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Hello, I'm AJ Jacobs, and I am the author of this, The Year of Living Constitutionally
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And today we're going to be talking about amazing facts from the Constitution. So let's get started
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Did I get it? A little tankard of grog
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The Constitution was drafted in under 100 working days. It originally ran 4,543 words
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In the 200 plus years since, we have added over 3,000 words
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And some of those words were misspelled. I love that the word Pennsylvania was spelled two different ways
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And it's only four pages. They were humans. They were very smart and very prescient humans, but they were humans
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and humans make mistakes. What inspired you to want to live constitutionally? I was inspired
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because I wanted to try to understand our founding document by adopting the mindset and technology
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from 1789. Wear the tricorn and carry the musket. I had a musket that I carried around the upper
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west side of Manhattan to mixed reviews. I wrote the book with a quill pen. I quartered soldiers
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in my apartment. It was fascinating, and I feel I really got some insight
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into the Constitution and how we should interpret it today. The conditions at the Constitutional Convention were gross It was a hot Philadelphia summer The delegates kept the windows shut tight because they didn want eavesdroppers
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The men, they were many of them wearing wool clothing like this
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It was really smoky because you had pipes. Everyone had a pipe and they weren't, they were communal pipes
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So they were sharing pipes. If you're a germaphobe, you do not want to be in 1789
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Colonial clothing, yay or nay? I'm going to have to say nay. I think it looks cool. My family, you know, would not walk within
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50 yards of me. But I will say it is hard to put on. It is time consuming. I became grateful for
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many things during this year of living constitutionally. Big things like democracy
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but also small things like elastic socks. I had to put on these socks every morning. No elastic
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They were wool stockings. They fell down to my ankles. I had to put on tiny belts. I will never
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get those combined hours back in my life. The Constitution was physically written by Pennsylvania
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General Assembly Assistant Clerk Jacob Chalice, who was paid $30, around several hundred dollars
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today, for lending his penmanship. Thank you, Jacob Chalice. What is the most important thing
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to keep in mind when writing with a quill. Yes, I wrote a lot of this book with a quill pen
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and I loved it. First of all, it's very loud, so my wife didn't like it. But what I think is great
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about it is that you are completely offline. There are no dings or chimes. There's no pop-ups of
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baldness cures to distract you It changed the way my mind worked I feel that I was able to think more deeply and more subtly I don think everyone should adopt a quill but just right offline
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Founding father Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, later passed away after performing surgery on his own penis with a piece of baleen
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which is from a whale. I did actually know this fact. That penis of his was quite famous because he was a ladies' man
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At one point, he lost his leg in a carriage accident. And another one of the founding fathers said that he wished it had been another appendage
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that had been cut off by the carriage. So there you go
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They had dick jokes even then. What is one thing you're glad you did not have to do in your year of living constitutionally
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The Eighth Amendment says the government cannot do cruel or unusual punishment
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The fascinating question is, what does that mean? Because when the Constitution was written, a lot of stuff that we consider cruel and unusual was just fine
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For instance, the pillory. I decided, maybe I should, maybe I'll just buy one
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So I did buy one. It was shipped from France. But it was, of course, nothing like the original pillory, which was truly inhumane
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I am thankful that, cruel and unusual, that meaning has evolved over the years
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Thanks to the Constitution, you can become a state-sanctioned pirate. Article 1, Section 8, allows the government to grant letters of mark
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That is to grant people permission to become privateers Such a license would allow you to capture steal or spy on ships of America foreign enemies This is one of the wildest parts of the Constitution to me
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Maybe I should try to become a pirate. So I actually applied to Congress for a letter of
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mark. I met with a congressman from California. Now there hasn't been a letter of mark granted
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since 1815, but it's still on the books. It's still right there in the Constitution
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and I explained I would get my friend's water skiing boat, put some guns on it
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and go out and try to capture enemy ships. And then he was a little more trepidatious
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What, in your opinion, is the biggest misconception about the Constitution? I think people see it as either a great, perfect, sacred document
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or as this horrible, flawed, elitist document written by 55 white men
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It's all about the framing. And Frederick Douglass, before the Civil War, he said the way he looked at the Constitution was it was a promissory note
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that it promised freedom and liberty and equality, and he wanted to make America live up to those promises
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And that language has been used by Martin Luther King and Obama, and I find it a very inspiring way to look at the Constitution
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It's aspirational, and we should try to live up to these ideals of equality and liberty that are in the Constitution
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I'm A.J. Jacobs, and if you want to learn more about the Constitution
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you can pick up my book, The Year of Living Constitutionally, wherever books are sold
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And this has been Amazing Facts with Mental Ploss
