{"id":750,"date":"2026-06-20T12:39:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T12:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=750"},"modified":"2026-06-20T12:39:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T12:39:44","slug":"the-forgotten-founding-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=750","title":{"rendered":"The Forgotten Founding Father"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early one evening in August 1798, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court named James Wilson died in a sparsely furnished boarding room on the second floor of a North Carolina tavern. He had been holed up there for nearly a year to avoid creditors, to whom he owed unspeakable debts from land speculation. Delirious and destitute, he died from malarial fever, which burned through the Carolinas every summer.<\/p>

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There was no public announcement of Wilson\u2019s death. It was an ignominious end to a man who was not only a Supreme Court justice but also arguably the most influential, prescient, and democratic drafter of the Constitution, one of only six men to sign both that document and the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>

The other Founders had acolytes who promoted their legacy and preserved their records, but Wilson died a pariah, which kept him out of history books as the conventional narrative of the founding took shape. Even today, his headstone in Philadelphia lists the wrong date for his death. Recovering his role in creating America is essential if the nation is to recommit itself to the ideals of democracy and popular sovereignty, which he championed with greater force than any of his contemporaries did.<\/p>

Wilson\u2019s peers had no doubt about his importance. \u201cNo man is more clear, copious, and comprehensive than Mr. Wilson,\u201d said William Pierce, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Georgia. According to Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence alongside Wilson, \u201chis mind, while he spoke, was one blaze of light.\u201d He was \u201cas able, candid, and honest a member as any in convention,\u201d George Washington wrote.<\/p>

Wilson first arrived in Philadelphia as a poor 23-year-old immigrant from Scotland. Two decades later, after becoming one of the most celebrated lawyers in America, he attended the 1787 Constitutional Convention in the same city. Wilson spoke more than all but one of his fellow delegates. From the start, his guiding principle was the power of regular people, whom he saw as \u201cthe legitimate source of all authority.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cThe general government is not an assemblage of states, but of individuals,\u201d Wilson declared in his Scottish brogue. \u201cIt is not meant for the states, but for the individuals composing them: The individuals<\/i>, therefore, not the States<\/i>, ought to be represented in it.\u201d<\/p>

To many delegates, this was unconscionable. \u201cThe people should have as little to do as may be about the government,\u201d Roger Sherman of Connecticut said in the convention\u2019s opening days, as the delegates debated how to select members of Congress. Sherman wanted them to be chosen by state legislators rather than the public, who \u201care constantly liable to be misled.\u201d Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts seconded the point. \u201cThe evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,\u201d Gerry said. \u201cThe people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots.\u201d<\/p>

Wilson rejected these characterizations outright. No other delegate was more persistent in defending the wisdom of the people or their right to exercise political authority in accordance with their numbers; he was the convention\u2019s strongest advocate of proportional representation. Wilson also called repeatedly for direct popular elections to Congress, as well as for the allocation of representatives in both houses to be based on population. Delegates from the smaller states in particular were aghast at this latter proposal. William Paterson of New Jersey said that he would \u201crather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate,\u201d arguing instead that each state needed equal representation in Congress. Wilson countered that giving states equal power would endanger the entire American project. It would be \u201ca fundamental and a perpetual error,\u201d he said, one that \u201cmust be followed by disease, convulsions, and finally death itself.\u201d<\/p>

The central problem with state equality, Wilson argued, is that it undermined majority rule and thus republican government as a whole. A Senate in which each state had an equal vote would \u201cenable the minority to control in all cases whatsoever, the sentiments and interests of the majority,\u201d he said. Of the 13 states at the time, the seven smallest accounted for less than one-third of the population, Wilson pointed out, which meant \u201cit would be in the power then of less than one-\u00adthird to overrule two-\u00adthirds.\u201d<\/p>

Wilson lost the fight over state equality in the Senate, but more than a century later, he would be vindicated on the issue of direct congressional elections with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.<\/p>

Congress wasn\u2019t the only branch that Wilson tried to democratize. Early in the convention, he argued for a popularly elected president. When the proposal failed to generate enthusiasm, Wilson was urged to come up with an alternative. The following day, he offered one: Divide the states into districts and allow the eligible voters in each district to nominate \u201celectors\u201d who would pick the president.<\/p>

Wilson made clear that this was not his first choice; a direct vote \u201cwould produce more confidence among the people,\u201d he said. But his elector proposal was far more democratic than the other option under consideration: letting Congress choose the president. More than three months later, the convention adopted a system very similar to Wilson\u2019s original idea\u2014illustrating again his knack for getting there before everyone else.<\/p>

Wilson was devastated by losing debates about the design of Congress and the presidency, and in particular by the convention\u2019s refusal to acknowledge the centrality of regular people to the government. But he would get another chance to enshrine his view of popular sovereignty.<\/p>

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In late July, when most delegates were out of town for a 10-day break, Wilson stayed in Philadelphia to serve on a five-man committee tasked with drafting the Constitution. William Ewald, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has identified the moment when Wilson hit upon the document\u2019s famous opening words.<\/p>

Sitting in his home office, Wilson started to make notes on a large folio sheet bearing an early version of the preamble, which began: \u201cThe People of the States of New Hampshire etc.\u201d After leaving some annotations, he stopped, went back to the beginning, and added: \u201cWe.\u201d In that instant, Wilson had composed the three most resonant words in the history of democracy: \u201cWe the People.\u201d He had ensured that the people would come first, before the states, and he watched over his phrase jealously. When it was altered in a later draft to \u201cWe the People and<\/i> the States \u2026\u201d he changed it back to \u201cWe the People of<\/i> the States \u2026\u201d (The individual states would ultimately be removed from the preamble altogether and replaced with \u201cWe the People of the United States\u201d\u2014the most Wilsonian gloss of all.)<\/p>

During Pennsylvania\u2019s ratifying convention later that year, Wilson aptly explained the preamble\u2019s significance. It \u201ccontains the essence of all the bills of rights that have been or can be devised,\u201d he said, \u201cfor, it establishes, at once, that in the great article of government, the people have a right to do what they please.\u201d This was also the central message of the Declaration of Independence, which Wilson, more than any other Founder, insisted was the basis of the American experiment, supreme over even the Constitution.<\/p>

During that ratifying convention, Wilson also argued that the franchise should extend broadly, beyond just property owners. Giving people the right to vote, he said, would turn their attention \u201cto the contemplation of public men and public measures,\u201d and foster civic virtue. Voting, he said in a later speech, \u201chas a powerful tendency to open, to enlighten, to enlarge, and to exalt the mind.\u201d<\/p>

But Wilson\u2019s prescience failed him in one significant instance: the Constitution\u2019s handling of slavery. Although he was personally opposed to slavery, he was less outspoken about its injustice than were many of his peers, including slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. (For many years, Wilson kept a domestic slave, a man named Thomas Pursel, whom he freed in 1794.) At the 1787 convention, Wilson was the one who proposed counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation and taxation. The general idea predated Wilson, but his willingness to use it in service of that abhorrent compromise\u2014subordinating the dignity and equality of individual people to the importance of the American union\u2014showed that his commitment to popular sovereignty had its limits.<\/p>

Wilson was also hindered by personal failings. To finance his compulsive land speculation, he took on enormous debt, and toward the end of his life, he was forced to spend more time scrounging for investors than tending to the young nation he had helped create. His reputation was ruined. As a result, more than two centuries later, Wilson remains almost entirely absent from the prevailing narrative about the founding. This usually centers on the likes of Jefferson and his local, agrarian ideal; James Madison and his counterbalancing factions; Alexander Hamilton and his distrust of the common people. Those Founders were of course essential to the nation\u2019s birth, and yet, in time, many of them came to agree with Wilson.<\/p>

In a letter to a friend in 1816, Jefferson referred to what he called \u201cthe mother-principle, that \u2018governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.\u2019\u201d He proposed a set of amendments to the Virginia Constitution, including \u201cgeneral suffrage,\u201d \u201cequal representation in the legislature,\u201d and \u201can executive chosen by the people,\u201d echoing what Wilson had sought to establish in the United States Constitution nearly three decades earlier.<\/p>

In 1821, Madison wrote that his comments on voting rights during the convention\u2014where he, contra Wilson, defended property qualifications to vote\u2014did not convey his \u201cmore full and matured view of the subject.\u201d Madison continued, \u201cThe right of suffrage is a fundamental article in republican constitutions.\u201d More than a decade later, he wrote that \u201cthe will of the majority\u201d is \u201cthe vital principle of republican Government,\u201d sounding no less convinced than Wilson had been.<\/p>

None of these other Founders foresaw more accurately than Wilson what America would become. Consider all of the ways in which his vision has come to fruition: in the dramatic expansion of suffrage and political equality, in the right of the people to elect their senators directly, and in the Supreme Court\u2019s ultimate adoption of the principle of \u201cone person, one vote.\u201d<\/p>

This was the world Wilson saw 250 years ago. He was, in a sense, a 21st-century man trapped in the 18th century. Today, Wilson\u2019s ideals are under threat. Restoring him to his rightful place in the American story can help us save them.<\/p>

This article has been adapted from Jesse Wegman\u2019s new book, <\/small><\/em>The Lost Founder<\/small>.<\/small><\/em><\/p>

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The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People\u2019s Constitution<\/div>
By Jesse Wegman<\/div><\/div>