#212: Constitution Day - Rediscovery of the Lost Founder feat. Jesse Wegman

Watch this video episode on our YouTube channel!

Happy Constitution Day the year of America's 250th birthday!

He was only one of six Signers to place his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. 

He is the man who was one of the major architects of our federal government. 

He became arguably the biggest defender of democracy among the Founders.

And yet, his name has been largely forgotten.

His name is not Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Franklin. 

His name is James Wilson, the Founding Father you have never heard of before.

Jesse Wegman, Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center and a former NYT opinion columnist, shares his fascination of Wilson and his contributions, oddities, and even survival from a mob attack. Hear how Wilson's arguments and contributions shaped the Constitution and made a lasting impact on the country we call home today.

Get your copy of The Lost Founder!

Check out Jesse's website at jessewegman.com!

Follow Jesse on his Substack "Major Questions with Jesse Wegman"!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

He didn't originate these ideas, but he's starting to synthesize them in a way that nobody had yet. The essay that Wilson wrote, he had been advised to put away. It was so bold at the time that his mentor said, you know, James, don't publish this. 1774, six years later, there's a lot more appetite for that kind of an argument. Wilson publishes it in a newspaper in New York, and Thomas Jefferson has it on his desk as he's drafting the Declaration of Independence two years later. And you can hear the echoes of the words I just read you in We Hold These Truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Patriotism, faith, national unity, education, fiscal responsibility, civility, the values that define America. Fascinating stories and talks from America-loving patriots dedicated to preserving freedom, opportunity, and justice. Welcome to the Friends and Fellow Citizens Podcast. Hello everybody, happy Constitution Day. I am your host, Sherman Taloski. Welcome to Friends and Fellow Citizens. This is another episode, a special episode, talking about the Constitution of the United States. We had our inaugural Constitution Day bonus episode last year, and we just needed to do it at the end. Today we're going to be discussing a founding father you have never heard of before, but he is one of the most influential founders in our history, and someone who just doesn't get enough recognition. But our distinguished guest today is going to reveal so much more about this founder, and you're going to be blown away by just how influential and how important this gentleman is to our country. Before we get to our content, first of all, a big shout out and thank you to our dedicated Patreon supporters. They help to keep the show going and are so incredibly generous with their contributions. So if you want to be part of a podcast that values American traditions, such as patriotism, like civility, like national unity, like fiscal responsibility, become a part of our podcast and join our membership here in the Patreon page down in the show notes below. Without further ado, I'm going to introduce our guest today today. Our guest is Jesse Wegman. Jesse is a senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Brennan Center. He works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee, and Brennan Center Ventures on Electoral Policy and Democracy. From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times Editorial Board, where he wrote more than 1,000 editorials and signed pieces on law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and the rule of law. His work was part of a Times package that won the Pulzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. For the Times, Wegman was a senior editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, a legal editor at Reuters, and a reporter and producer for National Public Radio. Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President, The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, published by the St. Martin's Press in 2020, and the book that we're going to be discussing today called The Lost Founder, James Wilson and The Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution. The first full-length biography in more than 70 years of the most democratic of all the American founders. Wegman has been a regular guest on MSNBC, CNN, and many other national local TV and radio programs to discuss the Electoral College and Democracy Reform more broadly. I'm very excited to welcome Mr. Jesse Wegman onto the podcast. Jesse, thank you so much for coming to our podcast.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Obviously, we used to celebrate America 250, so we've got to keep the party going, right? So with this, uh with these conversations. And uh I came across your uh your a new book. Uh I it was obviously by accident, because that's how great ideas come from. And I I came across your book, and uh the your title, the title of your book is The Lost Founder. And I've got a copyright here, and uh I'm it's so fascinating to see uh see people studying the founders, but not just the the big founders, as uh it's it's it's definitely common to cover Washington and Adams, all these, but we're gonna be talking about a founder that probably no one's ever heard of before listening to this podcast, and that's James Wilson. Uh, this is fascinating, and I'm so glad that you decided to put a lot of research and effort into this book. Before we get to the mean of our conversation, though, can you tell us a bit about your background, your experience in journalism, and particularly your interest in the Supreme Court, which is one of your specialties there?

SPEAKER_00 5:07

Sure. Uh I've been a journalist for 30 years or so now. Um, and the last half of that time, roughly, I was at the New York Times on the editorial board. Uh, and there I was writing about the Supreme Court, um, constitutional law, rule of law issues, democracy reform. You know, I think as uh when Trump won his first term, I think a lot of our focus uh got adjusted, and I ended up writing a lot more about um the history of and the future of democracy and and how basic structures that we often took for granted actually worked. And that that led me to my first book, which was called Let the People Pick the President. It was an argument uh in favor of a direct election of the president. And it was in the process of writing that book that I found my way to James Wilson. Um, I, like you, and probably many of your listeners or viewers here, uh, was so shocked that I didn't know who Wilson was, because it's very clear uh on reading Madison's notes and then on digging even just a little bit into the history of this that Wilson is a central figure in the country's founding, from the Declaration of Independence to the uh Constitution to the first Supreme Court, he is not only at the center of all these uh institutions and events, but he's also sort of in terms of his principles and his vision, he is so far ahead of the other founders. Um, he can he sees an America that more accurately reflects where we are today than any of the other founders did. And so the moment I stumbled on him, which happened in the writing of that first book when I was reading James Madison's notes of the 1787 convention, and found this guy saying things that sounded so jarringly modern to my ears, you know, so out of place in a room full of people that I thought were mostly very skeptical of popular involvement in government. Here's this guy from Scotland saying, no, of course, the the people should be as directly involved as possible. And when you're electing a president, the people should elect the president directly. I thought, oh my God, I didn't know somebody who was arguing that at the convention. I look into it. James Wilson is this the guy. And, you know, he is clearly the most well-respected lawyer in the country at the time. Everybody says so. He's he's the greatest legal thinker, and he becomes, you know, a member of the first Supreme Court. Uh, and yet he his life uh you know has a very tragic and and premature end, which is what led to his erasure from American history and what led me to want to write this book.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

I love the motivation part. It's almost like when you're busy thinking of doing of something else or you're doing something else. It's not, it's really those great ideas that creep in. It's kind of like uh how they just you just you don't know where that crack is in your mind and all of it's like how did you how did that thought get in here?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Uh I I appreciate you sharing about that. And I I I want to follow up on that. This is a question I asked, I've asked a couple other people who've studied founders that are not the the giants that we we know. Uh how do you think that in a way James Wilson found you in the sense that obviously I mean you were working on a different project, but did you find that there was a a resonance in terms of the philosophy or just um how how do you think that resonance really turned into action uh as you were coming up with the plan and the research for putting the get of the book?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

That's a great, really interesting question. It's not one I've been asked, and yet it's one that really makes me think because if you're gonna spend a number of years with somebody, right, in the process of writing a biography, that person has to speak to you on some really, you know, profound level, on an almost like pre uh pre-cognitive level, right? You have to identify with them in some way to want to write about them and want to spend so much time in their life. Especially someone like James Wilson, who's a pretty he was an awkward guy. He was he was aloof, he was socially uncomfortable, ill at ease, even his friends didn't quite know how to relate to him. Uh, I have a lot of examples of in the book of people saying, I I I wish you would tell me how you are, but I know you won't. Um, you know, he he writes one letter to a friend and says, uh, I'm just writing to tell you I have nothing to say. You know, uh he's he's definitely he he would be diagnosed with something today if he were alive now. But I think I I was drawn to him, and maybe he spoke to me and found me in the sense that you're suggesting, in that there's a you know, there is this, there is a duality and a dilemma at the heart of democracy, right? The on the one hand, you have the kind of the beauty of it, right? The notion that this is uh a quote from E. B. White, the great essayist of the last century, who said democracy is the idea that uh no, democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. Um, which I think is just a beautiful way of framing the importance of democracy and also of acknowledging that majority rule, which is what that quote is referencing, is so valuable to us because it is the only system of government that, it's the only system of making decisions in government that treats all people as equal, right? This was James Wilson's fundamental guiding light is that people are the ultimate source of authority in government, and they all must be treated as equal in the making of decisions about their lives. So that is something that Wilson adhered to, in theory at least, more than any other founder. And so do I. At the same time, Wilson is struggling with the duality part, right? The underbelly, the dark underbelly of democracy, which is that kind of background, lurking threat of mob violence, right? And so Wilson experiences it firsthand, actually. So one of the one of the highlights for me of the book, the net one of the sort of narrative um touchstones of the book is uh roughly in the middle, uh, in 1779. So between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention, Wilson is attacked in his home by a mob of 200 or so militiamen who are furious at him and the other elites of Philadelphia. He's a famous and wealthy lawyer by this point. Um they're mad because uh Philadelphia is suffering from wartime shortages, and a lot of regular people are suffering. You know, they can't even buy the daily necessities. Um, you know, these are the regular people that Wilson throughout his life is speaking on behalf of, is, is, is, you know, arguing in you know the Constitutional Convention and in Congress and on the Supreme Court. You know, he's arguing for their sovereignty, right? And yet they don't like him. And so they attack his house, there's a it's a it's a it's a big fight. There's seven people are killed, I think 17 people are wounded. Um, Wilson escapes barely with his life. Um and then he comes back, you know, a few years later he comes back and he is no less an advocate for popular rule, for popular participation in government. And so that kind of that balancing of you know, the the dark side and the light side of democracy was something that I felt Wilson was doing his whole life, was or was attempting to do. And it's something that I find myself struggling with. And I think all decent people find ourselves struggling with, especially today, where the specter of political violence is greater than it's been in generations, and you know, we just lived through January 6th, which is truly a mob attack on a house, the people's house. So I feel like we're all continuing to live with that duality and struggle with how to how to operate within it in the same way James Wilson was. And that was why he spoke to me in particular for this book.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

I really appreciate what you shared about the duality element, because it does seem at times in a democracy, particularly when there's a lot of prosperity in in general, at least relative to other countries, right? Is that it's easy to pick and choose almost like a buffet line of what you like uh in the democracy, and then the the rest you just like uh you know, whatever. It so there is that in some ways that complacency too, right? Of of thinking that, well, in democracy there is that element of freedom which we enjoy, and I think it's important to to highlight, but there's also the the great cost, right, and the great uh work that needs to be done to uphold that democracy. Unfortunately, it is not a buffet line, and and uh I would say that and say I think the decline of buffets in Vegas is a is a uh a tragedy in and of itself, but uh uh nonetheless uh I do think that that there that that urgency to keep keep on reaffirming the the principles and those pillars democracy. I think that's so important. And I'm glad that you you you highlight that. Uh I imagine that Wilson uh probab probably should have gone into the home security business. Maybe he could have found an ADT at the time. Uh if if he had the maybe he just didn't have the time. I'm sure he had an had a reasonable excuse there. Uh Jesse, I want to now go to uh I think I like how you start off with with that story because I think it it and it might make all of us wonder it's like, okay, how do we get to that point? So I want to go to earlier in Wilson's life. So Wilson is a Scott. Uh so I imagine he would have enjoyed the World Cup pretty well up and well not up until Scottle was knocked out, of course. But uh I uh he's a Scott and uh he he actually has an interesting connection with John Dickinson, who uh would have an influence there uh and with the with the uh with not well not just with the declaration, obviously there was he had an interesting stance on there, but of course with the Constitution later on, as Wilson would have with the contributions there. What can you share about Wilson's early involvement in the revolutionary period? Uh there every signer has a different angle in terms of how they saw independence uh there. How did he fit into the early parts of our American Revolution?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

So, like you say, Wilson is born in Scotland uh and raised uh outside of Edinburgh in the lowlands. Uh he's in a he's a child of a poor farm family, and uh they uh expect him to go into the ministry. Uh they are devout Presbyterians, and he does not end up going into the ministry. It does not appeal to him. Uh he does start school. Uh, this is this is a feature that is uh special to Scotland at the time, is that um the schooling there uh is is incredibly well developed. Uh they have what they call a school in every parish, is the quote. And they insist on giving all children, whatever station they come from in life, uh a basic education, uh, reading, writing. Scotland, by the time Wilson is a child, is uh the most literate in all of Europe. And it's that's a remarkable achievement for a country that was until very recently uh behind a lot of other countries. You know, it was fairly stuck in many ways in the Middle Ages. Uh Wilson grows up, he becomes a young man in that world, a world where it was expected that everyone would get the same sort of attention in an educational environment, in the religious environment, the Presbyterian church in which he was raised is a much more democratically structured institution than the Catholic Church or the Anglican Church. So Wilson is, you know, he's in these environments that sort of uh prioritize and model democratic life, right? People living together, being treated as equals, and making decisions about their lives together. I think that was something that Wilson had to a degree that almost no other founder did. And then he ends up going to university at St. Andrews and then at Glasgow. So two of the leading universities of the world, one of them, St. Andrews, is just down the road from his home in Scotland, and the other one in Glasgow, uh, he studies there at those two universities with the leading minds of what we now call the Scottish Enlightenment. So this is Adam Smith and Thomas Reed, and they, you know, the earlier versions are David Hume and Francis Hutcheson, people who are really revolutionizing uh the way we think about um government and society and economies uh and relationships. You know, there it's it's really this explosion of thought and philosophizing that Wilson is right in the middle of. So when he's 23 years old and decides he's gonna come to America, like a lot of young, ambitious men from that part of the world at that time, he comes just imbued with all of these various influences, the the democratizing influences of his church and of his schooling, the intellectual influences of the Scottish Enlightenment, which, you know, to focus in on one, that Thomas Reed, one of his professors, uh uh was was was most known for the common sense theory, his common sense theory that gave Thomas Paine the title for his famous pamphlet in 1776. But the common sense theory is all about regular people having access to truth, everyone being able to discern truth, to access wisdom in the same way, regardless of their schooling, right? That was something that other thinkers did not agree with at the time, right? There were certain people who had more ability, say. Uh the common sense theory, and the one that Wilson was really attached to suggested that everybody had this ability. Everybody at least had the ability. Um, and so he comes to America when he's 23 years old. It's the middle of the 1760s. Uh, the Stamp Act crisis is underway just as he's arriving uh in New York Harbor. And he brings, I mean, he's one of the most learned people in the colonies all immediately upon stepping off the boat. And he uh, as you as you mentioned, he uh apprentices in law under John Dickinson. So Dickinson is one of the leading lawyers of the colonies at the time, so that's a that's a good apprenticeship to get. Um, Dickinson is the author of Letters from a Farmer, which is one of the most famous pre-revolutionary, you know, tracts, these this series of, I think, a dozen essays, um, which make a quite compelling case for independence. Wilson studies with him, then goes off and opens his own legal practice. And in in the the years immediately after arriving, it's 1768, so he's just 26 years old. Wilson drafts this essay that in some ways is really like lays out the argument that he would be then pursuing for the rest of his life, the idea of popular sovereignty, the idea that people are the sovereign, right? And his argument in this essay is that uh Britain, the British Parliament, has no uh has no authority at all over the colonies. Um, this is not an argument anyone else is making at the time. To the extent that people are having that debate and trying to figure out the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies, they're doing this dance of, well, Britain is sovereign, obviously. The you know, the king is sovereign. We're there there must be some power that they have over us, but we're not quite sure what they're arguing over, what the nature of that sovereignty is. Wilson comes in and says, no, there's there's no sovereignty at all. The only sovereignty is in the people. And he has this quote, I'll just read you briefly from it at the beginning of this essay. This essay, by the way, is 11,000 words long, heavily footnoted, it's uh deeply legally sophisticated, it's very uh historically learned. And at the beginning of it, 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. Such consent was given with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed. Obviously, these aren't Wilson's like he didn't originate these ideas, but he's starting to synthesize them in a way that nobody had yet. And six years later, actually eight years later, Thomas Jefferson is drafting the Declaration of Independence. The essay that Wilson wrote, he had been advised to put away, it was so bold at the time that his mentor said, you know, James, don't publish this. You're you're about to have a good career in the law, you don't want to wreck it at the at the outset, because it wasn't an argument people were ready to hear. 1774, six years later, there's a lot more appetite for that kind of an argument. Wilson publishes it in a newspaper in New York, and Thomas Jefferson has it on his desk as he's drafting the Declaration of Independence two years later. And you can hear the echoes of the words I just read you in we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. So, right from the beginning, Wilson's own ideas, Wilson's own writings are really becoming uh this the DNA of the American experiment and of the revolution.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

That is that is incredible to hear to imagine Jefferson consulting Wilson's notes. I mean, that and there's so many people who would probably just think, oh, Jefferson sat under a tree and just thought of all everything.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Well, well, Jefferson is just to be clear, Jefferson is totally open about the fact that he's a magpie, right? He's he he's pulling from a lot of different sources to he taught he calls it he's he's you know it's the or the harmonizing sentiments of the day, right? So he he's clear that he's borrowing, but what hadn't, I think, been fully appreciated is how much Wilson's essay in particular influenced him. And we know that it did because in Jefferson's commonplace book, his his you know, his private book where he kept quotes that matter to him, he's copied out entire chunks of that essay that I'm telling you about. So he's clearly influenced by Wilson in the writing of the what we now consider the most famous words and the most sort of soaring rhetoric of that declaration.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yeah, academia side wants to make sure that Jefferson used the right citations.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Right. No, no, I it the declaration would have been, I think, somewhat less impactful had it been footnoted.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Uh well, uh I'm I'm sure W Wilson is like, don't give me PTSD about some maybe some of the assignments that you had back at university. Um that that's that's amazing here, Jesse. And I it reminds me of how when we talk about the declaration, a lot of people might just think that it just kind of came out from nowhere that everyone was on board uh on uh all the time. And and it just wasn't the case. I mean, I just recorded a solo show for uh an upcoming episode beyond this episode, and it's about Richard Henry Lee. And Richard Henry Lee is the one who puts out the resolution, and uh it was it was put out actually in early June, and so it's John Yeah, and John Hancock's like, oh well, we gonna we're gonna debate that later, and so that's why we get the July 4th timing, is because uh there there was still a lot of debate about that, and so it just it's really fascinating to learn about Wilson's contributions there. And I think he he really did seems like he really did have that intellectual foundation to really see far. And I think he studied under a very astute uh politician of John Dickinson, uh, which was actually covered in a previous interview episode, too. Uh it's it's just mind-blowing, you know, like how all these are.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Well, and Wilson also, you know, during that debate, uh Wilson plays an important role in the Pennsylvania consideration of the Declaration because he actually is a delegate to Congress from Pennsylvania at the time that the declaration is being debated, and he slows down Pennsylvania's vote on the declaration. There is a good political reason for this, and I talk about it in the book, but suffice it to say that the optics of it aren't good because it makes Wilson look like a temporizer. It makes him look like someone who is not sufficiently committed to the cause of independence. So the revolutionaries, you know, they don't forget that and they're they're pissed at him for that. Later that same year of 1776, he opposes the uh Pennsylvania Constitution, the newly adopted Pennsylvania Constitution, which is famously the most democratic in the country. Um these are the kinds of things that build to the anger against him that leads to that attack on his house that we talked about. You know, uh all of them kind of somewhat attributable to his inability to kind of uh perceive how to behave politically in a savvy way. So he doesn't quite have the politics skills of Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison, of Hamilton. You know, he he's somewhat like he's he lives in his head, and this gets him in trouble. So that you're right, that obviously the debate over the declaration uh is is fairly fraught uh for for quite some time. But Wilson's role in slowing down Pennsylvania's vote, he eventually votes in favor of the declaration. Um, but slowing it down, you know, he never he was never allowed to live that down.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Wow. And it's and again, I think a testament to the that politics that was going on, and there's again there's so so much out there. And I'm really I'm I want to get into about you're talking about the anger there, because yeah, and as when the the delegates me, there's of course that famous line, right? They pledged and they're uh mutually pledge each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. And boy, was that the case. You know, although later on, there were obviously some signers who never lived to see what the United States would look like. There were some that did live a long time. And when and the conflict already started, of course, this is 1776, but of course, we already had what Lexington conquered the year before, and so uh there was already that conflict as dragging on. I'm curious to know, Jesse, about what led his anger, because I'm kind of seeing a couple things here. This is just just theories or just guesses that I've got. One is that with with any sort of element in a society, there's always gonna be this some element of anti-establishment sentiment, right? Like this idea that, well, you're leading us to you've declared independence, okay. Now what? Right? How do how do we win this thing? And as there were a number of subsequent defeats in the revolution, I mean you're you're based in New York, obviously Battle of Long Island later on that was not a not a success in a lot of ways, but just like um there's there's I think that sentiment there. But then there's perhaps the um you know the the element of uh well how how are we uh how are we making use uh how are we effectively running the logistics of this? Because obviously there were a number of of the delegates who had to manage the affairs of the Continental Army and all, even as they chose George Washington. Well, um and these are just kind of guesses from my end. What do you think led up to that anger and and do you think that that was something that uh was that that had that that could have spiraled into a into a different kind of anger that could have derailed potentially the efforts for for the revolution?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Oh the one at the one that led to the Fort Wilson riot.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

Yes, yes, that's that's right.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Oh yeah, so I think the so the pro so the primary cause of that, right, is or let's say the catalyst of that is the wartime shortages that were immiserating regular Philadelphians. This is 1779, so it's the middle of the Revolutionary War, but you know, the British troops have been occupying Philadelphia for much of the last year. They've just um left, the city is kind of in ruins, it's it's slowly rebuilding, but a lot of people are suffering, you know, homes and businesses destroyed, uh, people can't get their just daily necessities. People like Wilson are an easy target for several reasons. One is because he's an elite, right? He's part of that merchant class elite of Philadelphia. He has a lot of money. He lives in a nice townhouse in the middle of Philadelphia. So he's he's a he's a personal representative of the income and wealth inequality that that is is very obvious in Philadelphia and other cities of the country at the time. But then on top of that, Wilson himself, as I mentioned, is keeps stepping in it. You know, he keeps causing problems for himself that that turn the revolutionaries against him. So his resistance, his slowing down of the vote on the declaration, there's good argument for why, but again, it doesn't look good uh on the outside. So, you know, people start to mistrust him. The um his opposition to the Pennsylvania Constitution makes him marks him as an anti-democrat, marks him as somebody who's not in favor of the popular rule, which is so ironic, of course, because he's maybe the biggest advocate of all of popular rule. And his opposition to the um Pennsylvania Constitution actually was grounded in some good concerns about its lack of checks and balances. A few years later, shortly before the attack on his house, he's a you know, he's a lawyer, he ends up representing um Tories who were uh accused of um of treason, right? So he he and he gets some of them off. Uh and that is a you know a huge like that infuriates Philadelphians who just want to see people pay for the British occupation and for the harms harms they've suffered. So again and again and again, Wilson personally is setting himself up as a target. And then when you have the on top of that, the suffering of the wartime, I think you can kind of see why that anger coalesced into that onto on that October morning in 1779 and led to led this crowd to his house to try to kill him.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

That's that's it's still boggles my mind the the riot there because uh there's again, there's the there are times when people just assume that the signers are you know they're up there, they can't be touched, right? Almost kind of like uh like on a big thing.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

No, there's no that this was this was definitely the most shocking of the revolutionary era riots. It really uh unnerved a lot of his peers. Um, I think Benjamin uh rush wrote that you know, the streets are stained with fraternal blood. Um people were afraid that something like this would happen, and then it did. And Wilson, you know, is hiding out for days uh on the banks of the Skilko River, waiting to come back into the city. Um, and eventually he does, but you know, I mean, this kind of that spectrum of violence would haunt him throughout his life. They burned him in effigy after the Constitutional Convention, the the Anti-Federalists did. You know, he was always sort of a target of those who felt that he was not sufficiently committed to the cause of independence.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Uh now I'd like to move to the lead-up for Wilson to the Constitutional Convention, because Wilson, of course, is bringing these brilliant ideas of popular sovereignty, of the will of the people, and he's going to his constitutional convention, and already it's a hard uh project because of course the Articles in Confederation didn't work. And so everyone's okay, back to the drawing board here. Right. Uh so uh tell us about uh Wilson's thinking and approach to the Constitutional Convention, could but given that the Articles in Confederation was a total disaster.

SPEAKER_00 33:06

Yeah, so you know, as many of the nationalists, including Wilson, saw it, the Articles of Confederation were failing because they hadn't created a strong enough central government, right? They were they they they functioned essentially as a treaty among independent nations, right? The states all had equal power, they all had equal voting power regardless of their size. There was no president, there was no judiciary to speak of. So you had um this, these states that could have could were constantly checking each other. All it took was a single state to prevent any amendment to the constitution. So you net the requirement of unanimity just made it impossible for the country to move forward. So they they they plan this uh convention to, in theory, to amend the Articles of Confederation. Um, but they see it, you know, Wilson, Madison, um, Washington, uh, you know, they they understand this document, they understand what they're doing as trying to save a nation on life support, right? So so when they meet in Philadelphia, one of the things that is most infuriating to people like Wilson in particular, he says this more than anyone is that you can't treat states as equals, you have to treat people as equal. People are the relevant unit of measurement in a political society, right? So 40,000 people in one state cannot have the same power as 10,000 people in another state. Wilson says this at one point during the debates over the articles. He says, How can the 40,000, 10,000 be equal? He's like, that's magic, not reason, you know? And and he brings that mindset to the constitutional convention. He is just infuriated at the idea that they're gonna there's gonna be a Senate, and that there's gonna be a Senate that you know is not chosen by the people, right? It's it's chosen by state legislators, senators are chosen by state legislatures, and then that they're going to all have equal power, every state will have equal power in the Senate. That is smuggling the ghost of the articles into the Constitution. And Wilson is like, wait a minute, we came here to fix that problem, and now you're just gonna we're just gonna perpetuate it, we're just gonna repeat the same problem that we came here to solve. He's like, that's ridiculous. So he's really mad that the Senate was even under consideration as a body of equal states. He says to do something like that, he calls it a fundamental and a perpetual error. And he says it will result in disease, convulsions, and death. You know? And you know, he he, you know, Madison was along with him on that, right? So they were the advocates, the primary advocates of proportional representation, the idea that people should be represented in proportion to their numbers. And Wilson understood that as the expression of his fundamental political philosophy of political equality, treating everybody the same, right? That was that he felt was the essence of any republic. And interestingly, the other founders all eventually come around more to that position even after Wilson's death. But during the convention, Wilson is out in front fighting for more political equality, more proportional representation, and he doesn't get it. In the Senate, he doesn't get it, right? He's he loses that fight because there's enough people at the convention who want to protect their state interests. Wilson didn't care about states. He thought states were ridiculous contrivances that, you know, people drawing lines on a map, who cares? Um, he comes from Scotland, so he has no real allegiance to any given state, even his adopted state of Pennsylvania. Um and, you know, he loses it on the on the count of the presidential election, right? He he had advocated at the beginning of the convention for a direct vote for president. Again, treating the people as equals, giving them as much um, you know, as much participation as possible in the selection of their leaders, he loses that. And he ends up, he ends up proposing, and one of the many ironies of Wilson's life, he ends up proposing what becomes the Electoral College. So so um, so you know, he again and again, he does not get his way on that particular issue. But where I where I'll say that he does manage to do it is uh in the middle of the summer, there's a break. Everyone goes off for 10 days, takes a rest, goes to see their family, they're all sick of each other at this point. Wilson stays around and with four other delegates, they sit on the Committee of Detail. And the Committee of Detail is tasked with writing the first draft of the Constitution. There's there take take take everything that just got debated in the first two months and put it down on paper and let's see what this thing looks like. Wilson was the lead drafter of that. And he, in his private study, you know, puts down the words we the people at the very beginning of the document. We the people is such an important opening phrase for that document because it it emphasizes that political popular sovereignty ethos that defined Wilson's life. It ties the Constitution to the Declaration, right? Because the Declaration is the ultimate popular sovereignty document. It says the people are the ultimate authority, and the people have the right to throw off their government and change it whenever that and however they please, right? But that's not a legal document. That's more of a it's a declaration of independence. It's a it's a deck, it's a list of grievances. Um the constitution is meant to be a legal charter, right? That the the the super law of the country. And so he wants to make sure that that spirit of the declaration survives in the deck in the constitution. We the people, not we the states, not we the federal government, we the people, goes at the very beginning of the document and he makes sure that it stays there through the end.

SPEAKER_01 38:44

I I I love what you said there, Jesse, about the we the people, because I do look around the world, and there are countries out there that if they've had a constitution, it would say we the parliament, or we the the the monarchy, and it's and it's it's evident, I think, in there in a lot in a lot of cases. And I think just re always inscribing that and ensuring that every time we see that document in the rotunda of the National Archives, yeah, that we would that we see in large print, right? We the people. I think that's such a powerful moment there.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

And it's the it's the subtitle of the book, the people, it's a people's constitution, right? It is a constitution ordained and established by the people, and it is under their control always, right? They always have the right to change it when they want. That's another thing that Wilson was deeply committed to, this idea that the people ha retain that right, they can never give it away. The right to change their government, their constitutions as when they please. He's he says that it is it is clay in the hands of a potter. You know, that's a it's a nice metaphor for the the pliancy of of the system that we've designed.

unknown 39:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 39:56

And I I think what you said there too about the the Senate and the president, because we we often we call the Senate the upper chamber. I I wonder if Wilson would be kind of ticked off by that about that, because he'd be like, maybe he'd be like, What do you mean upper? What what what is what is over the house?

unknown 40:13

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Or or over the people, for that matter. I mean, yes, Wilson wanted the Senate to be elected directly as he wanted the House to be elected directly. He wanted both of those houses to be reproportionally representative, right? He did not want them to be evenly divided among the states. Uh the 17th Amendment, you know, 150 years after Wilson's uh uh, you know, attendance at the Constitutional Convention finally gives the people direct vote for Senate and takes it away from the state legislatures. Um, and there's people even today who don't like that, right? Who think that the 17th Amendment was a mistake. But to Wilson, that would have that was exactly what he wanted. That was exactly the point was to make sure that the people were as directly connected to the choice of their leaders as possible and that there weren't all these uh interposed barriers to their expression of their will.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

I'm glad that eventually someone downline still had that strain of thought of saying, wait, hold on a second. What the the state legislatures should be back to the people. So again, I just appreciate uh that just that um uh interesting train of thought there that that still led for decades. I'm gonna I'll ask a bit about that in a second, too. Uh uh if you don't mind, Jesse, I'd like to just cover uh briefly about uh Wilson's time in the Supreme Court. Now, the Supreme Court is not as powerful as the court we understand now, of course, because this is before the time of John Marshall. But what what kind of contributions did Wilson give or try to give on the Supreme Court?

SPEAKER_00 41:47

You know, his time on the court should have been the pinnacle of his career, right? He he's just created that institution. He, you know, he he helps write Article III of the Constitution, he creates the the position of Chief Justice of the United States. He even writes a letter to George Washington in the weeks before Washington is inaugurated, begging for that job of Chief Justice. And, you know, this is just, I can't emphasize enough how that's just not something you do. You know, nobody, you don't write a letter asking to be Chief Justice, right? If you're Wilson was obviously in the running for a job like that because he's the leading lawyer in the country, but still, you you just don't do it, and especially you don't do it with George Washington of all people. You know, Washington, who's just like the model of punctilious, you know, and uh he's he's so careful and so he refuses to be at least publicly uh swayed by these kind of personal appeals. So he says no. He makes Wilson um associate justice because he had to he had to put him on a court somewhere. Um the reason he does that, by the way, and this is sort of a something we can get to separately, but Wilson is a land speculator without equal. Um the reason that he disappears from the American founding and the story of the founding is because of the way he died, which is literally on the run from the law and from his creditors hiding in the back room of a North Carolina tavern. Um and that is only eight years after, or nine years after he takes his seat on the Supreme Court. He's a sitting justice hiding in in the back of a tavern, you know, um hoping he doesn't get caught. Uh and you know, that sort of his his his financial entanglements are a big part of why Washington did not appoint him to be chief. Everybody knew about Wilson's weakness for land speculation at this time. He was he was just reckless about it, and he owned so much land, he was so over leveraged that you know he was only a few years from going bankrupt at the time he took his seat on the court. But during his time on the court, um, as you say, It is not a very influential institution. It is still finding its footing in the broader federal government. It does not yet even have, you know, at least explicitly, the power of judicial review. You know, what would come to be the defining feature of the Supreme Court, which is that it has the power, the constitutional authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws by, you know, passed by Congress and the states. Wilson believes that it does have that power. And actually, in a in sitting on one of the circuit courts during his time as a Supreme Court justice, this was something all the justices did was to ride circuit, it was called, and they would sit on these circuit courts. He did actually author an opinion making an early case for judicial review. So this is yet another example of Wilson's prescience about where America was headed. But overall, his time on the court is pretty unremarkable. He is, you know, they there is not a lot of cases in the in the first case coming to them. Um it's still a young country, right? The disputes are still mostly in the lower courts. Uh there, they don't even, it's not even really clear how they're supposed to rule on cases. Everybody writes an opinion in every case, they all come out. The only case that I think of that there's for real Supreme Court nerds, there's probably half a dozen cases of Wilson's that are worth talking about uh in his nine years on the court. But the one that I think is the most significant to the general audience is his decision in this case, uh Chisholm v. Georgia, which was 1793, and involved the question of a citizen of one state suing another state. Did a citizen of one state have the power to sue another state? Um in Wilson's mind, the question, you can imagine his answer to this question, which is of course they do. The per people are the sovereign, not the states. The people are sovereign, they have that authority. Georgia, the state that was being sued uh in this case, uh has no sovereignty. Um so he comes out with his opinion, upholding the right of the people. And and to be fair, you know, it's in the constitution. So he thinks he's just articulating a constitutional principle. People are furious about this, states are furious about this. The day after that ruling comes down, uh uh the 11th Amendment is proposed in Congress. The 11th Amendment essentially is there to overturn uh the ruling in Chisholm v. Georgia and and hold forevermore that people of one state may not sue another state. So here Wilson, in his like ultimate expression of popular sovereignty, thinks he's thinks he's finally done it. He's he's brought himself to the pinnacle of American law and government, and then and then gotten to put in writing his ultimate political philosophy, and then the next day it gets overturned. So it's kind of tragic in its way, um, but also representative of that duality that we were talking about earlier.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

Wow, and and with regards to the court, I mean, I I I always although I'm not super well read with the that you're the Supreme Court, uh, I just think like the fact that John Jay had the that was who was the chief justice had the time to have to do the Jay treaty. I think I was like, uh, he probably had some bigger fish to fry at that point.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

Um and so uh I I that's yeah, and that just just to uh on that point, so when Jay um so Jay is Washington's first choice for Chief Justice uh over Wilson. Wilson is really humiliated by this, right? He it makes him it's it's very upsetting to him. And I think it's in many ways that you can trace it as the beginning of his final spiral into um absconding and death. Uh but twice after when Jay ends up stepping down, you know, Jay is Jay has uh, as you mentioned, quite a lot of other obligations beside being Chief Justice. Um that Washington has to name there there are two more Chief Justice positions that come up. Uh and and uh what and Wilson is passed over both times. So three times Wilson is up for Chief Justice and doesn't get it. It's a it's it's really devastating to him, and I think it really m helps mark the the last stage of his life.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

Well, I want to get to Jesse now the the big part of the end of his life, which is this the scandal. I want to just uh uh ask you not only a bit more about the scandal, but really reflecting on the effect of looking back at a scandal like that now you know almost 250 years later, and I I I am one to believe that people do people are certainly imperfect. Ben Franklin talks about how we're coming into this uh convention where we have all these imperfections, right? I'm paraphrasing here, but um we're we're and of course Madison men were angels, right? So there is an understanding that I have where people are not perfect. I but I also think that there and I and on top of that it's it's hard to fathom uh or hard to process when a scandal like what happened to Wilson would um cause him to be that lost founder that we're talking about. And I and I would say, and um it's not not it's reassuring to him, but obviously there's other founders who are also forgotten. But the fact that given what he contributed, um I it's it's certain it's hard to process, I would imagine, to see how the scandal affected. So you just talk a bit more about the scandal and how how you think that episode can teach us about how we should see scandals of famous individuals who did contribute a lot to the country.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Yeah. I mean, what we're talking about here is a slow-rolling scandal, right? Wilson had gotten into land speculation not long after arriving in America. So probably by the late 1760s, early 1770s, he's already starting to deal in land. This is something a lot of the founders are doing. This is not, you know, uniquely bad behavior on his part, but he gets into it with a sort of ferocity and a recklessness that none of the other founders do. And it takes over his life by the 1780s and 90s. And, you know, he owns so much land at the peak of his um time, uh, you know, his landownership uh phase that he's got about four million acres. Four million acres of land is a lot of land. Um it's like the size of Connecticut. And Wilson, you know, he's so over-leveraged as a result of all of this ownership that he's extremely vulnerable to economic downturns. So there's an economic downturn in the mid-1790s while he's sitting on the Supreme Court, and Wilson ends up going bankrupt. And this is he gets thrown in debtor's prison, not once, but twice, first in Philadelphia, then in New Jersey. And the second time he's writing to his son, I we have letters where he's saying, get, you know, bail me out. Basically, bring me, come bail me out, bring me clothes, bring me, bring me money, I need it all. And when he gets out, he goes on the run down to North Carolina. He goes to this town, Edenton, on on the coast, and uh it's actually in a little inlet harbor, and he um he hides in this tavern in in near near the home of his uh fellow justice, James Iredell, uh, who's a friend of his. And that's where he spends the last nine or ten months of his life in hiding in the back room of his tavern, and he eventually succumbs to malaria. He can't he, you know, malaria is endemic to that region um at the time in the you know late 18th century. They don't even know what causes it, they don't know it's mosquitoes, but uh, you know, there are no screens on the windows in 1798, so um a mosquito, you know, uh an infected mosquito uh stings or bites um Wilson and he contracts malaria and dies. Uh and this is August of 1798, right? So the country is barely 10 years old at this point. Um and he had so alienated all of his peers at that point, he had he had screwed many of them, right? A lot of their finances were also destroyed by, you know, investing on Wilson-related projects. And Wilson ends up um just essentially a loner. Uh, he nobody is his friend by the end. Uh, people are pretty relieved that he's off the stage at that point. There was talk about whether he would be impeached had he stayed on the Supreme Court, had he lived and stayed on the Supreme Court. Um, he was about to face possible a third jail term for uh because Pierce Butler, one of the other founding fathers, had loaned him $200,000 that he had not repaid. That's a that's a very large amount of money in today's dollars, millions of dollars. Um, but he never faced that uh that litigation because he um died. And so immediately on his death, it's like the erasure begins, right? There's no obituary of him, there's no public funeral, there's no state acknowledgement at all that one of America's founders has just left the scene. And so that I think is sort of the the tragic coda to this story is that he disappears both by his own choosing, right? He disappeared himself, and then he is disappeared from our national narrative about the founding. And, you know, it's all because of this, you know, this addiction that he had to speculating in lands and his inability to control it. Um, and when he would come up again in in sort of the stories or in in citations over the next centuries, it was usually in negative ways. Um, so I, you know, certainly like you what people would know today is the the Broadway musical 1776, which casts him in a very unfair light. Um, and so I see this book really as an as in some ways a resurrection of the fuller picture of the man and the complexity and visionary nature of his ideas. Um and, you know, putting it all down, right? I don't want to hide anything about him. I I definitely I'm I'm drawn to him. I think he's a remarkable figure and a remarkable thinker, but he's also a complicated and difficult person. Um, and so I hope all of that comes through in the book.

SPEAKER_01 54:08

And in many, many ways, perhaps that complicated nature is representation of America. And I think that's what absolutely it's yeah, that's a good, that's a great point, right?

SPEAKER_00 54:17

It's a metaphor, he's a metaphor for this country in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

So well, I I'll I'll like to combine two questions and one for the final question, Jesse. I obviously thank you for uh for sharing about obviously your book and all. I think it's just to reflect on his legacy there. I mean, there's instances or dealing with the topic of popular sovereignty. Think about how I I don't know if it's from the same strain of thought, but you know, Stephen Douglas talked about popular sovereignty when he's trying to push the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. Um and so there's and not to mention that I'm sure that with all these different ways of how when we eventually allowed women to vote and all that, right? I think that's that's along that's that that same sort of thought. So just reflecting on that, I think, is so so key. So uh Jesse, I want to combine two things here. One, of course, is uh reflecting on uh George Washington's farewell address and uh and reflect on those values of patriotism, faith, national unity, education, fiscal responsibility, civility, those key values there. So just uh what what values there do you think stand out the most, kind of reflecting on our conversation about James Wilson? And then the second part is on Constitution Day, uh how do you think what do you think is the best way to uh remember to honor and remember the contributions of uh those uh those delegates who went in under very difficult circumstances had a lot of different debates and very bitter debates, and yet looking at this experiment that has now gone 250 years plus, um so much to look back on.

SPEAKER_00 55:52

I think, you know, with regard to the signing of the Constitution, it's a remarkable moment, not only because they've debated so fiercely over the last several months, but because they had no idea whether this was going to succeed, right? Like, like there was this whole thing was just shot through with uncertainty. And I think that's a really important reminder, especially for us today, when you know we want clearer answers to things, and there just often aren't. You don't know where you're headed, you don't know whether the choices that you're making are going to end well or end very badly. And they didn't either. Um, some of them thought the whole thing was shot from the outset, some of them hoped it would last for a long time. I'm not sure any one of them could have anticipated that we'd still be here talking about the 250th anniversary of the declaration. Um, and I guess in 11 years, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the constitution. But I do think that that it's really important to remember that that uncertainty that was inherent in this whole project, right? They were just doing the best they could with what they had. They were trying to create a new world uh different from the one that they had grown up in and come from. Um I also think, you know, the the Constitution Day marks the the end of the convention, the signing of the constitution, but it also marks the beginning of, I would argue, an equally, if not more important phase of the constitutional of the constitution's making, which is the ratification process. And Wilson was central in this process as well. And I think it's so important because it was the embodiment of his central principle, which is popular involvement in government, right? In contrast to the Constitutional Convention, which is just a few dozen men in a room together with the doors locked and the windows sealed shut. This was in the, you know, the constitution, the ratification process happens in open convention in states all over the country where regular people, often uh, you know, with voting rules that are much more lenient than they are for regular elections in their states, get to come and talk about the constitution and argue about it. And that was an incredible experience. That was an incredible, like the debates that went on there are just as fascinating, if not more so, than the ones that happened inside the Pennsylvania State House the summer of 1787. So I really loved that part of the story uh as as much as any because it was the embodiment of popular involvement in government. And people were really remarkably learned and remarkably thoughtful uh on all sides about this new country that they were trying to build. And Wilson, you know, he's an interesting figure in that too, because as much as he wants the people's involvement, he he definitely fights against a whole group of people in Pennsylvania who don't like the Constitution and he and he strong arms them, right? He's part of an effort uh by the Federalists to essentially silence um the Western part of the state that does not favor the Constitution. So again, back to the duality that we talked about at the beginning. It's like you want the people's voice, but you don't always want to hear what they're saying. So I do think that duality has to be present in all our conversations about the Constitution, about American democracy, and about the future of the Republic. And I think Wilson is as good a vehicle for exploring that duality as anyone.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

Excellent. And I just want to remind everybody we've got the Lost Founder here, and you can pick it up on Amazon or on any site, and any of a site that sells good books here. And uh I just uh Jesse, I want to before we wrap up, thank you so much for uh telling the story of James Wilson and of the founders. I think it's it's so refreshing to see that even in the 2020s we can still have these robust conversations about our founders and to uh not have to uh to to on the one there's seems like when the polarized times there's just one end that say we shouldn't talk about the founders, and then the other side of saying we should glorify every single thing they did. And I think there is that middle element where we can uh uh have we can both celebrate our country but also reflect deeply on what these founders tried to do and do and to go back to friends' first principles as a country. Uh, what can people do to just very very quickly learn more about your work and what uh what you do?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

Uh you can, I mean, my website, jessewagman.com, has my, you know, right now it's overtaken with book material, so you can certainly go there to read about the book. You can buy the book. I would recommend, I would put in a plug for bookshop.org, which is a wonderful consortium of independent bookstores, uh, if you're gonna be buying it. Um, but also you can go to I have a substack right now. I'm I'm a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where I write about uh primarily the Supreme Court and constitutional reform. I have a Substack there called Major Questions. So if you go to Substack and look up Major Questions, you'll find my newsletter there, uh, which is lar about the Supreme Court and with a focus on potential reforms of the court uh in the in the near future.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:51

And all with the blessing of James Wilson. Yes, exactly. Jesse Wegman, thank you so much for coming to our podcast today.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:58

Oh, thank you. It was really a pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to check out the links down in the show notes below. Have a great rest of your day and rest of your week. And remember a day in America has always been we are with our friends and fellas.