George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay — these are the most famous men associated with the American founding, yet, according to research by William Ewald, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, none appear to have uttered the Declaration’s preamble aloud in public after 1776. Not “created equal,” not “self-evident,” not “pursuit of happiness,” not “unalienable.”
But one founder did: James Wilson. He quoted from the Declaration constantly, including one day on the floor of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. In notes Madison recorded that day, Wilson pulled out a copy of the Declaration and read aloud from it, arguing that it proved that the states had declared their independence “not individually but unitedly.”
Wilson’s insistent focus on one, united people was the natural consequence of his commitment to popular sovereignty: the idea that the people are, as he put it, “the legitimate source of all authority.” In other words, the people, not the states, are the ultimate fount of power in government.
This was the essence of the Declaration, as he saw it, and he did what he could to make it the essence of the Constitution, too. When he was assigned to a committee tasked with drafting the Constitution in the middle of the summer of 1787, he opened it with the words, “We the people,” to tie that document to the Declaration and to remove any doubt about who this government was being built for.
So why does almost no one today know Wilson’s name? Only a few years after the Constitution was ratified in 1788, he succumbed to malaria while hiding out in the back room of a tavern in North Carolina. He had been there for the better part of a year, absconding from his Philadelphia townhouse and from the Supreme Court, to which he had been appointed by George Washington. He had already been jailed twice for unpaid debts, a result of his compulsive and reckless speculation in lands; his modern anonymity is a result of his ignominious death.
