We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

by Jill Lepore

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” an aging Thomas Jefferson lamented in 1816, forty years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, forty years after the first American state constitutions were adopted. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.” Jefferson knew those men were never so wise and that the constitutions they wrote were flawed. He believed that constitutions can last—“if anything human can so long endure”—only if they are regularly revised: “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,” and constitutions need amending as “new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances.” This was not a quirk of Jefferson’s eccentric mind; it was a principle upon which the United States was founded, an idea embraced by an entire generation: “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.”