JimC wrote:





Regarding the intent of the fathers, Thomas Jefferson's opinion was
suggested by his comments to the effect that he favored a review and
updating of the constitution every few years so that it would address
changing conditions and needs naturally to be expected in future years.

Here are a few comments from Thomas Jefferson regarding how the
constitution should be modified in view of societal changes over time,
and to correct inadequacies inthe original drafting. Note that he says
nothing about searching the Federalist Papers for the "original intent"
of the fathers. Instead, he recommends looking forward, not backward.

" No work of man is perfect. It is inevitable that, in the
course of time, the imperfections of a written Constitution will become
apparent. Moreover, the passage of time will bring CHANGES IN SOCIETY
which a Constitution must accommodate if it is to remain suitable for
the nation. It was imperative, therefore, that a practicable means of
amending the Constitution be provided."

"Whatever be the Constitution, great care must be taken to provide
a mode of amendment when experience or change of circumstances shall
have manifested that any part of it is unadapted to the good of the
nation. In some of our States it requires a new authority from the whole
people, acting by their representatives, chosen for this express
purpose, and assembled in convention. This is found too difficult for
remedying the imperfections which experience develops from time to time
in an organization of the first impression. A greater facility of
ammendment is certainly requisite to maintain it in a course of action
accommodated to the times and changes through which we are ever
passing." --Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823. ME 15:488

"Time and changes in the condition and constitution of society may
require occasional and corresponding modifications." --Thomas Jefferson
to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:113



"We must be contented to travel on towards perfection, step by
step. We must be contented with the ground which [the new] Constitution
will gain for us, and hope that a favorable moment will come for
correcting what is amiss in it." --Thomas Jefferson to the Count de
Moustier, 1788. ME 7:13


"Our government wanted bracing. Still, we must take care not to run
from one extreme to another; not to brace too high." --Thomas Jefferson
to Edward Rutledge, 1788. ME 7:81


The Right to Change a Constitution

"We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted
him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of
their barbarous ancestors." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval,
1816. ME 15:41

"[The European] monarchs instead of wisely yielding to the gradual
change of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to
progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves
behind steady habits and obliged their subjects to seek through blood
and violence rash and ruinous innovations which, had they been referred
to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would
have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such
examples nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as
another of taking care of itself and of ordering its own affairs. Let
us... avail ourselves of our reason and experience to correct the crude
essays of our first and unexperienced although wise, virtuous, and
well-meaning councils." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME
15:41

"[Algernon Sidney wrote in Discourses Concerning Government, Sect.
II, Par 13,] 'All human constitutions are subject to corruption and must
perish unless they are timely renewed and reduced to their first
principles.'" --Thomas Jefferson: copied into his Commonplace Book.


"Happy for us that when we find our constitutions defective and
insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with
all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other
nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their
constitutions." --Thomas Jefferson to C. W. F. Dumas, 1787. ME 6:295,
Papers 12:113


Change is the Choice of the Living

"I willingly acquiesce in the institutions of my country, perfect
or imperfect, and think it a duty to leave their modifications to those
who are to live under them and are to participate of the good or evil
they may produce. The present generation has the same right of
self-government which the past one has exercised for itself." --Thomas
Jefferson to John Hampden Pleasants, 1824. ME 16:29

"My wish is to offend nobody; to leave to those who are to live
under it, the settlement of their own constitution." --Thomas Jefferson
to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:70

"We have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture
to make them unchangeable. But still, in their present state, we
consider them not otherwise changeable than by the authority of the
people on a special election of representatives for that purpose
expressly. They are until then the lex legum." --Thomas Jefferson to
John Cartwright, 1824. ME 16:47

"Our children will be as wise as we are and will establish in the
fulness of time those things not yet ripe for establishment." --Thomas
Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:394


Experience Dictates Change

"I am a friend to the reformation generally of whatever can be made
better." --Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson, 1813. ME 13:349

"Let us go on perfecting the Constitution by adding, by way of
amendment, those forms which time and trial show are still wanting."
--Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1803. ME 9:419

"It is more honorable to repair a wrong than to persist in it."
--Thomas Jefferson: Address to Cherokee Nation, 1806. ME 19:149

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and
deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They
ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and
suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I
belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It
was very like the present but without the experience of the present; and
forty years of experience in government is worth a century of
book-reading; and this they would say themselves were they to rise from
the dead." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40

"Those who [advocate] reformation of institutions pari passu with
the progress of science [maintain] that no definite limits [can] be
assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand,
[deny] improvement and [advocate] steady adherence to the principles,
practices and institutions of our fathers, which they [represent] as the
consummation of wisdom and acme of excellence, beyond which the human
mind could never advance." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:254

"I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements, nor bigoted to
the practices of our forefathers. It is that bigotry which keeps the
Indians in a state of barbarism in the midst of the arts [and] would
have kept us in the same state even now." --Thomas Jefferson to Robert
Fulton, 1810. ME 12:380

"Nature and reason, as well as all our constitutions, condemn
retrospective conditions as mere acts of power against right." --Thomas
Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:380

"The real friends of the Constitution in its federal form, if they
wish it to be immortal, should be attentive, by amendments, to make it
keep pace with the advance of the age in science and experience. Instead
of this, the European governments have resisted reformation until the
people, seeing no other resource, undertake it themselves by force,
their only weapon, and work it out through blood, desolation and
long-continued anarchy." --Thomas Jefferson to Robert J. Garnett, 1824.
ME 16:15


The Slow Process of Amendment

"I am sorry [the federal convention] began their deliberations by
so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of their
members. Nothing can justify this example but the innocence of their
intentions, and ignorance of the value of public discussions." --Thomas
Jefferson to John Adams, 1787. ME 6:289

"There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the
general mind under which we must acquiesce. A forty years' experience of
popular assemblies has taught me that you must give them time for every
step you take. If too hard pushed, they balk, and the machine
retrogrades." --Thomas Jefferson to Joel Barlow, 1807. ME 11:400

"Governments... are always in their stock of information a century
or two behind the intelligent part of mankind, and... have interests
against touching ancient institutions." --Thomas Jefferson to Robert
Patterson, 1811. ME 13:87


The Earth Belongs to the Living

"The idea that institutions established for the use of the nation
cannot be touched nor modified even to make them answer their end
because of rights gratuitously supposed in those employed to manage them
in trust for the public, may perhaps be a salutary provision against the
abuses of a monarch but is most absurd against the nation itself. Yet
our lawyers and priests generally inculcate this doctrine and suppose
that preceding generations held the earth more freely than we do, had a
right to impose laws on us unalterable by ourselves, and that we in like
manner can make laws and impose burdens on future generations which they
will have no right to alter; in fine, that the earth belongs to the dead
and not the living." --Thomas Jefferson to William Plumer, 1816. ME 15:46



"Can one generation bind another and all others in succession
forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not
the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things,
not to mere matter unendowed with will." --Thomas Jefferson to John
Cartwright, 1824. ME 16:48

"The generations of men may be considered as bodies or
corporations. Each generation has the usufruct of the earth during the
period of its continuance. When it ceases to exist, the usufruct passes
on to the succeeding generation free and unencumbered and so on
successively from one generation to another forever. We may consider
each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its
majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding
generation, more than the inhabitants of another country." --Thomas
Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. ME 13:270


"Forty years [after a] Constitution... was formed,... two-thirds of
the adults then living are... dead. Have, then, the remaining third,
even if they had the wish, the right to hold in obedience to their will
and to laws heretofore made by them, the other two-thirds who with
themselves compose the present mass of adults? If they have not, who
has? The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing, and
nothing can not own something. Where there is no substance, there can be
no accident [i.e., attribute]." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval,
1816. (*) ME 15:42

"A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in
life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all
the rights and powers their predecessors once held and may change their
laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable
but the inherent and unalienable rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to
John Cartwright, 1824. ME 16:48


"Let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated
periods. What these periods should be nature herself indicates. By the
European tables of mortality, of the adults living at any one moment of
time, a majority will be dead in about nineteen years. At the end of
that period, then, a new majority is come into place; or, in other
words, a new generation. Each generation is as independent as the one
preceding, as that was of all which had gone before. It has then, like
them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes
most promotive of its own happiness; consequently, to accommodate to the
circumstances in which it finds itself that received from its
predecessors; and it is for the peace and good of mankind that a solemn
opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be
provided by the constitution, so that it may be handed on with
periodical repairs from generation to generation to the end of time, if
anything human can so long endure." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel
Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:42

"Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the
end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force,
and not of right. It may be said, that the succeeding generation
exercising, in fact, the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if
the constitution or law had been expressly limited to nineteen years
only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing
an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might
be, indeed, if every form of government were so perfectly contrived,
that the will of the majority could always be obtained, fairly and
without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot
assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious.
Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions
get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal
interests lead them astray from the general interests of their
constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every
practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable
than one which needs a repeal." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison,
1789. ME 7:459, Papers 15:396

"This principle, that the earth belongs to the living and not to
the dead,... will exclude... the ruinous and contagious errors... which
have armed despots with means which nature does not sanction, for
binding in chains their fellow-men." --Thomas Jefferson to James
Madison, 1789. ME 7:460, Papers 15:396