it belongs.
We the People is a history of the Constitution, all the way down to the present, but it’s also the story of how the American people have tried, time and again, to revise it, the story of ordinary Americans proposing, defending, attacking constitutional amendments, seizing for themselves the power to revise the U.S. Constitution, rather than ceding it to the Supreme Court.
One of the things I love best about Franklin is how, even as an old man—he was eighty-one at the time of the convention—he embraced the philosophy of amendment. “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said. “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better Information, or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.” Everyone changes their mind sometimes. History happens. Change comes. And the only way to know what Constitution you want is to know where the one you’ve got came from—and how it’s changed.
