The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution

BOOK REVIEW: The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution by Jesse Wegman (New York: Celadon Books, 2026) $30.00 hardcover

 The Broadway play 1776 depicts James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress, as a cowardly, spineless understudy of John Dickinson, who opposed the Declaration of Independence. This portrayal is flat-out wrong, yet it reflects the lack of public and scholarly attention to Wilson’s life. Jesse Wegman, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, makes a compelling case that Wilson made substantial contributions to the nation and left an enduring democratic legacy.

The lack of scholarly interest in Wilson’s life and contributions is striking. The Supreme Court scholar’s work is the first James Wilson biography published by a non-academic press and only the third published in more than a hundred years. The two previous biographies were published by academic presses in 1956 and 2021.

Wegman demonstrates a journalist’s eye for storytelling. He opens with the tragic account of Wilson, then a US Supreme Court justice, dying from malaria in an obscure North Carolina tavern while hiding from debt collectors. This vignette highlights the central conundrum in Wilson’s life. He contributed significantly to the US founding documents but was spectacularly unsuccessful in business and at times engaged in shady dealings, which diminished contemporaries’ regard for him. The author characterizes Wilson as a “complicated man” (page 169) who lacked political savvy and held himself in too high regard. In academic lectures, Wilson referred to himself as the “American version of William Blackstone, the renowned British jurist” (p. 230).

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Born in Scotland to a poor farming family and educated in Enlightenment philosophy at leading Scottish universities, Wilson emigrated to America during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765. With family funding, the Scottish immigrant trained as a lawyer under John Dickinson, one of the premier colonial lawyers. Wilson quickly became a successful attorney with many wealthy clients, including the powerful Penn family. Entering politics, Wilson published an essay in 1774 asserting that Parliament had no authority over the colonies because Americans were not represented.

Given his growing influence, the Pennsylvania legislature appointed Wilson as a delegate to the Continental Congress. On the question of independence, Wilson’s reputation first suffered. As a representative of the Penn family-dominated legislature, he believed he was bound by their instructions not to vote for independence. However, when Pennsylvanians deposed the Penn regime and installed an independence-friendly legislature, Wilson changed his vote and ultimately signed the Declaration of Independence. Despite a Congressional resolution to the contrary, Wilson would be dogged by allegations that he was a closet Tory for the rest of his life.

Wilson played a larger role in the 1787 US Constitutional Convention. It was here that he earned a reputation for advocating a democratic form of government. Wegman argues that Wilson was the only voice to invoke the Declaration of Independence phrase “created equal” during the drafting of the US Constitution. Demonstrating his Scottish Enlightenment education, the Pennsylvania lawyer believed that popular sovereignty was the best and most enduring form of government. As a result, he proposed the phrase “We the people” in the Constitution’s introduction (p.190).

Additionally, Wilson proposed the Electoral College, the Three-Fifths clause, and the Treason clause (p. 179). When it came to preparing the final product, Wilson served on the Detail Committee, which drafted the Constitution. During this process, he added the “necessary and proper” clause, which enabled Congress to make laws to execute its powers. Given these outsized contributions, the author places Wilson on equal footing with James Madison in shaping the US Constitution (p. 9-10).

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At times, Wegman, a keen observer of today’s US Supreme Court, tries too hard to elevate Wilson’s stature and accomplishments. He argues that “In short, without Wilson’s energy, clarity, and eloquence, there might not have been a United States of America after 1788” (p. 210). He also cites Wilson’s Pennsylvania State House speech advocating ratification of the US Constitution as being as influential as the Federalist Papers (p. 195). These assertions would be more credible if Wilson’s contemporaries had made them. Additionally, the author assesses that Wilson possessed the greatest and most celebrated legal mind in the country (p. 229, 153) without specifying a yardstick. Certainly equally strong cases could be made for other attorney-founders, such as John Jay, John Adams, and John Dickinson. These grand assertions lack objectivity and contemporary evidence.

One reason history has not elevated Wilson’s stature is his reckless business conduct and undistinguished jurisprudence after his appointment to the first US Supreme Court. The author characterizes Wilson as the country’s “most prodigious speculator” (p. 254) with “too much ambition and not enough money” (p. 248). While many founders engaged in western land speculation, Wilson took extreme risks and engaged in ethically questionable transactions. The author quotes Thomas Blount, a North Carolina lawmaker, who said, “If you rely on his honor, or trust him in anything, he will certainly deceive you” (p. 266). Members of Congress recognized the risks to the integrity of the court and were moving toward impeachment when Wilson died in that North Carolina tavern.

To deepen his understanding of Wilson’s jurisprudence, Wegman sought out law professors with notable expertise in Wilson’s legal and political works. In particular, the influence of William Ewald, a professor of law and philosophy, is apparent throughout the book. However, the author misinterprets or minimizes the legal contributions of the revolutionary state constitutions. For example, he asserts that the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution “remains the most democratic state constitution in American history” (p. 75). Notwithstanding modern state constitutions, the 1777 Vermont Constitution expanded Pennsylvania’s suffrage of taxpaying freemen to all men. The author further claims that Wilson was the only founder advocating for the direct election of the chief executive (p. 164). State constitution framers established direct gubernatorial elections in the constitutions of New York (1777), Vermont (1777), Massachusetts (1780), and New Hampshire (1784). Importantly, the author overlooks the state constitutional-framing experience in the writing of the US Constitution. At least twenty, not fifteen, convention delegates had experience drafting state constitutions, resulting in the incorporation of democratic features from Massachusetts and other state constitutions into the US Constitution (p. 20).[1]

The Supreme Court editorialist would have benefited from input from historians of the American Revolution. A better understanding of Revolutionary America would have prevented the portrayal of Wilson’s gains from the sale of two farms as windfall profits (p. 40-41),[2] the overestimation of the size of the American economy vis-à-vis Britain (p. 49),[3] and the misinterpretation of the reason for only a few Quakers attending the 1776 Pennsylvania State Constitution Convention (p. 78).[4]

While all books contain errors, some raise thought-provoking questions. For example, Wilson was born into a devout Presbyterian family, and Wegman reports that he married at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in 1771 (p. 40). Before the Revolution, St. Gabriel’s was an Anglican church. It did not rebrand as an Episcopal church until the 1790s. While this oversight by itself is meaningless, it obscures a larger aspect of Wilson’s life. It is highly unusual that a man from a “deeply religious family” who educated him to become a Presbyterian minister (p. 21) would marry in an Anglican Church. The Presbyterians and Anglicans were bitter theological and political rivals. This raises questions about Wilson’s religiosity and other matters. What were his religious beliefs? Was his willingness to marry outside his family’s religion the result of a poor relationship with his mother and family? Why did he have little contact with his mother after moving to America?

Additionally, the veteran editorialist could have omitted the epilogue’s ending, which reveals his views on contemporary politics. Speculating about which side Wilson would support in current political debates goes beyond historical interpretation and will turn off readers. Alternatively, allowing people to draw their own conclusions about the relevance of Wilson’s political philosophy would engage 100 percent of readers in the author’s main mission: discovering the overlooked founder and better recognizing his influence.

The author concludes that Wilson wrestled with competing passions: pecuniary temptations on the one hand and the duties of democratic self-rule on the other (p. 43). Wegman deems this conflict “irreconcilable” (p. 45). While readers may agree or disagree, recovering and illustrating James Wilson’s life is a useful reminder that many contributors shaped America’s founding. Wilson’s infusion of democratic provisions into constitutional law helped establish a durable foundation for the Constitution. His life also illustrates that contemporaries can be the best judges of people. Perhaps President George Washington’s reluctance to elevate Wilson to Chief Justice reflects the best assessment of his contributions and character: a solid contributor, but not a first-tier founder.

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[1] Gregory E. Maggs, “A Guide and Index for Finding Evidence of The Original Meaning of The U.S. Constitution in Early State Constitutions and Declarations of Rights (May 11, 2020),” GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2020-28, GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 2020-28 98 N.C. L. REV. 779 (2020) (May 2020): 780–836, ssrn.com/abstract=3598487, 805-6.

[2] The author asserts that Wilson purchased a farm in 1772 for £700 and another in 1775 for £200 and sold them for £5,500 in the summer of 1778, a six-time windfall (p. 40-1). However, Wilson did not general windfall profits. Pennsylvania currency suffered rampant depreciation during this period, in the range of 8 to 1. Therefore, in nominal dollars Wilson, likely broke even with the sale or even lost money. For estimates of the worth of Pennsylvania currency see, www.continentalline.org/CL/article-960203/.

[3] The author asserts that the American GDP was 40 percent of the British GDP (p. 49). In comparison to Britain’s roughly £105 million nominal output, the aggregate GDP of the thirteen American colonies in 1775 is estimated to have been roughly £25 million to £30 million (in sterling values)—making the British home economy roughly 3.5 to 4 times larger than the colonies it was fighting. For estimates of the size of the American economy, see Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America, 2nd ed (Columbia University Press, 1988), 234. For the size of the British economy see a data set at www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/ukcompessay.php. Other estimates of American versus British GDP at the outset of the Revolution range from 19 percent to 33 percent.

[4] The author states that the absence of Quakers at the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitutional convention was due to their refusal to swear oaths. While the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention was structurally designed to strip the traditional Quaker establishment of its political monopoly, procedural rules allowed for “affirmations” out of respect for Pennsylvania’s historic religious demographics. While the official Friends religious body boycotted the convention, a few individual delegates with Quaker backgrounds who favored the Revolution did attend. They chose their political and patriotic convictions over church discipline.