American History Hit - The People's Founding Father

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Signatory of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, James Wilson was a sitting Supreme Court justice when he died. So why is he missing from popular history?From inspiring the phrase 'we the people' to starting the ball rolling on the Electoral College, Jesse Wegman joins Don to discuss Wilson's influence on the United States.Jesse is Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of 'The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution'.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's the 4th of October in Philadelphia, 1779. Inside a substantial brick home at 3rd Street and Warren,

about 30 men prepared to defend themselves against approaching attackers who are demanding the surrender of the owner and resident of the house. Tall, stout, ruddy complexioned, with reddish-brown hair and wire glasses poised at the tip of his nose. This man has never seen a day of bowels. never seen a day of battle in his life, but now he finds himself at the center of one on his own property. Shots are fired, and men fall before the city cavalry comes to break things up. Though the war against Britain still rages on, this is nothing revolutionary. This is a class

struggle between common folk Philadelphians and one of the wealthy elite, who just happens to be a leading member of the Second Continental Congress. His name, James Wilson. Hi everybody, I'm Don Wilde and welcome to American History Hit. It is a funny thing how the stories of American history have been passed down. Many of us listening on this side of the pond at least were drilled as children on the founding story involving certain famous individuals and the legendary documents they created and signed. But who these founders were is usually a discussion of a handful of gentlemen when everyone knows a whole bunch of them were in those rooms. 56, to be exact, where the the Declaration of Independence was concerned, all enshrined by the famous signatures. Today's story involves one of those men not often spoken of. And a new book, The Lost Founder, James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for People's Constitution, released just this summer. Its author, and our guest today, is Jesse Wegman, writer, journalist, and senior fellow

at the Brennan Center for Justice. Jesse Wegman, welcome to American History Hit. Thank you so much for having me. 56 men. we usually talk about seven of them. Why such a select group of superstar elite? What divides these guys? Well, certainly the names that most Americans know were central to the founding of this country. I don't mean to, you know, take away from any of their accomplishments. But I think what was astonishing to me was that James Wilson is just sitting there in plain sight and really has been disappeared from the story of the American founding, even though he was central to it. and one of the most prescient of all the founders in terms of seeing where this country was headed

hundreds of years before it got there. So I was thrilled when I stumbled upon him and it led me to write this book. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay. So fascinating to think. It's a seven, it's a list of seven. And for, as you say, very good reason, those guys are remembered well and deeply. But that leaves a lot. I mean, what's the math there? 56 minus seven. So that leaves 49 guys that nobody talks about very often. And James Wilson being one of them, but it's an amazing story and a great book. So let's talk about the one and only James Wilson. Scottish immigrant arrives age 23 in 1765. Can you take me from there? Sure. So Wilson is born in the Scottish lowlands. So that's outside of Edinburgh to a very poor farming family. Right. There was no expectation that he was going to be. part of the elite of this new country across the sea when he was growing up. But slowly the pieces were falling into place for him in ways that no one could anticipate. He's growing up in the middle

of the 18th century in Scotland at a time of revolutions in that country. So there's all kinds of things happening that are affecting him and really making him into the person who comes over and has such an impact in America. He's raised in the Presbyterian Church, which is a very democratic structure, much more so than, say, the hierarchical, the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church. He's educated in Scottish system, which is very much about making sure all children, no matter their station in life, become well educated, learn to read and write. So Scotland has the highest literacy rate in Europe when Wilson is a young boy. That's an astonishing thing for a country that was until recently sort of stuck in the

middle ages. And then you have Wilson's training in what we now call the Scottish. Scottish Enlightenment. Wilson went to university just down the road from his house. He won a scholarship there. He couldn't afford it at St. Andrew's University and then at Glasgow University. And these are two of the centers of the Scottish Enlightenment, which really was this explosion of intellectual thought and democratic belief that has still informs the world today. You know, from David Hume to Adam Smith, Thomas Reed, Francis Hutchison, all these names that everyone's familiar with. Many of the other founders, of course, read their work and knew their work. But Wilson alone studied with them personally. So he comes to America as a 23-year-old man completely just overflowing with both, you know, incredible education, but also ideas, democratic ideas, inclusive ideas, egalitarian ideas that were far ahead of where his peers were. That was one of my biggest surprises when to start reading about this is that, you know, we think of Paris and France is the heart of the Enlightenment and certainly it was. But Scotland was a major bastion of this, isn't it? And that's what comes over with these immigrants pre-revolution.

Yeah. Scotland, you know, is unique. Obviously, the Enlightenment is playing out across Europe. But Scotland is unique in that its thinkers are grappling with something that is different from what everyone else is dealing with. They are grappling with a shift into modernity, right? Scotland had been very poor. It's, you know, Wilson's father was probably using farming techniques that hadn't changed much since the middle ages. it struggled to have any kind of agricultural production.

It was cut off from much of the world. And at the same time, it was struggling over questions of its relationship to England. So these are all things that are happening in the Americas at the same time. And so the thinking that is coming out of Scotland is actually quite relevant to the Americans. These ideas of how do you live together? How do you have a commercial society that comes out of a place that was not as developed until a few decades earlier. All of those questions are ones that Wilson is educated in, and then he comes to America, and he can apply them to his new land, which is struggling with

all of the same stuff. It's a relationship to Britain, most notably. And he ends up writing this essay as a 26-year-old. I like to point out that this is the same age that Bruce Springsteen was when he wrote Born to Run. And it is in the same way. It's Wilson's sort of summational statement, you know, the summation expression of his worldview, and it carries him through to the end of his life. Wilson argues in this essay, right, it's an 11,000-word essay, heavily footnoted, legally learned, historically accurate, where he is talking about the relationship of Britain to the colonies. And what he says is something that nobody has said to that point. This is in 1768, right?

So we're still a few years before the actual revolution. He says, parliament has no authority at all. zero over the colonies. No legal authority of any kind. Now, this is not something anyone else was willing to say. Everyone is sort of grappling with, well, they're sovereign. Britain is sovereign. The king is sovereign. So there's some, there's some relationship here and they have some authority over us, but not over internal taxes, only external taxes. Everyone's sort of doing this funny, awkward dance. And Wilson just comes through like a bulldozer and says, absolutely not. There's no authority here at all. And I'm just going to read you a very quick passage from the beginning of this

11,000 word essay that runs over the course of six editions of a newspaper in New York, he says, all men are by nature, equal and free, no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent. All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it. And such consent was given with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed above what they could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature. And so on. I think those words you might recognize as echoing quite strongly a few years later in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, who drafted that declaration, was sitting with Wilson's essay on his desk. We know this because he's copied the essay into his commonplace book, the place where he keeps all the

quotes he wants to remember. And Wilson had actually held on to this essay after he wrote it for about six years. He didn't publish it until 1774 because he had been warned not to. His mentor said, James, don't do this. you're a new lawyer, you're about to have a good career, don't destroy it at the outset with such a bold statement. He publishes it in 1774, it becomes the talk of the colonies, and Jefferson ends up sort of translating it loosely into the most famous words of the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. So Wilson, right from the

start, as a 20-something is really laying down the principles of the American experiment that we still live by today. I get it. That is so excited. to me because often we live with this sort of murky idea of these ideas, you know, democracy just magically and organically sprouting in this land, this fertile land that we've suddenly occupied and against the tyranny of the tyrannical pressures. But these are original thoughts of young guys coming up. I mean, they're all young at this point. And this guy is a brilliant thinker. I want to describe him physically, but just so people have a picture of him. He's a very tall guy, first of all, kind of stout. He's ruddy, reddish brown hair. He's a very Scottish-looking

guy and wire glasses on the end of his nose. He's a very studied guy. I'm glad you call attention to his physical appearance because it's important to this story and it's important to who he is and it's important to the, in some ways, to his shortcomings, to the ways in which he was not able to achieve everything he wanted. Wilson was an awkward guy. He was socially awkward. He was emotionally awkward. He was sort of, he pushed too hard for things that he wanted. He was very persistent, but he was also hard to get close to. Even his closest friends didn't quite know how to approach him. I have a letter in here that I quote from him to one of his closest friends where he writes, I'm just writing to you to tell you I have nothing to say. You know, it's very kind of someone

who today we might have some diagnosis for, but he was basically a very uncomfortable and aloof person. And the glasses detail is an interesting one because he wore these wire room glasses and they were always sliding down the end of his nose. And in order to keep them from falling off his face, he would tip his head back. He would walk around with his head in the air, with his nose in the air. And that gave him this extra air of aloofness, right? It did not help him and his reputation among the regular people, the common people. These are the people that he, more than any other founder, was speaking on behalf of. He believed in the power of regular people. This was the essence of his vision, popular sovereignty, it's called,

the idea that all political power resides in the common people, resides in just regular Americans or Scots or anywhere you are in the world. They are the basis of government. And so for a guy like that who believes so strongly in that principle and tried to apply it to the development of his new government, it's such a painful irony that, you know, they didn't see him that way. They didn't see him as their avatar or their hero, they saw him as a strange guy that they often didn't like. And in some cases, as I talk about in the book, tried to kill. Well, nonetheless, there are some real quotes that are revealing. George Washington says, as able, candid, and honest, a member as any in convention. I suppose he's talking about the constitutional times, which, incidentally,

James Wilson has as much to do with the declaration as he has to do with the Constitution later on. So William Pierce, Georgia delegate, no man is more clear, copious, and comprehensive than Mr. Wilson. Benjamin Rush famously. His mind while he spoke was one blaze of light. He left an impression despite whatever physical quandaries he had. I want to talk about the mechanics of him getting involved in the founding of stuff. Okay, so first of all, there's a movie to be made about the real conversations that happen. We really sit still with that, you know, famous portrait in our minds or the same as the famous room scape of those guys all, you know, crowded, together in the little clicks. But the reality of it is this, there was real arguments.

There were real discussions for a long period of time and lots of papers running around with stuff to read. He advocated, as you say, for popular sovereignty. How different an idea would this have been at the time or had they been for centuries discussing this? Wilson didn't invent the ideas that he was talking about. Obviously, these are popping up and bubbling up around the world for centuries. He brings them together in a way and he reassembles them. And there's a, there's a, There's a synthetic nature to his thinking, I think, that really is unique and that really makes him stand out from the others. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, so we're talking now 1787, right?

Most of the founders that Americans have heard of, right, the names that you said at the beginning, in general, I think what we've learned about them is that they were uncomfortable with the people being too close to government, right? Regular people scared them, right? There were riots. There was Shay's rebellion right before the Constitutional Convention, right? A lot of these guys, they're elites. Many of them are slaveholders, right?

They are scared of slave revolts. They're scared of, you know, war with Native American tribes. So there's a lot for them to sort of protect, right? They're very interested in their property. And so I think in many cases, we've grown up with this idea that as a rule, the founders didn't want the people close to government. Wilson just blows that wide open. And that was how I first came upon him and why I was so thrilled by him.

You know, I was writing this book some years ago on the Electoral College, the founding and the function and dysfunction of the Electoral College. And I wanted to find out where's the moment that the Electoral College gets adopted by the founders at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia? And I stumble upon this guy, this Scottish guy, this very long-winded Scottish guy, and he keeps talking about things that no one else is talking about, popular sovereignty and political equality and the importance of, you know, popular involvement in government. And it's particularly around that election of the president where he says early in the

convention, in the first week of the convention, he stands up and he says, well, of course, the president should be a single person and he should be elected directly by the people. And he says this sort of as though it's like, you know, it's obvious, right? He hesitates to say it in part because he knows everyone else is going to, you know, sort of balk at it. But to him, it's just common sense. Of course you have a leader who is elected directly by his constituents because that's the only way to hold that person accountable. And yet there's crickets in the room, right?

You know, nobody climbs on to that idea. I think there's just too much discomfort with the idea of popular involvement in government that direct. And so Wilson comes back the next day and proposes what, we now recognize as the Electoral College, this interposing of a body of electors between the executive and the people and the voters themselves. So that's from Wilson, the Electoral College? The Eleanor. Well, yes, he proposes that the day after he says, let's do this directly, you know, he gets no, he gets no buyers on that. So he comes back the next day and he makes this other

proposal. It doesn't get adopted then. It takes another three or four months and it's only in the waning days of the convention when they realize, oh, my God, we still haven't figured out how we're going to choose this executive, that some guys go off into a side room. Wilson is not part of that group, actually. They go off to a side room and they come up with the most convoluted longest single passage of the entire constitution, which is the manner in which the president is elected. And what's amazing about it is that it reflects almost exactly what Wilson had proposed three months earlier, and it is the electoral college that we live with today, more or less. How interesting. So the man who is passionate about popular sovereignty is the guy who also

is a big part of creating the electoral college, which robs the constitution of the very idea. That's crazy. Wilson's life is filled with ironies like this. There's others that I'm sure we'll get to, but that was the one that struck me when I first came across him. However, despite that, you know, his involvement in proposing the electoral college, he alone, he is out in front of everyone else throughout that summer in fighting for regular people to have a role in their government. So another example, the Senate, right? The Senate is something that drives him insane. He does not understand why states need equal power in government, right? To him, states are these arbitrary you know, concoctions by people. They're lines on a map. And he's like, why would you give 40,000 people

in one part of the country, the same power as 10,000 people in another part of the country. That's not fair. He says, that's not, he's like, that's magic. It's not reason. And his idea is obviously people are equal. People are the only relevant unit of measurement of power in government. So he, and he came from Scotland, right? So he has no allegiance to a state and it's power relative to the other states the way that

the other founders do. So all through the summer, he's just arguing, he's banging on the table. He's like, why are you doing? doing this. He says, at one point he says, if you create a Senate that's based on state equality, rather than popular equality, he says that will be a fundamental and a perpetual error. And he says it will end in disease, convulsions, and death. Like, he's very clear that he does not think it is compatible with the image of the American Republic that he has. And I think, you know, looking back 250 years, we can say he had a point. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're bumping up

against the next element of this conversation, which is not only popular sovereignty, but also the power of the federal government versus the state governments, which of course in the next century will play out in a major way. He's already aware of this. And of course, the great equalizer among the people is the federal government versus their states. And that's as reflected by the Senate as well and all that, you know, the arguments about the Senate. He is enormously influential. in what particular element mostly in terms of the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution? Yeah. So Wilson, I think, alone among the framers again, sees the link between those two documents, right? He's one of only six men to sign both of them. He's the only founder who signed both the

declaration and the Constitution and sat on the Supreme Court, right? So that's, you know, that puts him apart right there. But his understanding of the link between the Declaration and the Declaration and the Constitution is unique. To him, the declaration is that ultimate expression of popular sovereignty. The idea of popular sovereignty is not just that the people are the foundation of all government, but that they have the authority to change it whenever they please. If it is not making them happy, they can just change it. And there's no particular rules around that, right? It's kind of a scary thought, but it's also a very exhilarating one. And Wilson understood the declaration to be expressing that perfectly, right? So the Declaration of Independence is literally a people saying, we are no longer

going to be governed by you. We are going to be creating our own government. That's popular sovereignty right there. He did not want to lose that spirit 11 years later when he comes to the constitutional convention as a delegate from Pennsylvania, which is where he lived. He, you know, he became a famous and well-paid lawyer pretty soon after arriving in America and he lives very well in Philadelphia. He goes down the street to the Pennsylvania State House, and he, you know, insists on including that spirit. And the way in which he does it, as you're suggesting, is not only through making sure that the people are, or trying as hard as he can to make sure that the people are central to this new document, but that the federal government, which represents

all of them, which represents everyone equally, is supreme. So among many other things, he writes, we the people at the beginning of the Constitution, those three words, which are sort of, you know, civic scripture to us today. Wilson put those words on paper for the first time. We, the people, he put them at the very beginning of the document to import that spirit of the declaration of popular sovereignty into the new document to make sure everyone knew who had made this new charter and who could change it if they wanted. We do ordain and establish this constitution, right? And then he also added things that made sure that the federal government was going to be powerful. So the supremacy clause, the clause that makes the federal constitution supreme

over the states. That was a Wilson addition. The necessary and proper clause, which, you know, ends up giving Congress immense power to legislate for the country. That was a Wilson addition, right? Today, even still, most of Congress's powers expressed through the necessary and proper clause, because it is expansive. It includes all these powers that are actually not written into the Constitution, but that are required in order to carry out the powers that are written into the Constitution. All of these things come together to sort of build a sort of a system and a vision of government in which there is one federal government that is supreme and it is, and it represents the people equally wherever they live. And James Wilson is the bridge between those two ideas,

those two, those two documents together. That's right. Jesse, when James Wilson comes to America, where does he settle and how does he get established as such a brainy guy? So Wilson lands in New York Harbor in 1765 in the fall on a boat from Scotland. He very quickly makes his way down to Pennsylvania. He becomes a tutor at what would be at the College of Philadelphia, which is now the University of Pennsylvania, in Latin. But he's pretty bored by that. I think it's sort of beneath him in a way. And he becomes an apprentice to John Dickinson, a legal apprentice, John Dickinson,

who's already one of the most established and respected. lawyers in the colonies. And within a year or so, Wilson has trained and become a very good lawyer himself. He starts a practice in Reading, Pennsylvania, then in Carlisle. Very quickly, he becomes one of the leading lawyers in the colonies. And for the rest of his life, he is known as perhaps the top lawyer and the legal mind in America. So is he part of the first Continental Congress at that point? He's elected to Congress from Pennsylvania and ends up being a member of the Pennsylvania delegation where he has to vote on the question of independence. So this is actually one of the first really major things he does in Congress is vote on that. And this is one of the

things that has made his name and sort of sullied his reputation for hundreds of years. If you're familiar with the 1776 and Broadway musical, Wilson is a character in that musical. It's unusual to have Wilson appear anywhere in stories of the founding. But he appears there and in a pretty unflattering light. He shows up as a guy who's kind of a temporizer, right? He can't decide which side he wants to be on. And eventually, under extreme pressure, he agrees to vote yes on the declaration, right, on independence, which is a big deal, right? Pennsylvania needed to vote yes for this to work at all. He votes yes. He's the decisive vote, but he says, I'm just, he basically says, I'm doing this because, you know, I don't want to be the guy that's remembered as the holdout. That's not really true.

That's not what happened. Wilson actually pretty skillfully navigated the Pennsylvania delegation to a yes vote when it was initially a no vote. But the way in which he did it required some delaying of the vote. And he never lived that down. So, you know, his time in Congress was, I think it was very frustrating for him. He did not, it was, it was a feckless institution. Right. That was one of the reasons that they gather in Philadelphia in 1787 is that Congress can't do anything. It can't govern this new country that has just been created. There's no executive, right? There's no president.

There's no real federal judiciary. And I think he's just losing his mind over how badly designed this first draft of American government is. He's seeing it from the inside. He's seeing it from the outside. And he's like, let's do this all over. Let's start over. And let me take charge this time.

How much did he alienate those founders that we know through this process as he's making all these noises about popular sovereignty and everything? They think so highly of them, but is it within those conversations that he begins to, they begin to move away from him? You know, Wilson has interesting relationships with all the other leading founders. I actually don't think he alienates them as much as we might expect. James Madison in particular, the two of them work hand in hand through much of that summer of 1787. They're both very much in favor of what we call proportional representation, that idea that, you know, one person, one vote is what we call it today. But it's this idea that people are represented equally in government.

Madison is on his side about that. Madison even agrees with Wilson at one point that electing the president by a direct popular vote is the way to go. But Madison does say that it's not going to happen. And he says, and that's on the score of the Negroes. That's his quote, on the score of the Negroes. And what Madison is saying there has to do with the fact that obviously the southern slaveholding states, of which Madison is a member, right? He's a slaveholder himself, are never going to go for a system where they can't count all of their enslaved people who obviously have no right to vote. If you have a direct vote, they're not going to get credit for all of those slaves. So you then end up having this thing called the three-fifths clause, right? And this is another way in which Wilson,

the irony of Wilson's life, it's James Wilson, who proposes incorporating this three-fifths ratio into the Constitution. And that's something I struggle with in the book because it goes against everything he believes in. You know, people have said to me, oh, don't, you know, you can't apply modern day morals to, you know, that time and people are different, da, da, da, presentism. And I say, I'm not, I'm not applying my morals. I'm applying his. You know, like Wilson says, you know, Wilson is all about equality. He's all about dignity. He's all about consent of the governed, right? slavery, human bondage violates all of those things. And there's people saying it at the time. They are not shy about talking about the moral obscenity of this practice. Even the guys who are doing it

themselves. Jefferson is very eloquent about this. Madison, you know, George Mason, like they're all talking about it. Wilson is pretty quiet on this topic. And I was frustrated at him. I wanted him to be more heroic. I wanted him to be at least more rhetorically clear about the evil that he was willing to accommodate here. Instead, he proposes this three-fifths ratio as a way to keep the southern states on board, right? Because they're saying, we're going to walk if you do anything to our slaves. The three-fifths, what becomes the three-fifths compromise, gives them this outsized power for their enslaved, enslaved populations. It gives them the three-fifths compromise. It gives them more power in the Congress. And then when the electoral college that Wilson also proposed

gets adopted, that translates into extra power to choose the president. So Virginia slaveholders, you know, our president for most of the nation's first four decades, all because of these things that James Wilson sort of inadvertently put in the Constitution. It's a, it's, it's one of the many contradictions of the man and of the time. Obviously, you know, enslavement and we hold these truths to be self-evident are fundamentally contradictory. So the contradictions of, the country from its founding really are embodied in Wilson himself as well. In James Wilson, it's so fascinating. He's a real lightning rod in his life.

One of the major events that happens is before the Constitution is being made. It's 1779, this thing called the Fort Wilson Riot, it's called. It's actually about his house in Philadelphia, right? Yeah. So we were talking about how he's awkward and how he's aloof and how he struggles to kind of, he's not politically, you know, that intelligent or savvy. He does not know how to talk to regular people, the regular people that he promotes. And they return the favor.

They don't like him very much. And there's several reasons for this. I've touched on some of them. One of them is the way in which he delayed the vote for independence in Pennsylvania. Another is that that same year, 1776, Pennsylvania passed what remains today the most democratic state constitution in American history. Wilson was not a supporter of it. you would think based on the things we've been talking about that he would be, right?

Because he was all about democracy. He was all about regular people having a role in government, a direct role in government. And yet, for reasons that I go into in the book, he was not a supporter of that particular constitution that made people very mad at him. And then in 1778, 79, he's a wealthy lawyer. He's returned to Philadelphia after the British occupation and ends up representing loyalists who are accused of treason. He is their defense lawyer, and he gets many of them off. This infuriates Philadelphians, many of whom are already suffering from the shortages of wartime, right? The country

is still at war with Britain at this point for its independence, and lots of regular Philadelphians don't have the money to buy bread or sugar. And Wilson here is representing the bad guys, right? He's already on their shit list for, you know, for the things he did in the mid-1770s around independence and the state constitution. In October of 1779, a group of militias, they've had enough. They announced that they are going out looking for the elites of Philadelphia, right? These are the, these guys that represent all the ways in which, you know, there's these inequalities and these unfairnesses that they're suffering from, and they want to go pick them up. They want to go take them into custody. So they start marching around the city. They gather at a tavern in Philadelphia. They drink a fair

amount and then they head out on the town with arms to go find these men. They end up at James Wilson's house, which is this pretty fancy, you know, townhouse in the middle of the city. Wilson gets word that they're coming. So he barricades himself in the house with about two dozen of his friends. And this mob, probably 200 or so people show up. Gunfire, you know, breaks out there. Seven people get killed. 17 people are wounded. Wilson escapes, you know, within inches of his life. He's he gets out and has to escape the city for a few days. But it's this astonishing and sort of terrifying attack. It gets called the Fort Wilson riot.

And for many founders, it's the most shocking riot of the revolutionary period because it's Americans against Americans. And it's so stunning again because Wilson, these are the people Wilson in theory is speaking on behalf of. And I think what sort of inspired me or sort of lit my way throughout this book is the question at the heart of that attack and Wilson's response to it, which is here's a guy who had built his, you know, political worldview on the power

and the equality of regular people. Those people then come and try to kill him. And then a few years later, he comes to the Pennsylvania State House and he helps write the new constitution for this country, the, you know, Constitution 2.0, the one that we have today. And he is no less committed to those values

than he was before he was attacked. And I just think if anybody in a America could be given a mulligan to say like, well, you know, maybe I was a little bit overzealous in, you know, how much power I wanted the people to have. Maybe I trust too much in the people. It would be James Wilson who nearly died at their hands. And yet, here he is just as committed as before. And that sort of, that to me was a mystery that I struggled with throughout the entire book and is a fascinating part of his life to me. Still, he could have rationalized the Electoral College better as a result of that seven people.

dying on his watch, I suppose. Exactly. Although he didn't, yes. Yeah. Tell me about his later life and his downfall. It gets real ugly for James Wilson later in his life. Yeah. So, you know, the lost founder is the title and the lost part of this book is to me just

as interesting as the founder part. And that's obviously, this is why you and I and most other Americans don't know him. The primary reason that Wilson has gone from our narrative today about the founding is the way in which his life ended. And the way in which his life ended ties back to something that started happening soon after he arrived in America, or at least that's when we have records of it starting. And this is land speculation. This is an activity that a lot of the other founders are involved in.

It's a side hustle for many of them. It's, you know, buying and selling land in this new country. It's an activity that earns some of them lots of money. Wilson gets involved in it to a degree that nobody else does. He's sort of almost addicted to it. I think you would probably today call it a compulsioner. or an addiction, like gambling almost. And as he earns more money,

he becomes this very skilled, this very sought after lawyer, he starts spending that money on land. And by the late 1780s, he is a leading lawyer to or on the board of many of the biggest land companies in America. He personally owns four million acres of land. That is a large amount of land. That is the size of roughly Connecticut,

today. So he has so much land. That means he's heavily over leveraged, right, because he can't possibly be paying off all the, paying all the mortgages on that. And when the economy turns south, he is extremely vulnerable. And this is what happens in the 1790s. So Wilson, by this point, just to put him in place in this moment, he is a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court. Appointed by George Washington. Pointed by George Washington to the first Supreme court. There's no question that James Wilson had to be on that court. A story that I tell in the book is that he actually intended to be chief justice. He had just created the position of chief justice, right? So he's like, of course that job's mine. I'm the best lawyer in America. And he writes a letter to

Washington. This is part of his awkwardness and his failure to sort of understand politics. He writes a letter to Washington and he basically says, please, you know, I'd like to be chief justice. You don't do that, right? No chief justice in history has ever done that. Certainly you don't do that to George Washington, who was this paragon of rectitude and sort of punctiliousness, you know, George Washington is like, no, I'm not going to give you that job just because you ask me for it. I'm going to make the decision, you know, the way I make all my decisions very carefully and, you know, based on merit and all that, blah, blah, blah. And Wilson is mortified, right? He's so upset that he doesn't get this job because that would have been the pinnacle of his career. That would have been the pinnacle of his life.

It's 1789. You know, he's already the best lawyer in America. He should have been chief justice. He was never going to be president. And so what we know from looking at these letters between Washington and Adams and other founders is they all knew at this time Wilson's finances are disaster, right? And they don't want him in a position of such power, right? They have to make him, they do put him on the court because you couldn't not put him on the court. He's too good for that. But they couldn't, they didn't want to make him chief judges. So instead they make Washington makes John Jay chief justice. But then he passes over Wilson twice again for the Chief Justice role. He does once, I think, and then Adams does, because they all know this is a dangerous guy to put anywhere near the absolute leadership of a branch of the federal government.

So Wilson, in 1796, his finances are in such a mess that he actually goes bankrupt. He gets thrown in debtor's prison in Philadelphia. He gets out there. He goes to New Jersey. He's thrown in debtors prison in New Jersey when two of his creditors, track him down. Okay. He is a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice. I like to say he is to date the only Supreme Court justice to have seen the inside of a prison cell. Wow, sir. And he writes his son, Bird, and he says, Bird, get me the hell out of here. Bring me clothes, bring me money,

bring me food. I need everything. Bird bails him out and then he goes on the lamb. And he runs down. Eventually, he ends up in coastal North Carolina. This is where the book begins. He ends up in coastal North Carolina in the back, he goes into hiding in the back of a tavern in this town, Edenton, which is where one of the other Supreme Court justices lives. That's why he ended up there. It's his friend James Iredel. And he hides in the back of his tavern for nearly a year. And while he is there, he contracts malaria and dies of malaria, a horrible death of malaria in August of 1798. At the age of 55. At the age of almost 56, that's right. This is the tragedy. At the of your book, the deepest irony of all, this brilliant man from such an important power center

of the country, the early country at that time, who is that such a bridge between our founding documents, the engine of so much behind it ends up disgraced and insolvent, nearly forgotten. And it begins almost immediately, right? There is no obituary. There's no public announcement of his death. He's buried in an nearly unmarked grave, you know, in that town of Edenton. there's no state funeral of any kind, right? It's really a shocking disappearance that begins almost immediately. I mean, he contributes to it, right? He chooses to disappear himself by running away, but then we all contribute to it as well by agreeing not to talk about him. He disappears throughout most of the 19th century. And so really one of the interesting parts of this book is

when does Wilson come back into our narrative? And that's, that to me, is a fascinating illustration of where his ideas still hold purchase with the rest of us. And I think in this moment right now, it feels especially important to talk about popular involvement in government, how the people actually are the government, not the president, not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, not a king, not the federal government or the state governors or anything like that, but the people themselves. That's an idea, I think, that has particular resonance today. It seems so stamped in stone all of this stuff, but in fact it was a bubbling percolation of ideas from the likes of James Wilson and all the rest. And this is the way to find that out.

A lousy businessman, brilliant statesman, incredible lawyer, dies in the back of a tavern. Not your typical story. Get the book. It's called James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution. Its author is Jesse Wegman, former New York Times journalist, author, teacher, constitutional scholar, as you can tell. currently with the Brennan Center for Justice. Thank you so much, Jesse. It's really been a pleasure.

I love talking to you. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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