Jill Lepore

me and my readers of two things one that the founding idea of our system of constitutionalism is what i call the philosophy of amendment the idea that the people should be making things better when it was should be changing things peacefully when it's necessary to change things yeah and the other is just this notion that the constitution is actually our constitution yeah it doesn't belong to the court

So they talked about Parliament's behavior during the years before the American Revolution as having been unconstitutional.

So England does not have a written constitution, but that doesn't bar the Sons of Liberty and the Resistance from saying all the time, you know, when they say, you know, we oppose the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townsend Act, the Tea Act, the Chorus of Acts.

They said because they're unconstitutional, because of no taxation without representation.

So they had no remedy for being faced with tyrannical, unconstitutional acts on the part of their government, except revolution.

And the Revolutionary War is so distant in time, and we have so little sense of the kind of suffering that 18th century warfare meant.

But

There are types of misery that are just unfathomable to us in terms of the daily suffering of people in wartime.

Modern war is more lethal, for sure.

The machinery of modern war is more lethal.

But people are living in such a general state of deprivation with essentially zero medical care and hardly any food to begin with.

These are people who, by the time you get to 1787, you know, they're only a few years from the Peace of Paris.

They're not that far from Yorktown.

Everybody has lost someone, seen the tremendous amount of suffering that that Revolutionary War led to.

The idea that the only way you could successfully deal with a government that was acting unconstitutionally would be by bloody violent revolution was horror, a terror to them.

And they were very self-conscious and indeed quite self-congratulatory about the method of...

what they would have said, a peaceful revolution.

Amendment was the great, the genius idea of the American Constitution in many ways.

They, you know, the framers themselves said this all the time because they had invented a method by which the people could peacefully change fundamental elements of their government.

Whereas in all previous time,