Christ Church: James Wilson played an essential role in the country’s founding, especially in the creation of the Constitution, yet he doesn’t have the same name recognition as figures like Benjamin Franklin. What drew you to Wilson and his story?
Jesse Wegman: I was drawn to him while working on my last book, which was a history and study of the Electoral College. I had a chapter on the founding era and the adoption of the Electoral College at the Constitutional Convention.
While I was reading Madison’s notes from the 1787 convention, I ran across this guy who just sounded totally different from all the others. He’s talking constantly about political equality, direct participation in government, and popular sovereignty, this fundamental idea that the people are the source of all power and authority in government.
And he’s this Scottish guy that I couldn’t believe I didn’t know. I thought, “Who is he? How can I not know him? He seems central to the whole thing.”
As I read more, I discovered that he is, in fact, at the heart of the writing of the Constitution. He writes the first draft of it. He is essential to so many of the components of it that we know today. And yet he’s gone from American history.
Then I discovered his run from the law at the end of his life, following years of financial collapse that culminated in him being thrown in debtor’s prison twice and then hiding out in the back room of a tavern in North Carolina, where he died of malaria in 1798.
So I thought, “Okay, well, there’s a story there.” Here’s one of the most important of all American founders, and yet nobody seems to know who he is.
Christ Church: Christ Church itself becomes part of that story. What was it like visiting Wilson’s grave while researching the book?
Jesse Wegman: I visited Christ Church in the fall of 2022, I believe, with Jeff Rosen, a professor at George Washington who at the time was leading the National Constitution Center. The two of us were on a bit of a Wilson adventure through the city. But I wanted to see where he now lies.
I was shocked to see that the date chiseled into his headstone is wrong. It’s off by a week. When you look at the exchanges of letters right around his death, everyone refers to the 21st. It’s clear that he died on the evening of the 21st. So I’m wondering at what point it became the 28th.
Christ Church is also relevant to me because it represents the first real attempt to resurrect Wilson. He was exhumed from this almost unmarked grave in coastal North Carolina by a group of very persistent men who understood his significance to the founding and wanted him to have a more proper burial.
He came up on a Navy ship with full honor guard to Philadelphia and was buried outside Christ Church. So I’m sort of in the resurrection business myself and felt some kinship to the church along those lines. This book is yet another attempt to bring this founder back into the American founding narrative.
Christ Church: Wilson had this profound conviction that the people were the ultimate source of political power. How did that set him apart from the other delegates at the Constitutional Convention?
Jesse Wegman: I think what a lot of Americans learn about the founding is an incomplete picture. There is this understanding that the framers generally did not trust the people and did not want them near government. They were elites who felt that they were the best positioned to govern this new country.
That was true for a lot of them. And Wilson has strands of that himself. He definitely thought he was one of the elite. But unlike the others, he had this profound, principled belief in popular rule, and he had it to a degree that none of the others did.
During the debate over the election of the president, Wilson stands up and says, well, obviously this person should be elected by the people directly. They were creating this new job out of whole cloth. There was no president under the Articles of Confederation. To Wilson, it was obvious: How else would you select the president except by a popular vote?
He loses that. He comes back with a different proposal, which is very similar to what we now call the Electoral College. This is one of the ironies of Wilson’s life. He ends up being a conduit for certain mechanisms of government that seem to go directly against his most cherished principles.
He also thought Congress should represent people according to their numbers, what we would call one person, one vote or proportional representation. He could not stand that the Senate gave states equal representation.
He basically says that if you adopt a Senate where states get equal power, that will be a fundamental and perpetual error that will result in “disease, convulsions, and death.”
He’s very clearly on the side of popular rule and defining the relevant unit of governance as the person, not an arbitrarily drawn state.
Christ Church: Many of Wilson’s arguments sound remarkably contemporary. Do you think his ideas speak directly to debates Americans are having about government today?
Jesse Wegman: I think a lot of people today are feeling despairing about our government at all levels: local, state, federal. And I think a lot of that comes from this sense that regular people do not have much influence.
The Electoral College and the Senate are both designed to be anti-majoritarian or function as anti-majoritarian structures. They do not respect popular will as it is expressed through a majority. There is also the Supreme Court, which of course Wilson supported as an institution and was a member of until his death, but which has evolved into an institution that frequently thwarts the will of the people.
I think people today are understandably frustrated at the lack of their ability to translate their wishes into policy and governance.
Wilson can be an inspiring model for people to remember that these ideals were there from the start. Slavery abolitionists in the 19th century cited Wilson. Suffragists pushing for women’s vote cited him. The one person, one vote cases at the Supreme Court, which completely reshaped Congress and redefined American government, literally rely on Wilson for their arguments.
All the way to today, I think he serves in a way as an avatar for our highest democratic ideals.
Christ Church: Wilson was brilliant and enormously influential, but his life also had a deeply flawed and tragic ending. How did you balance those sides of him in the book?
Jesse Wegman: The reason he went bankrupt and ended up in debtor’s prison was because he was a very aggressive land speculator. A lot of his peers were engaged in that at the time, but I think it’s pretty clear that none of them were quite as voracious or reckless as Wilson was.
He had something like four million acres of land to his name at the peak of his ownership. By 1797, he’s living in the back of a tavern. His clothes are falling apart. His body is going to pieces.
It’s a shocking fall from grace. I wanted to emphasize that partly because it explains why he’s absent from our founding narrative. The “lost” part of The Lost Founder has to be explained.
But also because he’s a human. All of these guys are just as human as we are. They did an amazing thing, but they were flawed like we are. They made compromises that undercut their professed ideals, the most obvious being the toleration, if not outright support, of slavery and human bondage, which completely contradicted the essence of the founding principles of this country.
I wanted their hypocrisies and their inconsistencies and their humanity to be at the forefront because I don’t think we can really understand either the founding era or ourselves unless we accept the full complexity of who we are as people and as humans.
Wilson was definitely anti-slavery, but at the Constitutional Convention, he was the one who introduced into the debate what became the Three-Fifths Compromise. That ends up being an enormous concession to the South and defines the first several decades of the country’s existence.
All those contradictions and hypocrisies need to be a part of this story for it to be told well and told right.
Christ Church: When people visit Philadelphia today and walk through places where these early leaders gathered, what aspect of James Wilson’s legacy do you most want them to remember?
Jesse Wegman: I think it’s the idea that people are the source of power in government, or must be for a government to function.
Wilson pushed that harder than any of the other founders. I think that’s a really important reminder for people today that they are the government. They are the source of all authority, and they can change that government when they are unhappy with it. That was Wilson’s central idea. That’s his idea of popular sovereignty.
To him, the Declaration was the ultimate expression of that principle. It was a people throwing off one government and declaring that they were creating a new one because they were unhappy with the way they were being governed.
And there’s a good case to be made that Wilson helped inspire its language. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is a very strong echo of an essay that Wilson wrote in 1768 when he was just 26 years old. We know Thomas Jefferson was influenced by this essay.
Perhaps most importantly, Wilson added the phrase “We the People” to the beginning of the Constitution. That is, in its way, importing the Declaration spirit, that popular sovereignty spirit, to make sure that what everyone knows at the outset is that this document is ordained and established not by the king, not by God, not by the states, not by the federal government, but by the people.
That, I think, is an essential part of what Wilson understood functional democratic government to be, and I think it’s what we need to remember today.
Christ Church: Who would you consider Wilson’s biggest ally at the Constitutional Convention?
Jesse Wegman: During the convention, he and Madison worked hand in hand for a lot of the summer because they were both very much in favor of proportional representation. They both did not like the idea of a Senate that gave small states the same power as big states.
Madison even came around to his belief in the popular vote for president. In the middle of the summer, Madison says, “I actually agree. I think it would be best to elect the president directly. It’s not going to happen.”
He explains that the Southern states, if you have a direct vote for president, don’t have very big voting populations if you leave out all the enslaved people. They want a system of choosing the president that gives them some kind of credit for those enslaved people. That’s what they get with the Three-Fifths Compromise combined with the Electoral College.
So Madison is essentially saying, “We’re not going to have a direct vote for president because of slavery.”
On different issues, Wilson has different allies. But I’d say across the board, probably Madison is his closest.
Christ Church: Wilson was also one of the most active voices at the Constitutional Convention, correct?
Jesse Wegman: Gouverneur Morris was number one, and right behind him was Wilson at number two. I think Madison is probably number three.
Wilson was there every single day of the summer, including the 10-day stretch in the middle when everyone else went on vacation. He and four other delegates stayed back, forming the Committee of Detail, which is where they wrote the first draft of the Constitution.
Christ Church: How did Wilson ultimately die?
Jesse Wegman: He died of malaria. In 1798, malaria was endemic to that entire coastal region of North Carolina and Virginia. People were sickened in large numbers and died in large numbers. It’s a horrible, horrible way to die.
They didn’t call it malaria then. They didn’t even know what caused it. But he got sick in July of 1798 and died in August.
Christ Church: And how did Wilson eventually make his way from North Carolina back to Christ Church?
Jesse Wegman: In the early 20th century, a Pennsylvania historian named Bert Konkle decided that Wilson was important enough both to give a biography to and to find out where he was buried.
He found out that Wilson was buried in Edenton, North Carolina, on the edge of a plantation, with almost no fanfare at all. There was no obituary. There was no public announcement of his death, even though he was a Supreme Court justice.
So Konkle started a letter campaign and arranged for an honor guard to go down to North Carolina. They exhumed Wilson in a ceremony in 1906. There are photos of the ceremony.
They brought him up on a Navy ship to Philadelphia and marched him from the harbor to the church. The public was allowed to process by his casket, and then he was buried where he now lies outside the church.
With the wrong death date.
Christ Church: Finally, tell us about the book and where readers can find it.
Jesse Wegman: The book is The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution. It’s published by Celadon Books, and it is available wherever books are sold.
