Devin Stone doesn't just list failed constitutional amendments; he exposes the bizarre, often desperate logic that drove them, revealing a history where the American experiment nearly derailed over dueling, French babies, and presidential lotteries. While most legal histories focus on what passed, Stone's coverage of the 12,000 failed proposals offers a unique window into the structural anxieties that have plagued the republic since its infancy.
The Dueling Dilemma
Stone opens with a striking statistic that immediately reframes the difficulty of constitutional change: "Americans have tried to amend it 12,000 times. That means that 99.998% of proposed amendments have failed." This framing is effective because it shifts the reader's perspective from viewing the Constitution as a static document to seeing it as a battleground of constant, often absurd, experimentation. He then pivots to the early 19th century, where the stakes were literally life and death. The author details the duel between Kentucky Representative William Graves and Maine Representative Jonathan Cilley, noting that they "didn't even have a direct grievance with each other" yet decided to fight because they were already at the grounds. Stone's narrative highlights the absurdity of the era's honor culture, observing that despite the Supreme Court boycotting the funeral in protest, "nobody ever went to jail for Graves' death."
The proposed amendment to ban dueling, introduced by William Steven Morgan, serves as a case study in how specific tragedies often fail to translate into broad constitutional solutions. Stone writes, "Congress wouldn't put dueling out of pasture just yet," illustrating the gap between public outrage and legislative action. A counterargument worth considering is that the failure of this amendment wasn't just about political will, but perhaps a recognition that a federal ban on private dueling might overstep constitutional bounds regarding state police powers, a nuance Stone touches on but prioritizes the narrative of congressional inaction.
The Missing Thirteenth and the Sovereign Citizen Myth
The piece takes a sharp turn into the realm of conspiracy theory with the story of the "Titles of Nobility Amendment." Stone explains how the Federalist Party, desperate after their 1800 election loss, seized on the presence of Jerome Bonaparte's American-born son to argue for an amendment stripping citizenship from anyone accepting a foreign title. He notes the irony that "the Federalists were as worked up about the Bonaparts as Piers Morgan was about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today." The proposed text was severe: "If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility... Such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States."
Stone's most critical contribution here is tracing how a printing error in 1815 birthed a modern legal conspiracy. When the amendment appeared in an 1815 book of laws with a disclaimer that ratification was uncertain, Stone points out, "The printers never would have imagined that 150 years in the future, people would cite this book to prove that the missing 13th amendment had been ratified." This historical footnote has evolved into a cornerstone of the sovereign citizen movement, which argues that lawyers using the title "esquire" violate this phantom amendment. Stone dismantles this by noting the amendment never achieved the necessary three-fourths of state ratifications, yet the myth persists because it offers a convenient legal shield for those who wish to ignore the judicial system.
The printers never would have imagined that 150 years in the future, people would cite this book to prove that the missing 13th amendment had been ratified and that the court system had zero power over them.
Presidential Lotteries and National Rebranding
Moving to the mechanics of democracy, Stone critiques the Electoral College by highlighting proposals that were even more chaotic. He describes Senator Hill House's 1808 idea to select the president by lottery, where retiring senators would draw balls from a box. Stone writes, "Hill House envisioned each senator dramatically drawing a ball out of a box, sort of like an NBA draft lottery." The author's tone here is dryly humorous, noting that John Quincy Adams dismissed the idea as "ridiculous," yet the proposal resurfaced decades later. Stone's commentary effectively uses these outlandish ideas to underscore the stability of the current, albeit flawed, system. He notes that Congress eventually decided that selecting the president by "Powerball lottery would be even dumber than the electoral college."
The final section tackles the nation's identity with the 1866 proposal to rename the United States simply "America." Stone describes Representative George Washington Anderson's argument that the existing name was not "sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people." Stone's analysis of this proposal as a "geopolitical glow up" is particularly sharp, contrasting the 19th-century desire for a unified brand with the practical reality that changing the name would require revising "nearly every law, treaty, letterhead, and coin in circulation." He also briefly touches on the even more ambitious 1893 proposal to rename the country the "United States of Earth," suggesting that American expansionism has always been a driving force behind legislative oddities.
Critics might argue that focusing on these fringe proposals distracts from the serious, substantive amendments that failed due to political gridlock rather than absurdity. However, Stone's approach suggests that the absurdity itself is the point: it reveals the extreme lengths to which lawmakers have gone to solve structural problems, often with solutions that were worse than the disease.
Bottom Line
Stone's strongest asset is his ability to weave historical trivia into a coherent narrative about the fragility and absurdity of American governance, proving that the Constitution's survival is as much about luck as it is about design. The piece's biggest vulnerability is its reliance on the humorous tone to carry the weight of complex legal history, which may occasionally oversimplify the genuine political tensions behind these failed amendments. Readers should watch for how these historical precedents of constitutional experimentation resurface in modern debates over electoral reform and national identity.