From the very start, Americans proposed amendments. After the Declaration of Independence was issued, on July 4, 1776, Lemuel Haynes, a 23-year-old Massachusetts man who was the son of a Black father and a white mother and who had fought in the Continental Army, copied out its opening lines on a manuscript he titled “Liberty Further Extended.” And then he wrote an amendment: “An affrican has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen: Consequently, the practise of slave-keeping which so much abounds in this land is illicit.” (I have left all sources in their original spelling.)

The demand for amendability came from ordinary Americans who insisted that their constitutions be revisable, “to rectify the errors that will creep in through lapse of time or alteration of situation,” as one Massachusetts town meeting put it. When Massachusetts sent a constitution to voters for ratification in 1778, they rejected it by a margin of almost five to one, mainly because, as one town complained, “We don’t find any sufficient provision for any alteration or amendment of this Constitution,” except by the legislature itself, “whereas, it appears to us, at least, of the highest importance, that a door should be left open for the people to move in this matter,” because without such a door the only way people would be able to change the government would be “commotions, mobs, bloodshed and Civil War.”

Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate George Mason, pointing out that everyone knew the Constitution that they were drafting was imperfect, argued that “amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.”

But Americans ought to think more expansively about the history of those amendments. In April 1788, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who had served in Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention and would go on to serve on the state’s Supreme Court, mocked the Constitution’s critics, who refused to ratify it without the promise of amendments. The Constitution lacked a bill of rights, they pointed out. So what? Brackenridge asked. It also didn’t specify that the president of the United States “shall be of the male gender,” but did that really need spelling out? “What shall we think if, in progress of time, we should come to have an old woman at the head of our affairs? What security have we that he shall be a white man? What would be the national disgrace if … a vile Negro should come to rule over us?” These possibilities were, to Brackenridge, absurd. Amendments to clarify these points were as unnecessary as a bill of rights. The original meaning of the Constitution was plain, Brackenridge insisted. That’s what originalists think, too.

The rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork once explained how originalists think about the Constitution and the historical record. “If someone found a letter from George Washington to Martha telling her that what he meant by the power to lay taxes was not what other people meant, that would not change our reading of the Constitution in the slightest,” Bork wrote. Seemingly more irrelevant are constitutional opinions that might have been expressed, for instance, in a letter from Martha to George, or in any evidence left behind by any of the more than 300 people held in human bondage at the Washingtons’ plantation in Virginia. But Americans are descended from all of those people, and if the courts are going to claim to be ruled by history, the justices ought to consult a broader and more democratic historical record.