The Congressional Research Service (CRS) memorandum you shared concludes that the proposed Titles of Nobility Amendment (TONA) “has not been ratified by the states” and rests that conclusion on (1) modern practice that makes the Archivist of the United States the certifying officer, (2) a 2020 NARA blog post that says TONA never reached three-fourths, and (3) the absence of any Supreme Court decision compelling publication. Read in isolation, that sounds neat and tidy.
It isn’t. When you place the CRS memo next to the primary records from 1813–1817 that you’ve assembled, the picture changes in five important ways. At a minimum, CRS has not grappled with contemporaneous federal evidence showing that the political branches treated TONA as adopted before Congress created a modern certification regime in 1818.
Below is the core of the case—built only on the documents in hand.
1) CRS applies a post-1818 yardstick to a pre-1818 event
What CRS assumes: The Archivist’s certification function (today at NARA) is the dispositive test for whether an amendment has “become part of the Constitution.”
What the 1813–1817 record shows:
In January 1814 there was no federal statute requiring any officer to certify or publish amendment adoption. Congress did not enact the ministerial certification-and-publication duty until April 20, 1818. Before then, the executive branch tracked state returns and acted on them by custom. Measured by the correct, contemporaneous yardstick—Article V itself—what matters is whether three-fourths of the states had in fact accepted, not whether a later-created federal office published a notice.
Why CRS is incomplete: A categorical “not ratified” answer that treats modern certification as retroactively controlling simply misframes a question that ripened before the 1818 statute existed.
2) CRS ignores the Executive’s own 1814–1816 determinations
What your documents show:
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Jan. 12, 1814 – Monroe’s circular to foreign ministers. It states the amendment, “having been adopted by a large majority of the states,” makes it improper to issue or continue exequaturs to U.S. citizens to act as foreign consuls. That is not idle talk—the Department of State changed policy in line with TONA’s rule.
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May 11, 1815 – Monroe to Sweden’s chargé. Reaffirms that Americans holding foreign consular office is not conformable to U.S. principles, granting only a narrow, temporary indulgence. The 1814 policy continues.
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Oct. 30, 1816 – State Department to Ralph B. Forbes. After “examination of the subject,” State writes that the “requisite number of the States” have accepted the amendment and that it “has thus become a part of the Constitution,” and then recites TONA’s text.
Why this matters even under CRS’s own framework: In the very case CRS cites (Leser v. Garnett, 1922), the Court treated an executive proclamation of ratification as “conclusive upon the courts.” Here, the executive branch in 1816 said, in writing, that TONA had become part of the Constitution and it had been governing as if it were since 1814. CRS never engages this evidence. If certification/proclamation has conclusive weight, the closest contemporaneous executive statement we possess supports adoption, not rejection.
3) CRS omits the 1815–1817 official print trail that put TONA in the Constitution
What your documents show:
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1815: The Bioren & Duane Laws of the United States (printed by authority of Congress) includes TONA as the 13th Amendment.
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Dec. 1, 1817 (opening of the 15th Congress): According to the Government Printing Office’s 1908 Monthly Catalogue, the House received an “official edition of the Constitution” that included TONA. Congress itself was given a Constitution with TONA attached.
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Dec. 31, 1817: Only after members had that Constitution in hand did the House pass a resolution asking the Executive to report the precise state count, which led to the 1818 paperwork reforms.
What happened next: The specific 1817 House Constitution has since disappeared—despite targeted searches at NARA and the Library of Congress—even though earlier and later constitutional printings do survive. The 1908 GPO catalogue still remembered and described it; sometime after that, the artifact dropped out of the accessible record.
Why CRS is incomplete: A government-sanctioned constitutional reference work (Bioren & Duane) and an official Constitution handed to the House both printed TONA as part of the text. CRS cites modern Constitution Annotated entries and a 2020 blog post, but it never confronts the contemporaneous official print record that contradicts its bottom line.
4) CRS treats Connecticut’s “disagreement” as settled fact—your documents show it was anything but
What CRS implies: Negative state actions (e.g., Connecticut) kept TONA below the threshold.
What your file shows:
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A Connecticut committee report whose original language recommended ratification—explicitly describing restraint on “accepting presents from any foreign powers”—was struck out and replaced with “not expedient … to ratify.”
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A companion resolution sheet originally written “do ratify … is ratified” was line-edited to “do not ratify … is not ratified.”
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The committee autograph purporting to be “Theodore Dwight” does not match known exemplars—indicating a non-genuine signature applied after the textual reversal.
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In August 1814, Governor John Cotton Smith sent a duplicate “disagreement” packet to Monroe, explicitly in response to a missing July 29, 1814 State Department letter. He claimed to have sent originals in June 1813, but had to re-file during wartime disruption.
What the Executive actually did with that: It kept treating TONA as adopted (see 1814–1816 above). In other words, even after the August 1814 “disagreement” was re-submitted, the State Department did not alter course. CRS never addresses the internal irregularities in Connecticut’s papers or the Executive’s decision to discount the late, duplicate negative return.
5) CRS overlooks a key 1816–1817 sequence: policy → adoption statement → House Constitution with TONA
Put the pieces in order:
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1814: State says a large majority have adopted; implements TONA’s core rule in consular practice.
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1815: Federal policy reaffirmed; Bioren & Duane prints TONA as the 13th Amendment.
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1816: State writes the requisite number have accepted; TONA “has thus become a part of the Constitution.”
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Dec. 1, 1817: The House receives an official Constitution that prints TONA.
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Dec. 31, 1817 → 1818: Congress asks for a tidy tally and then enacts the 1818 certification statute.
That sequence is coherent. It explains why official editions included TONA, why the Executive governed on it, and why Congress regularized certification procedures afterward. The CRS memo skips this whole arc and jumps straight to a modern, Archivist-centric frame.
What follows from all this
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At minimum, CRS’s categorical statement—“has not been ratified”—is not proved by the evidence it cites and is contradicted by contemporaneous executive statements, official printings, and legislative practice before the 1818 statute.
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A careful answer would acknowledge a live historical dispute: the political branches (1814–1817) acted and printed as though TONA were in force; later editors, using the post-1818 paperwork baseline, dropped it. The disappearance of the Dec. 1, 1817 House Constitution after it was still being referenced in 1908 deepens, rather than resolves, the discrepancy.
Bottom line: The CRS memo is not “wrong” because it quotes today’s NARA page; it is wrong because it treats that modern summary as dispositive, while ignoring the controlling context and primary sources from 1813–1817. Those sources show an Executive that determined TONA had become part of the Constitution and a Congress that was handed an official Constitution with TONA attached at the opening of the 15th Congress. Unless CRS can reconcile those facts—or explain why the Executive’s 1816 adoption statement and the 1817 House Constitution do not count—its conclusion should be recast as a present-day administrative position, not a settled historical truth.
