The Lost Founder: James Wilson

Joining the conversation are legal scholar Bill Ewald of the University of Pennsylvania and Jesse Wegman of the Brennan Center for Justice. Together, we discuss Wegman's new book, The Lost Founder, James Wilson, and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution, which explores the life and legacy of this founder and U.S. Supreme.

So to give you a quick uh as quick as possible, I think, in a in a uh setting like this uh summary of of James Wilson, Wilson is, I will say, the most important American founder that you don't know. Uh and I think The way I can m most clearly uh elucidate that is to is to point out all the mosts that he was. Uh he was the most respected lawyer in America. He was, without question, the most democratic of the founders.

He was the most committed to the idea of popular sovereignty that the people themselves hold ultimate political authority. He was also the most reckless land speculator. And by far he was and is the most forgotten of the leading framers of our constitution and our nation. So the book tells his story in full, uh, but I'll give you the short version here. Wilson was born in the Scottish lowlands in 1742 to a poor, very religious farming family.

Uh his parents wanted him to enter the ministry, but he was uh too energized and engaged by the political and social revolutions taking place around him to choose that life. So Uh, in his early twenties, he immigrated to America and very quickly became a leading lawyer and political thinker. At the age of 26, he wrote an essay that influenced not only the push toward revolution and independence.

But also quite arguably the central lines of the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self evident. He served in Congress. He wrote a number of the most critical provisions of the Constitution. He was appointed by George Washington as a justice on the first Supreme Court, and he gave a series of lectures on law that would define American law for generations to come.

Through it all, he was advocating for this expansive, egalitarian, democratic vision of American government that was centuries ahead of his time. And that I would say, in many ways, we are still trying to catch up with. And also, less than ten years after the Constitution was ratified, Wilson died.

In the back room of a tavern in North Carolina, on the run from both his creditors and the authorities, destitute, dressed in rags, raving like a madman until the end. Within a matter of months, it was as though he had never existed.

As you can tell, for a journalist looking for stories, this is a good one. I actually discovered Wilson while I was writing uh my book on the Electoral College, Let the People Pick the President, which which uh I also discussed uh with the National Constitution Center. Um That book came out in 2020, but it was a couple years before that while I was researching it, that I was curious about the origins of the Electoral College and the origins of how we chose to pick the president.

I was going through Madison, James Madison's notes on the on the Constitutional Convention, and I keep running into this guy that I hadn't heard of to my you know, surprise. I I I went to high school, I went to college, I went to law school. Uh I thought I knew who all the the major framers were. And here's this guy Wilson, this Scott with this funny accent, uh who keeps standing up, talking constantly.

In the voice of someone two or three centuries ahead of himself, I mean he I just kept being so struck by H the egalitarianism that threaded through all of his comments, he wanted the president to be elected by a popular vote. He thought the Senate was a a complete abomination. He wanted people to be represented, not states.

He thought they should be represented in accordance with their numbers. You know, all of these things that we think of today largely as being sort of unobjectionable, uh, Wilson was proposing for the first time and in the face of a lot of opposition uh at the Constitutional Convention and and both before and after.

So as I learned more about him and about his ideas and and also about his almost total erasure from American history, I became sort of obsessed. uh I started asking people, do you know James Wilson? Have you heard of James Wilson? And almost nobody had. And the the the best story about this, which I can just tell briefly is I I was at an event uh where a Supreme Court a sitting at the time sitting Supreme Court justice was

uh in attendance and I I cornered the justice and I said, Oh, I'm I'm I'm reading about James Wilson right now. He's first one on the first Supreme Court. I'm so excited by his ideas. And this justice, you know, knew who James Wilson was, of course.

But within about 30 seconds of our conversation, it became clear that I knew more. So I thought, okay, I know more than a sitting Supreme Court justice about one of the most important figures of the American founding. This is a story to tell, and that's how I came to this book.

And I teach civil law. So I thought, okay, I'll be able to do a nice short twenty-five page article about James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. So he turns out to be far more uh far more important than I had realized. Jesse's absolutely right about what he says. Uh as for uh why he's faded from view, uh Chessie basically gives the right answer. He died in Poverty and the In disgrace.

Well, it's unclear whether he actually went to debtors' prison or not, but for a sitting Supreme Court justice to be hunted down by his creditors. uh people didn't want to talk about this embarrassing aspect of the founding. Also his papers got scattered, his correspondence is not particularly interesting, so He disappeared, and then once you disappear from the historical narrative, it's very hard to get back in.

Um, a uh historian um named Bert Conkel in the early twentieth century. Everybody has sort of run up against uh what I think Bill identified as the real hurdle of trying to bring someone back from the dead. someone who has been buried uh in ignominy and you know uh forgetfulness um and make them sort of put them back in their rightful place. But as Bill said, you know, this really, you know, his death and then the the the nature of his death and the timing of it really I think came as a relief.

to a lot of his colleagues. The court had been shorthanded for a year by the time he died. They were sitting, uh, but they didn't have one of their members. So it it be it was harder to do their job. And as you say, Julie, this whole legacy building project of the Framers was a really big part of their lives. They they saw themselves, right? They understood themselves as world historical figures at the time they lived. They knew they were going to be remembered. They were right.

Uh and they kept their papers. They were ex they were extremely, you know, I mean, I think understandably so, uh, impressed with themselves. And they had people to burnish their legacies, to res to preserve their papers, to collect them. uh to tell to tell their stories, to repeat their names. Wilson really didn't have that. He had a son who tried to put together a collection of his writings and speeches.

But it just really didn't add up to anything. And as Bill also said, Wilson was a terrible correspondent. You know, we talk about the other founders that everybody knows about. uh Hamilton, Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, you know, these guys were all incredibly prolific and we have incredible records of their, you know, I mean reams of books on them, on just their own writing.

Wilson, I mean, it's scattered all you know, it's scattered, it's it's it's very minimal compared to them. I have one letter that I I found of his where he writes to one of his dearest friends and he begins the letter by saying, I'm just writing to tell you I have nothing to say. So he's not the easiest guy to capture through his words, even though those words are really so transformative, both in his era and in ours today.

that James Madison alone deserves the title of father of the Constitution. And you think Wilson uh has a a claim uh to that title as well. So can you walk us through the role that Wilson played at the seventeen eighty seven uh Philadelphia Convention and what the lasting imprint he left on the constitution was.

And he was actually quite unhappy when he left the convention that not having gotten exactly what he wanted. But more importantly, Madison was very clear that this was a collaborative effort. You basically had fifty very strong willed people locked in a room for four months arguing at one another and to try to pick out any single person as the architect of the constitution just makes no sense. It also makes no sense for Wilson, by the way, so I don't want to be claiming him as the father.

If you read through the convention notes slowly, that there are two people who really emerge as the ones who are most in control of the ideas, they're in control of the arguments. They've got novel things to say on just about every point, extremely insightful, even when their ideas aren't picked up. And those two, I think, are Madison and Wilson. There really isn't a third delegate who comes

It comes close to those two. Governor Morris, maybe, but he wasn't there through the entire through the entire summer. So, you know, for consistently interesting delegates at the convention, I would say it's Wilson and Madison, and there's no particular reason to choose between the two. Now, as for Wilson himself, There are lots of contributions. Some one is more pleased about than others. The greatest contribution to the final document is probably the structure of the presidency.

So this is something that Wilson led with at the very beginning of the summer. Almost nobody accepted his view of a single president elected for short term of office and re-eligible and b all the rest of what goes into Article II, by the end of the summer, essentially the entire convention had come to the position that Wilson led with. So that's long been recognized. If you're looking for the architect of the American presidency, Wilson has a greater claim to that than anybody.

Now, there are other things that are more problematic. He was, along with Charles Pinckney, one of the people who proposed the three-fifths compromise on slavery. He was himself anti slavery. The reason that he did that was to try to break a logjam in the convention where the South and the North were uh unable to agree on representation in the legislature, and Wilson Pinckney

came forward. Now this is one strongly anti slavery delegate, one strongly pro slavery delegate. They came forward, they said, We've already been using a formula of three fifths for evaluating taxation, why don't we use that formula going forward? So Wilson proposed it. He later apologized for what the Constitution did with slavery. But I think that has to be viewed as a blot on his record.

The third thing is the thing that most astonished me when I started working on Wilson, and that is. What was going on in the background of the convention itself? And that this is something there's been a good deal of scholarship in the past. fifteen, twenty years, looking at not just the arguments that were made on the floor of the convention, but at the committee work that was going on behind the scenes.

So to simplify things, you've got three really significant committees that people had not paid close attention to till fairly recently. They meet at three separate stages during the summer.

One is a meeting that was held early in the summer between the Pennsylvania and the Virginia delegations that came up essentially with the Virginia plan. The mastermind behind that committee, I think, although it's really hard to be sure is Madison, which is the traditional view, and I don't see any good reason to question it.

At the end of the summer, there's another committee called the Committee of Style, which writes up the final document. Bill Trainer at Georgetown has written extensively about that and it's important. Because it's a committee, because it's not reflected in Madison's notes, it tended to get simply overlooked. And you have to go back and look really closely and figure out, okay, what exactly did the committee of style do? And it's extremely important.

The third committee is in the middle of the summer. That is the Committee of Detail. Now, when I started writing my short article on Wilson and I was plotting my way through, I hit this thing called the Committee of Detail and thought, well Uh what is this? I've never heard of the committee of detail, and the footnote says the manuscripts are in the handwriting of James Wilson.

And somebody must have studied this. There's got to be a monograph someplace. And I I don't know what it is. So so It turns out, to make a long story short, basically historians have just skipped over the Committee of Detail, not looking at it in it with If you look closely, you find a couple of things. One is the members of that committee, so this is a five member committee meeting when the rest of the convention is in recess for ten days in the middle of the summer.

The members of the committee are not the big names. So it's not Washington, not Madison, not Hamilton. But it is Gorham, Ellsworth, Wilson, Randolph, and but Randolph and Rutley. Who you know, they're names that are known to historians, but they're not the names that you tend first to think of when you think of the constitutional convention. Now, it turns out it's an intricate business to try to reconstruct what happened inside the Committee of Detail.

But what's quite clear is the committee wrote a large segment of the final constitution. So they were inserting things that were not discussed by the convention as a whole, maybe tangentially, but. It's really the committee that puts the language into the Constitution, and a lot of it goes straight from the committee report into the final. text of the constitution.

things so you get the you get the structure of the federal judiciary, you get the enumeration of congressional powers, you get such things as the supremacy clause, the necessary and proper clause, By the way, there's a extraordinary article by John McKyle at Georgetown on the necessary and proper clause that uh he took this work on the committee of detail and then was able to explain what the legal significance of the way that that clause was drafted is.

Okay, there's other things, uh lesser things, but those matters are kind of core. to the structure of the Constitution, and they emerged more from that committee than they did from the Convention as a whole.

I should say there are lots of lots of things that one can't pin down with entire certainty. So you don't know how much discussion was going on between the committee members and other people at the convention about those things.

If you look at other records for other for like the Second Continental Congress, Madison's notes are an extraordinary document. He records speeches, arguments, who said what, who was answering whom. But Madison was not in this committee. So the convention took a 10-day break. Madison well went off and did whatever he was doing during those 10 days while the committee met. So you don't get

any sort of description of what was the back and forth inside that committee room. You can somewhat piece it together looking at the various looking at the delegates, looking at the positions they took elsewhere. And you can say pretty confidently that Wilson was the mastermind of that committee, which doesn't mean that he drew up the documents out of his own head. There's certainly things in there that he disagreed with that he had to put into the committee report.

Uh but no okay. So you know I've lingered on this for lingered on this for a bit, but it it was the thing that struck me as really quite surprising that the historiography of the Constitutional Convention had managed not to notice this central event. As soon as you've seen that, there are then two immediate questions that arise. One is how could historians have overlooked this?

Well, which that's something that requires uh extended discussion. The other is who is this guy Wilson? Because he's clearly uh clearly a very central figure in a way that had not previously been seen. Important, yes, but basically he was treated as an adjunct to Madison. So somebody who came along who was helping Madison with Madison's program, and that picture, I'm afraid, simply does not work.

He's a very different thinker. The the personalities are different. The way that he's behaving at the convention is different. There's a lot to admire in both of them, but uh mushing the two together uh I think does not work.

Um, but I I I agree that Wilson is clearly at um the center of the convention from start to finish. I think he's one of the very few members who's there every single day. Um and His role, you know, what was exciting for me about discovering Wilson as this uh central figure wasn't just that these the the first thing was that it was that these ideas that we think of today as being sort of

part of our lives, you know, the one person, one vote uh idea, the idea of basic human equality, they were there at the convention in the in the guise most clearly of James Wilson. Um, but also what those ideas mean for us today. And, you know, we're we live in a time right now where there's a lot of, I think, discussion over what democracy is, whether we are a democracy, what we will be and should be going forward. And I think we also have this kind of um

uh, you know, way of talking about the founding and their ideas and the founders and the you know, the the idea of originalism, right? Which is a I think a a um a troubled concept uh uh both in its theory and in its practice, but You know, th there is value to it and I think to the extent that we want to understand the founders, Wilson has been really completely uh uh almost completely ignored in the in the

general public narrative of the founding. So to me, telling that story of his role in the creation of the country and most specifically at the constitution, uh at the constitutional convention, where I spend the sort of the heart of my book, is essential. And it's that That in inerring focus, I would say, on popular self-rule. The people themselves are the essence of all and the and the and the and the source of all political authority.

And his belief in one overarching national government, that makes Wilson unique at the convention. Nobody else puts those two things together. That we're going to have one big country, right? Not a bunch of provincial uh former colonies that are now battling with each other endlessly over you know their own their own interests. Uh but that also the only way that that country is going to work. is w it is in a w with deep respect for the authority of the people themselves.

And that is something that I think got lost in in the sort of retelling of our history, in the narratives that have become popular. Um I I really think it's essential that as we tell the story of Wilson, we realize that these threads have been there from the beginning.

Um, but we do know, uh Bill, your scholarship has shown this, that Wilson was one of the only uh founders to invoke the phrase created equal during the debates uh over ratifying the constitution.

Why was Wilson so closely attached to the declaration other than because he signed it, obviously therefore believing in it,'cause he was willing to put his uh life on the line by doing that. And what does that reveal about his political philosophy? Uh Jesse, why don't we we start with you on that one and then we can go to Bill.

We think of the declaration as, you know, the the the founding words of America, the most important words. We we we keep it in the archives under, you know, bulletproof glass. It's such an essential document, and particularly its preamble. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. You know, all of that is so embedded in our national psyche.

Right. And yet at the time, at the time they were written and in the decades after, almost nobody cited them. They just it just wasn't something that God talked about, except with the exception of Wilson. Wilson is the person who sees in the Declaration of Independence and in its promise of human equality the essence of the American experiment.

Right. This may seem again, this may seem obvious to us now, but at the time he was the only one pushing that. He said, you know, to him, the declaration superseded the Constitution. The idea of popular sovereignty, of popular self-rule was was in the declaration itself, it was the declaration itself. It was the idea that people have the ultimate control over their government. If they aren't happy with it, they can change it at any time and however they please.

This is what Wilson is saying throughout the 1780s, 1790s, until his death. And nobody else, really until Abraham Lincoln, is saying this out loud in any kind of clear, uh, comprehensive, programmatic way. Um, and so I I think there there's there's more to say on this, but I wanna let Bill weigh in too, because he's the one who really kind of opened my eyes.

I took a paragraph from Wilson, rewrote it. Jefferson's a better writer than Wilson, it's more memorable words, but the chain of thought is something that he took from Wilson's pamphlet. Now Wilson so the Wilson gets credit for being i in the background to the preamble of the declaration, not to the rest of the document in any particularly Close way. Is the only founder. Explicitly to connect the declaration to the Constitution. And he does it in a couple of places. He does it once.

w in passing at the Constitutional Convention, and then more explicitly in the Pennsylvania ratification debate. Now, you can ask why did he why did he do that? Did he realize that he had himself been the source so that he was quoting his own publicizing his own work? Uh uh that I cannot answer, but it is very striking that none of the other founders attached the importance to the preamble that Wilson did or that we do. That really doesn't start to come in until the until

most of the founders are dying off. So I would say 1820s, 1830s. Particularly in the context of the debate over slavery, that's when people really fasten on the phrase all men are created equal, but prior to that it did not receive the same degree of attention that the rest of the document did. Different way to put it, the document was viewed primarily as a bill of grievances against Great Britain rather than a statement of human rights.

Including the grievances, which to your point, were quite significant, a quite significant part of the document, particularly at the time. I want to pivot a little bit.

Uh Wilson arrives in America from Scotland in seventeen sixty five. We've talked about his accent uh a little bit, leaving an imprint. But let's talk a little bit about how his Scottish upbringing and education shaped his political thinking and his vision for the nation.

comparatively backwaters. But the Scottish universities, Scottish Enlightenment, people like David Hume, Thomas Reed, Adam Smith, they were in the intellectual forefront of thinking about issues of government philosophy and the like. Of the American founders. So here I'll put on my philosopher's hat.

It seems to me quite clear Wilson was technically the most highly trained of all the founders. Jefferson, Madison, they knew something about the Scottish Enlightenment, but they did not have the same depth of understanding that Wilson did. Scotland is as a Presbyterian country, it was more democratically minded than Anglican England.

So you don't have the hierarchy of bishops, so it would have been more natural for somebody like Wilson to have democratical ideas than for some of the other framers. But whether you want to say that that's the source of his ideas, I'm not sure. There's not really there's not really f any f solid evidence that one can point to.

There's one other aspect that uh is extremely important and it's in fact what got me interested in Wilson in the first place, which is that Scotland is a civil law jurisdiction. Meaning it followed in the eighteenth century Roman law, not the English common law. Why is this important? Well, in Scotland, if you wanted to become a lawyer

Scots lawyers, they tended to be educated on the continent. So they would go to Leiden, they would go to Paris, that they would read the French, German, Dutch, natural law thinkers. they had an entirely different approach to the way that you analyze abstract legal questions than the English common law tradition did. Now that's something that it's clear Wilson was steeped in. He had the education to be able to make use of the natural law tradition. He carried that with him

To North America. And there's every reason to think he continued in that tradition. I continued reading the works that were coming out of Scotland. To that extent, the Scottish background for Wilson is absolutely central. But pinning down exact details, what was he like when he was in his early twenties? And how did that affect the way that he developed in his later career? That's a bit harder to winkle out.

birthplace, the house in which he was born, the uh the cottage is still there um uh on the on the property. Uh so that's just a a a thrilling experience um for for people like us. And uh and then, you know, I would just add what to I I would add to Bill's point about the sort of relatively democratic nature of uh of the Presbyterian church is

Uh that also uh you know Scotland had an incredibly advanced and uh egalitarian education system. So, you know, uh one of the outgrowths of the Reformation in Scotland was. uh this sort of edge you know, a a school in every parish, they said. So they they really it they emphasized this was a country moving from pretty like primitive uh uh you know times and and and practices into the modern world with a speed that a you know was was was remarkable and a lot of that came out of

an intense focus on education for everybody. So even a poor farmer's son from the lowlands like James Wilson, starting at age five or six, was getting as good an education as anyone else in the country. And this, I think, was another kind of influence on his democratic mindset, right? The church and the school were giving him this idea that people are equal. They are fundamentally possessed of the same capacity for knowing truth.

and understanding the world, no matter where they started, no matter what their work is uh as a grown up. Uh and and I think that uh uh is one of the other ways in which Wilson stands out among uh the framers, many uh many of whom were themselves you know, uh born into a more elite class and and lived among uh uh the elites uh uh throughout their lives.

It's really the Fort Wilson riot I keep coming back to. The Fort Wilson riot happened on October fourth of seventeen seventy nine. As you say, there was a a mob that went to a local bar, got themselves pretty well juiced, and then w came out, it was d dozens or hundreds of people, depending on the account. They were armed. Uh they started marching around the city of Philadelphia, the center of the city, looking for people they considered to be traitors to the cause of the revolution.

Um, you know, that this is the middle of the Revolutionary War, the declaration has been signed three years earlier, but the country is still trying to find its footing uh amid ongoing fighting. Philadelphia is in a major crisis at this moment.

You know, prices are out of control, people are s are suffering, uh, they're they they can't afford food. Uh people are getting mad and they they they're looking for people to blame and they're going after the merchants, the elites of the city. Wilson by this time Is a very uh accomplished, a very well paid, and a very respected lawyer. He's one of the most respected in the country, as I said at the beginning.

He lives in this house on the corner of uh uh uh Walnut and South Third Streets in Philadelphia. It's a very nice house. It's a big brick house, I think three story, maybe four stories. Um, and he's well known as one of the members of the city's elite. Uh so this mob comes looking for they start, they they pick up a few other guys on the way, but they are headed to Wilson's house. Wilson gets word that they're headed to his house.

Uh they uh at they come, they attack his house there. So uh he he he he c cordons himself off in the house with a group of his of his peers, uh, about two dozen of them. They they lock the doors, but then someone opens the window on the second floor, leans out, yells at the crowd, a gun a gun is fired, that that man, Captain Campbell is his name, gets shot and killed.

The the fighting begins. They they knock down the doors. There's people charging up the stairs, trying to grab Wilson, pull him down. I mean, he he's he's basically uh on the edge of being uh pulled out and and killed. Um he manages to escape. He is he leaves the city for several days. He doesn't return. Uh his family, he's already moved his family out. Robert Morris, one of the other nation's founders, has taken his family uh to a country house to just keep them safe.

I think uh three or four children by this point with his wife Rachel. Um but what was shocking to me about this whole incident is that this is the most shocking attack of the founding era. I mean the founders are truly shaken by this, right? This is This is several years before uh Shea's rebellion, which, you know, is one of the triggers of the Constitutional Convention. Um

And I think they were just so startled by the intensity and the ferocity of the attack, they didn't quite know what to make of it. Um what was amazing to me about this is Wilson is a guy who comes into this, as we've talked about now quite a bit. As the primary promoter and advocate of the popular rule, popular self-rule, the people's power, the fact that regular people should have all the power to decide what happens, how government runs, who who who serves in government, all of this.

You could very easily see Wilson coming out of a near-death experience at the hands of an angry mob. And saying, you know what? Enough of it. I'm done. Like that's I was wrong. Uh that is not that that is not the right way to to build a government. As certainly many of his peers thought that from the start, right? They did not trust the people. There's a lot of mistrust of regular people that uh threaded through the the founder's writings and their speeches.

Wilson comes out of the Fort Wilson riot, you know, uh, you know, sh d shakes the dust off and says Bring it on. He wants more. He he doubles down on his commitment to popular sovereignty and uh you know democratic self-rule. At the Constitutional Convention, as Bill has explained and as I have explained, Wilson is the foremost advocate. for popular self rule and and popular sovereignty.

And that I think was what really drew me to his story. I was like, why is this guy who is so um, you know, so commit how how is this guy who could how is this guy so committed to popular self-rule even after He nearly loses his life to a mob. And, you know, I think some of it has to do with the fact that he lived so much in his head. Wilson is a Wilson was a a complicated guy and a difficult guy. I think he was an awkward, somewhat aloof.

figure. He was not politically savvy in the way some of the other founders were. Um and I think that also contributed to, you know, the lack of of uh um his appeal. People didn't really get to know him, they didn't really like him when they met him. Um and I think, you know.

Th these are the things that are that are swirling around as the attack happens and then the aftermath. But Wilson is really someone who is so committed in his mind to the right way to d design a government that not even a you know a a brutal attack like the Fort Wilson riot is gonna stop him. Um, but I will say that, you know, the the last point I will make is, you know, Wilson did oppose certain things about um

uh uh the way that the people would would try to design government that I think didn't endear him to those people. So the b the the most obvious example of this is the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, right at the same time that the uh uh the declaration is being drafted and and voted on in the States.

uh or in the colonies at the time, uh you have Pennsylvania drafting what became the most democratic constitution of that era or of any era. And it's famous for its its its emphasis on democracy, on You know, uh it has only a single uh unicameral uh legislature. It has essentially no uh executive, it has very weak uh courts.

Wilson was horrified by this. As someone who actually did believe in popular sovereignty, he saw the Pennsylvania's constitution as being actually a a threat to popular sovereignty. He saw it as being a doorway to tyranny. And so he fought very aggressively against it. In his his vision was one rooted in popular self-rule. But the people saw it at the time as oh, he's not really a Democrat. He doesn't he's not one of us. If anything, he's a

He's a Tory sympathizer. He lik you know, he's he's secretly, you know, protecting the British from, you know, independence. And so I think. He did things like that that, you know, you can understand today, we can understand today as very much a part of his larger vision. But at the time, it did not work in his favor as a man of the people.

He doesn't believe what we thought he believed, and he becomes much more accepted than he had been previously. At any rate the attempts of burning him in effigy or lynching him those receded into the background.

Uh, we've talked a lot about Wilson as a statesman and a political theorist, but uh Jesse, you open uh your book and you talked about this a little bit at the outset, um, with Wilson in a in a very different uh position toward the end of his life. uh where he's on the run from creditors, he's living in a a shabby tavern, he's very far from Philadelphia. Uh how did a founding father and a Supreme Court justice

end up there and what led to such a dramatic reversal of fortune. And I and I do feel like when I read the opening um of your book, uh just that narratively people love uh gossip and uh difficult endings and that uh that in and of itself should make people want to learn more about Wilson uh because what what a uh kind of crazy way uh to end um uh an otherwise pretty illustrious career.

is that he was in uh he was essentially bankrupt. He was in massive debt. Uh and the reason he was in massive debt was because he was a a compulsive land speculator. Um, you know, he uh land speculation was a very common practice among the fan in the founding era. Many of the other founders, George Washington included, engaged in it. Nobody engaged in it with the tenacity or the sort of boldness.

of Wilson. Wilson at one point owned as many as four million acres of land. That is the size of modern day Connecticut. Uh it is a lot of land in in the early republic. Um, and Wilson himself was just he was he was c you would call today he would be diagnosed as a compulsive gambler. He was so addicted to the to the selling and buying of land, to, to, to, you know, he was so over leveraged that he basically got himself

into a debt that he could not climb out of. And with the economic crisis of the mid-1790s, you know, creditors came calling and Wilson uh did not have the money to pay. He was thrown in jail at least twice, once in uh Philadelphia uh again uh in New Jersey and then uh possibly again in um in North Carolina, although that's less clear from the record.

Uh he had to write his son beseeching him to bail him out. Uh this is a sitting Supreme Court justice, by the way, the only Supreme Court justice who's ever gone to jail. Um and his son had to come and bail him out and bring him clothes because he didn't have anything. Um and so this is why Wilson through the seventeen nineties, while he is a justice on the Supreme Court, while he's delivering this remarkable set of law lectures, is digging himself in a hole that he can never get out of.

Uh and Wilson's sort of a attachment to that. um life of land speculation, of growing his own uh empire even as he is developing this new nation. You know, it seems kind of contradictory to us maybe, but uh I think there's an interesting case to be made and some scholars have made it that It's sort of intertwined. It all connects back to his Scottish upbringing and to sort of Enlightenment, Scottish Enlightenment beliefs that.

that virtue, the sort of democratic virtue that we need to be citizens in a in a self-governing republic, and sort of the commerce, right? The the the the back and forth of commerce and and and of um and and and and business. believe. They are actually connected. And so you can see a way in which Wilson saw this all as part of the same project. He he would do he would do good by doing well, you know. Um and I think

That is really uh, you know, what what what the story becomes in the last decade of his life. It wasn't just about his bank account, it was also about You know, the collapse of his entire, you know, his integrity, right? This is a guy who designed the nation, lar you know, was was central to designing the nation, and yet as a Supreme Court justice, he's petitioning Congress on behalf of

um land companies that he has a major stake in. Right? This is I mean t I mean, even putting aside the ethical questions of justices on the court today, this is a

sh just completely shocking thing for a justice of the Supreme Court to do. And yet Wilson was so wrapped up in his own uh you know, in his own compulsion that he that he couldn't stop doing it. So It's really a sad ending to this story, and it's really, as Bill said earlier, the major reason why Wilson is not part of our narrative today.

is there were two things. If you look at Wilson's death, there were kind of two things that the American legal system was really concerned with. One was uh tracking down Pierce Butler's runaway slaves, the other was Throwing Wilson into prison for debt. So anybody who wants to return to the eighteenth century ought to reflect on the way in which one of the principal architects of the Constitution was treated by the system.

Just I'll start with you, Jesse. Um, what does Wilson's uh what do Wilson's ideas teach us about the challenges and possibilities facing American democracy today? And then Bill, I'll I'll pose that same question uh to you.

we'll buy it and read it. It it comes out uh June twenty third, just in time for the uh sesquicentennial uh uh uh observances on July fourth. Um but but you know The s the story of James Wilson that I tell in the book and that I want to kind of p to weigh with to to sit with people here is a story of what America might have been and what it still could be. Um it's a it's a lesson in

I think how much we miss by erasing someone like him and his ideas. You know, we are in this really, I think, uh difficult period where we're debating whether we are still or or or could ever be a democracy. Um and this idea that that the people are the ultimate soft

That is at the heart of James Wilson's vision for America: a directly elected president, directly elected Senate, a Congress based on proportional representation. You know, these are the things that I think he saw as essential to having a functional republic. And we have not really achieved many of them.

So I think Wilson still holds out the promise of what we could be, uh, and that is a democracy. To those who say, you know, well, we're a republic, not a democracy, including members of Congress who should know better, uh, you know, Wilson's life. story and his ideas are to me the answer.

You know, w as I said, we're talking about the founding of the country and we're talking about the future of the country. And to me, Wilson ties those two things together in a way that none of the other founders ha ha i is is able to do.

uh is is really critical, I think, to deepening our understanding of the constitution itself and who we are as a self-governing people. Um and so I hope as you mark America's 250th anniversary with us. You'll return to these figures, to the debates over.

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