‘Is this it?’ Governor Spencer Cox asked in the aftermath of the recent fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah. ‘Is this what 250 years has wrought upon us?’ His timeline referred to the nation’s forthcoming semiquincentennial next year: the celebration of 250 years of the United States – as of from the Declaration of Independence. The ratification of the Constitution came over a decade later. But the two cannot easily be separated. Indeed, as Jill Lepore points out, their wording, the statements they make and the future they promise are often confused in the public mind. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ ‘We the People…’ – in both cases, a nation is being invoked, a people brought into being by words.  

If the Declaration of Independence was the new nation’s mission statement, the Constitution is often read as the road map for the republic. It is a document, as Chief Justice John Marshall described it, understood ‘chiefly from its words’. Lepore, always fascinated by words, has sought, from her earliest publications, to parse American national purpose from the nation’s political, legal and literary publications. She has located the country’s identity in The Name of War (1998), which analysed the impact of King Philip’s War in New England (1675–6); explored its evolving public language in A is for American (2002); and contemplated the political and cultural power of print in The Story of America (2012). Now, in We the People, Lepore has pulled together and developed her arguments in an echo of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter’s assertion that the Constitution is ‘not a document but a stream of history’. She has given us a sweeping assessment not of the Constitution in general but specifically of its amendments: to date, twenty-seven in total. Amendment, she proposes, is ‘essential to the American constitutional tradition’, to such an extent that it may be read as a philosophy, one that is ‘foundational to modern constitutionalism’. A is for Amendment.

Lepore begins by locating the Constitution in ‘the loamy earth’ and the life that grows out of and on it – the land over which the document asserted control. In this respect the Constitution was simply the latest and most ambitious in a series of legal and political documentary claims