Wilson

On the second of August 1776, in the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) at Philadelphia, the engrossed Declaration of Independence (the formal calligraphic copy on parchment) was laid out for the signatures of the fifty-six delegates of the Continental Congress, the formal vote on the Declaration having been taken on the second of July and the resolution finalised on the fourth of July. Among the signatories on the Pennsylvania delegation was James Wilson, born at Carskerdo near St Andrews in Fife on the fourteenth of September 1742, schooled at the University of St Andrews, emigrated to Philadelphia in 1765, and at the time of the signing one of the principal lawyers of the colony. Wilson had, in his pamphlet Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (Philadelphia, August 1774, but written in 1768), been the first writer in the English-speaking world to argue from natural-law and contractual grounds that the British Parliament had no legislative authority over the American colonies, an argument that, in 1768, had no obvious takers and that, by the summer of 1776, was the constitutional position of the Continental Congress. He was thirty-three years old. He went on to be the intellectual force behind the federalist case at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (the long quotations from his Pennsylvania ratification speeches are preserved in Wilson's Works of 1804), to be appointed by Washington as one of the first six Associate Justices of the Supreme Court (1789), and to die, bankrupt and discredited, in a North Carolina inn in 1798.

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On the morning of the eighth of January 1918, in a Joint Session of the United States Congress in the House of Representatives Chamber in the United States Capitol building, Woodrow Wilson, sixty-one years old, the twenty-eighth President of the United States, of Scots-Irish Wilson stock (the Wilson family had emigrated from Strabane in County Tyrone to Pennsylvania in 1807, and Woodrow's father the Reverend Dr Joseph Ruggles Wilson was the Presbyterian theologian of the American South), delivered a speech of about forty-five minutes on the United States' war-aims in the Great War (which the United States had entered in April 1917 on the Allied side). The speech set out fourteen specific points (the Fourteen Points) that the United States proposed as the basis for any post-war peace settlement: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removal of economic barriers, reduction of armaments, the adjustment of colonial claims, evacuation of Russia, restoration of Belgium, return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, frontier adjustments along clearly recognisable lines of nationality for Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Balkans and Turkey, an independent Poland, and (the fourteenth and most consequential point) a general association of nations, the precursor of the League of Nations of 1920 and the United Nations of 1945. The Fourteen Points became, by the October 1918 German request for an armistice on their basis, the formal framework of the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919.

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