Reimagined by crises: Why the United States' Constitution is doomed to fail

A sweeping history traces the US Constitution's roots to medieval England, arguing it was shaped by crisis and expansion rather than pure ideals of liberty

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION: A Thousand-Year History

By Mark Peterson

Published by Princeton University Press

394 pages  $29.95

Claire Rydell Arcenas

 

Chances are, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the US Constitution. Indeed, as we celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday this year, William I and the Norman Conquest of England nearly 1,000 years ago may seem utterly irrelevant. 

Not so for the Yale historian Mark Peterson, who begins his stunning and timely revisionist history, The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution, in the medieval village of Groton, amid the sheep and meadows of William’s newly acquired realm. For Peterson, Groton matters because it is a good example of the 15,000 places surveyed, assessed and recorded in the massive Domesday Book, a detailed record of England’s land, people, resources and power structures that holds the unexpected key to understanding the trajectory of American society. 

 

The US Constitution, Peterson shows, was forged in crisis. The conflict that started at Lexington and Concord was not so much a revolution as a civil war brought about by mounting resentment toward the way the British Empire interpreted its constitution, a legal framework scattered across scores of conventions, judicial decisions and treaties that was designed to manage scarcity on a few tiny islands and was ill suited to managing abundance on a continental scale. 

When, for example, the colonists famously objected to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade them to settle Native American territory won by the king’s forces at the end of the French and Indian War, they did so not because of an abstract commitment to liberty. Instead, they were furious that the act took away their ability to develop (and profit from) land west of the Appalachian Mountains. 

A decade of war against the crown ensued. In its wake, the new constitutional order that emerged in America was much like its British ancestor. But it differed in fundamental ways. It was written into a single hard-to-change document. It also included provisions for transforming the Western territories into new states, empowered Congress to “regulate Commerce” with Native American tribes and, most important, established an executive office that could command armies in peacetime to overrun Native nations when their land could not be bought. 

Sustaining this state-making engine, one that would manage the conquest and conversion of Indian land into property open to settlement by the nation’s white citizens, was, Peterson persuasively contends, “what the Constitution was for.” Ironically, then, despite the rupture with the motherland, the Constitution’s purpose was to make the United States into a country much like the one it had just left. 

At first, the Constitution worked almost exactly as intended. The “Domesday Machine” that arose from it, Peterson writes, was so successful that, within a century, it transformed a nation of four million people occupying 365,000 square miles along the Atlantic coast into one of 63 million spread across 3.4 million square miles stretching all the way to the Pacific. 

But the American continent was nothing like the England of Domesday. As the nation expanded, particularly across the vast prairies and deserts west of Missouri, the Domesday Machine ground to a halt. 

The states in this region were sparsely populated and hardly self-sustaining. After the Civil War, the new state of Nevada, for example, quickly came under the control of speculators and mining interests that pressured its two senators to sway national power in a way the framers had never foreseen. Meanwhile, the rest of the country footed the bill for dams and complex irrigation projects for the state’s few inhabitants. 

By the 20th century, as two world wars stoked American manufacturing, the Constitution was once again stretched and distorted to encourage a mass movement of people into industrialised cities, especially in the Southwest. To keep these economies going, military spending ballooned, helping transform a place like Phoenix, with its Army and Air Force bases, from a town of a few thousand residents in 1890 into the fastest-growing US city by mid-century. 

As in the 19th century, almost every facet of growth emerged not from a carefully formulated reimagining of the American constitutional order but as crisis response. With the advent of the Cold War, and endless opportunities to make and use explosives and other weapons, Congress’s constitutional role in declaring war came to be ignored as an inconvenience. 

A long time ago, in England as well as America, people understood a constitution to be like a garment, tailored to fit the body of a nation and intended to “align the character of the land and people it governs with an appropriate frame of government.”

So, too, Peterson reminds us, was the belief that when a constitutional relationship goes awry the people have the power, right and responsibility to alter it. Whether we possess the political will to create a new constitutional order better suited to address the challenges of our time seems entirely less certain. 

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The reviewer is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana and author of America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life  ©2026 The New York Times News Service