What did james wilson contribute to the constitution

WILSON, JAMES. (1742–1798). Signer, jurist, speculator. Scotland and Pennsylvania. Born in Carskerdo, Scotland, on 14 September 1742, Wilson studied at St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh (1757–1765). While learning accounting in the latter city, Wilson suddenly decided to move to America. He reached Philadelphia in the middle of the Stamp Act crisis and immediately began tutoring Latin at the College of Philadelphia. The following year, 1766, he abandoned teaching to study law under John Dickinson. Admitted to the bar in 1767, he practiced briefly at Reading, Pennsylvania, before moving to the Scots-Irish community of Carlisle and married Rachel Bird. Here he quickly became the leading lawyer and acquired a taste for land speculation. Having also taken an active part in Patriot politics, on 12 July 1774 he became chairman of the local Committee of Correspondence and was elected to the first Provincial Congress.

That same year, 1774, Wilson published Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, which argued that Parliament had no authority of any kind over the colonists and advocated that America become an independent state within the British empire. Even more dramatically, Wilson insisted that legitimate authority derived solely from the people. This pamphlet was widely read, and it immediately marked Wilson as a leading intellectual in the Patriot struggle.

On 3 May 1775 Wilson was elected colonel of the Fourth Battalion of the Cumberland County associators, and served as commissioner and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Middle Department in 1775, although an Indian conference at Pittsburgh was fruitless. Elected to the Continental on 6 May 1775, Wilson was quickly recognized as an able writer, and he was called on to draft a number of papers. Early in 1776 he was directed to craft an address to the people, to prepare them for the idea of independence, but Thomas Paine's Common Sense made Wilson's task unnecessary; it was never published. Although Wilson believed in independence for America, he shared the convictions of conservatives such as John Dickinson, Edward Rutledge, and Robert R. Livingston, that neither the American people nor their government were capable at that time of making this jump. Wilson and James Duane led the opposition against John Adams and Richard Henry Lee in the four-day debate on the preamble to the Congressional resolution in favor of independence (May 1776). "Before we are prepared to build the new house," Wilson asked, "why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to the inclemencies of the season?" After continuing to oppose the Declaration of Independence in the debate of 8 June, Wilson joined Benjamin Franklin and John Morton in voting for it on 2 July, and eventually signed the finished document. Wilson's heated opposition to the new state constitution resulted in his being removed from the Pennsylvania delegation to Congress on 14 September 1777. This ended his congressional career during the war, but he returned to Congress in 1783 and for the period 1785–1787.

Wilson's conservative views and his continued opposition to the state constitution, which he considered too "democratic," made him so unpopular in Philadelphia that he had to spend the winter of 1777–1778 in Annapolis, Maryland. When he returned to the city he had to barricade his house for protection against the mob. Though Wilson supported independence and the war effort, and his wife Rachel raised more money for the troops than anyone else, he allied himself with the state's financial elite, apparently not hiding his desire to become one of them. As a consequence, he was identified with the conservative opposition to the more democratic impulses of the Revolution. Wilson compounded this negative image by defending Loyalists in court. In October 1779 "Fort Wilson" was attacked by a militia force in response to a handbill of 4 October calling on them to "drive off from the city all disaffected persons and those who supported them." Wilson and his friends were rescued by the timely arrival of the First City Troop and President Joseph Reed (the title of president was accorded to the head of the Pennsylvania government at the time).

In the last years of the Revolution, Wilson took part in many speculative schemes, and he became legal adviser to Robert Morris in the formation of the Bank of America in 1780. Wilson borrowed heavily from the bank to finance his other investments, particularly in land. Wilson's postwar congressional career was highlighted by his proposal to erect states in the western lands (9 April 1783) and the major part he played in the adoption of the Constitution. Wilson sought a strong central government that could promote national economic development. He favored proportional representation, opposed slavery, and generally demonstrated a greater commitment to democracy than most of the other delegates. On the other hand, he did not completely trust the people, proposing a powerful President with an absolute veto over all legislation. Ultimately, though, Wilson went along with the Convention and helped craft the final wording of the Constitution, taking an active part in gaining its ratification. Wilson modeled Pennsylvania's state constitution of 1790, which he largely wrote, on the federal constitution. Replacing the democratic constitution of 1776, Wilson's frame of government sought a careful balance between the three branches of government.

Wilson sought the office of chief justice of the United States in 1789, writing to President George Washington to apply for the position. The President was a bit taken aback, but did name him an associate justice on the first court. On 17 August 1789, Wilson was appointed to the chair of law at the College of Philadelphia. Alert to the possibilities of establishing a new system of American jurisprudence, he launched a series of lectures in which he departed from Blackstonian views and contended instead that law was the rule of the individual, "whose obedience the law requires." Blackstone had defined law as the rule of a sovereign superior and maintained that revolution was illegal, whereas Wilson maintained that sovereignty resided in the individual and used this as the basis for legally justifying the American Revolution. Wilson's call for an American common law fell on deaf ears, most American jurists preferring statute and constitutional law as the nation's legal basis.

Wilson's early interest in land speculation continued throughout his life, and ultimately led to his destruction. Having been interested in various western land companies in 1785—he was president of the Illinois and Wabash Company—in 1792 he involved the Holland Land Company in unwise purchases in Pennsylvania and New York, and three years later he bought a large interest in one of the Yazoo companies which were later shown to be involved in a massive land-fraud scheme in Georgia. In 1797 the bubble of speculation burst as Wilson was launching into a grandiose plan for immigration and colonization. That summer he moved to Burlington, New Jersey, to avoid arrest for debt, but he retained his supreme court seat despite talk of impeachment. His mind began to break under the stress of this financial and professional failure. Early in 1798 he moved to the home of a friend in Edenton, North Carolina, and on 21 August he died of what was called a "violent nervous fever."

SEE ALSOIndependence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCloskey, Robert G., ed. The Works of James Wilson. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Seed, Geoggrey. James Wilson. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978.

Smith, Page. James Wilson, Founding Father 1742–1798. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956.

revised by Michael Bellesiles