James Wilson: Scottish Immigrant, Pennsylvania Statesman, Signer of the Declaration, and Framer of the Constitution

James Wilson’s impact on the founding of the United States was significant. One of only six individuals to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he helped create the nation and its enduring institutions. Arguably none of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention had a greater influence on the document that remains fundamental to Americans to this day. Both through the debates on the Convention floor and behind the scenes as a key member of the most important drafting committee, Wilson helped shape all three branches of government and the system of federalism that distributed power between the national and state governments. He advocated for a national popular vote to select the president and, as a fallback, proposed what became the Electoral College. In his home state of Pennsylvania, he was the Constitution’s leading defender, helping to ensure its ratification while generating many of the most influential arguments in favor of it. Widely regarded in his time as the most learned lawyer in a nation full of them, he served as one of the first justices on the United States Supreme Court from 1789 to 1798.

Despite all he accomplished, today Wilson is not a household name, overshadowed by his more famous peers. We would do well to remember him, however, and especially his contributions to the Declaration of Independence. As much as anybody of his generation, Wilson gave voice to the central idea announced in the Declaration: that Americans were “one people” who had formed a single indivisible nation.

Like other prominent members of the American Revolutionary generation, James Wilson was an immigrant. He was born on a farm in eastern Scotland in 1742. Intelligent and ambitious, he quickly transcended his humble origins, earning a scholarship to the University of St Andrews at age fifteen. With limited opportunities available in Scotland, Wilson followed many of his countrymen and immigrated to America in 1765. His Scottish upbringing nonetheless forever shaped his outlook and attitudes. During his schooling, he had been deeply influenced by the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Thomas Reid, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith, who stressed human beings’ benevolent nature and intuitive capacities. These theorists claimed that people were inherently social by nature, that they were equipped with a moral sense that enabled them to instinctively apprehend the virtue of human actions. They could intuit self-evident truths about the world through their common sense and experience. Unlike many of his American peers, Wilson maintained an almost sentimental confidence in ordinary people’s capacities—to tell right from wrong, to render judgments, and, ultimately, to engage in democratic self-government. While other revolutionary leaders were skeptical of popular rule, Wilson was an ardent champion of popular sovereignty. He never returned to Scotland, but it never left him. Throughout his life, his political and legal philosophy bore the firm imprint of his Scottish sensibility.

Shortly after arriving in the American colonies, Wilson made his way to Philadelphia, where he found his passion in the study of law, throwing himself into it with characteristic energy. After reading law under the tutelage of John Dickinson—the Pennsylvania legislator who would become known as the “Penman of the Revolution” for his essays in 1767–1768 against the Townshend Acts—Wilson established his legal practice in the rural community of Carlisle surrounded by other Scottish immigrants. While he would eventually return to the cosmopolitan world of Philadelphia, he never lost touch with the countryside. Much of his early legal practice focused on frontier land deals, and he would remain enamored with western expansion, its potential often the source of his unflinching optimism in America’s future and development.

Wilson had arrived in British North America amidst controversy, to find colonists vigorously protesting British efforts to regulate their affairs. Wilson soon joined the resistance and became a noteworthy political figure in Pennsylvania. In his widely read 1774 pamphlet denouncing Parliament’s proclaimed right to legislate the colonies, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament , Wilson stressed how American colonists had been unjustly denied a fundamental English liberty—the ability to consent to the laws governing one’s political community. In building his case, he offered a penetrating and radical account of the true nature of the British Empire. American colonists, he argued, remained subject to British authority only through their personal allegiance to the crown. His implication was that Americans were already a separate, independent people.

Wilson had the foresight to anticipate American independence before most could even contemplate it. Having established his reputation as a leading defender of the American patriot cause, he was appointed to represent Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress. Throughout his service, he remained a spirited critic of parliamentary authority over America, but he struggled to reconcile himself to independence. Perhaps influenced by John Dickinson, his former mentor and fellow member of the Pennsylvania delegation who held out hope for reconciliation with Great Britain until the very end, Wilson counseled patience and preached the virtues of continued political connection with the mother country. “Before We are prepared to build the new House,” he cautioned, “why should We pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the Inclemencies of the Season.”[1] Only in June 1776, as support for independence was mounting, did he tentatively follow suit. While he still maintained that Pennsylvanians “were not yet ripe for bidding adieu to the British connection,” he conceded that “they were fast ripening & in a short time would join in the general voice of America.”[2] When it came time to decide the next month, Wilson voted in favor of independence, but his earlier reluctance had branded him an opponent of the cause.

Wilson defended his foot-dragging by painting himself as a servant of the people who had elected him. Pennsylvania’s assembly had prohibited its delegates from voting for independence without their permission and Wilson heeded that order. He was sufficiently embarrassed about his public reputation, though, that he drafted a public memorial in which he claimed that while he had personally supported independence, he had formally opposed it for so long in Congress on the sacred belief that only the people themselves could make such a weighty decision. He convinced over twenty of his colleagues, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, to sign it. Despite this impassioned plea, rooted in his sincere commitment to popular sovereignty, Wilson’s public image remained damaged. Most Pennsylvania radicals viewed him with suspicion, especially after he opposed Pennsylvania’s constitution drafted later that year. Then, in 1779, after Wilson defended a set of Philadelphia loyalists who were tried for treason, an angry crowd attacked his house. Wilson would never fully live down his reputation as an out-of-touch elitist. Some of that was his own doing, as he could be arrogant and tone deaf. But much of it stemmed from his perceived ambivalence toward American independence.

The great irony is that despite his initial reluctance to support independence, for the next two decades, the Declaration of Independence meant more to Wilson than to any other American. It became the cornerstone of his constitutional vision and the vehicle through which he channeled his enthusiasm for popular sovereignty and his attendant belief in human sociability and solidarity.

In the years after its publication, Wilson drew repeated attention to the Declaration of Independence, even having a personal copy made for himself. To Wilson, the central idea expressed in the Declaration neatly summed up the point of the Revolution: Americans broke from Great Britain as “one people,” as the document put it, not thirteen separate peoples hailing from thirteen independent political communities. As such, the United States of America was a single nation. During the 1780s, Wilson deployed the Declaration to challenge those who advanced the twin claims that the United States was a loose confederacy of autonomous states and that the national government’s powers over those states and their people were accordingly limited.

At the Constitutional Convention, Wilson brandished his personal copy of the Declaration to emphasize—as Abraham Lincoln later would in the face of secession and civil war—that the American colonies had declared independence not separately but collectively. The United States, in short, formed a single, indivisible union. Many imagined their home states to be their home countries, but Wilson saw himself solely as American. “I consider the people of the United States as forming one great community,” he would later say.[3] Confident that Americans had formed one single nation and one sovereign people, Wilson supported vesting the national government with vast powers to promote the national welfare. To cement this vision, Wilson likely helped draft the Constitution’s opening words, “We the People of the United States,” summarizing his understanding of what the Declaration had wrought. Later, in 1793 from the bench of the Supreme Court, Wilson would point to the Declaration and the Constitution’s Preamble as proof that “the people of the United States intended to form themselves into a nation for national purposes.”[4]

Wilson failed to have a lasting impact. His interest in western lands as strong as ever, he fell prey to financial speculation and became mired in debt. Rather than shaping the early Supreme Court as many predicted, his tenure was quickly cut short when he died on the run from his creditors in 1798 with only his wife by his side. But he bestowed a legacy worth remembering. This Scottish immigrant who spent his early years in the Pennsylvania backcountry made the most emphatic case of all for the integrity of the American nation. No matter how different its various states and peoples, the United States was, Wilson believed, truly and fully a nation made up of one single people. That was the foundational idea, he insisted, at the heart of its Declaration of Independence.

Jonathan Gienapp is associate professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association.