Jill Lepore

And that it's it's like very quickly clear that's not going to work.

But that then leads to, what is it, 1814?

There's a Hartford, a sort of like almost a constitutional convention.

It's just only like New England.

And New England gets together in Hartford and they're like, man, this constitution is really not working for us.

And we're not going to get any amendments through because this Article 5 thing is really not going to work.

What are we going to do?

And they start threatening to secede from the union.

So you already have that.

And then the next kind of big crisis is in the 1830s when South Carolina starts threatening secession over the tariff.

There's a whole kind of... By the 1830s...

Is it really that there's concern that the Article 5 doesn't work?

It's more like it's become clear by the 1830s that there are different understandings of what the Constitution even is.

So that's when John C. Calhoun says, you know...

If we don't like a law passed by Congress, we don't have to obey it.

Right.

We can just nullify it.

Because we're not really... The federal government isn't sovereign.

Only the states are sovereign.

And, like, they're just, like, light recommendations that Congress will offer us.