THE LOST FOUNDER

A not-quite founding father gets his due.

Wegman, author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (2020), writes that when the 1787 Constitutional Convention discussed choosing a central government, some members proposed democratic elections in which every man voted. That was radical for the time; democracy until the 18th century to elites meant mob rule and, in the absence of police (a 19th-century institution), mobs were common and often murderous. After a debate, the idea was easily defeated. As a result, Americans vote for electors who choose the president, and the Senate is made up of two representatives from each state, regardless of size. Both are undemocratic systems that give voters from smaller states more influence; Congress has defeated innumerable efforts to correct this. Leading the losing fight was James Wilson (1742-1798), a Scottish immigrant to Pennsylvania who became a wealthy, influential lawyer and an opponent of British rule. While not a page-turner, the heart of Wegman’s book—his account of the convention’s work—will educate most readers on how our federal government was born. Wilson never missed a day of the convention and belonged to a small committee that drew up the first draft of the Constitution. “Without him,” Wegman writes, “American government as we know it today would not exist.” After ratification, Wilson became a Supreme Court justice in the new nation. Wegman emphasizes that Wilson (not John Marshall) first insisted that the Supreme Court should determine if a law obeyed the Constitution. The 1790s were not kind to Wilson, who speculated disastrously in western lands. Frequently absent from the bench, he served time in debtor’s prison and in 1797 fled creditors, spending months holed up in a North Carolina tavern, where he died, largely forgotten.

A genuinely fresh look at the birth of the Constitution.