Wilson · 1776
James Wilson signs the Declaration
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.
It is a quarter to two on the afternoon of the second of August 1776, in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, in heavy summer light through the south windows. He is thirty-three years old. He is James Wilson, born at the small farm of Carskerdo near St Andrews in Fife on the fourteenth of September 1742, schooled at the University of St Andrews, called to the Pennsylvania bar at Reading in Berks County in 1767. He is in the long black frock coat of the Philadelphia bar and a powdered wig. He has been a delegate of the Continental Congress for two years.
On the table at the head of the room is the engrossed Declaration of Independence, the formal handwritten parchment copy made by Timothy Matlack the Pennsylvania assistant secretary in the past two and a half weeks. The text has been agreed since the fourth of July. The signatures, of the fifty-six delegates from the thirteen colonies, are being collected this afternoon. John Hancock has signed at the head, in the famous large hand. Most of the New England and middle-colony delegates have already signed. The Pennsylvania delegation, by the protocol of the Congress, signs together: Robert Morris first, then Benjamin Rush, then Wilson, then Franklin, then John Morton, then George Clymer, then James Smith, then George Taylor, then George Ross.
He thinks: Carskerdo to this room is six thousand miles and eight years.
He thinks: the argument I made in Considerations in 1768 (the seven of us in this room have read it; the country has not) is, this afternoon, the constitutional position of the country. The argument was that no legislature could bind a people who had not consented through their representatives. The country has, on the second of July, formally given itself the right to do without the legislature.
He thinks: the question is now what kind of constitutional architecture replaces it. The answer is not in this document. The answer is the next ten years of work.
He thinks: the document I am about to sign is a writ of high treason against the King I was born under. It commits me to the gallows if the war goes badly.
He thinks: I emigrated from Carskerdo for the law and not for politics. I have never wanted to be a soldier. I have never wanted to be the executive officer of a state. I have wanted to be the lawyer who put the contractual ground under the new country. The new country needs that lawyer.
He thinks: the new country has a war on its hands and is at the bottom of the war. The new country has lost Long Island. The new country has lost Manhattan in two weeks. The new country may lose Philadelphia in the autumn. If the new country loses Philadelphia, the document we are signing this afternoon goes into the British Privy Council file as the evidence at the trial.
He thinks: I have signed contracts in this room for ten years that have committed me to less and risked me more. I will sign this one.
He picks up the quill from the inkstand. He signs his name in his careful copperplate, James Wilson, in the seventh signature of the Pennsylvania column. He passes the quill to Franklin, who is sitting at his right elbow.
Wilson held the seat in the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777 and from 1782 to 1783. He was the principal author of the Pennsylvania Constitution's revision of 1790, the foundational text on which the modern Pennsylvania state constitution rests. He was, by the testimony of every careful historian of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (Madison's Notes, the Federalist, modern scholars Jack Rakove and Pauline Maier), the intellectual force on the case for the federal Constitution beyond Madison and Hamilton themselves. He proposed the popular election of the President at the Convention; the Electoral College was the compromise that came out of his proposal. He was appointed by President Washington in September 1789 to one of the first six seats on the Supreme Court of the United States. He served on the bench until his death.
He died at Edenton, North Carolina, in a small inn called the Horniblow Tavern, on the twenty-first of August 1798, of yellow fever and the chronic stress of a personal bankruptcy that had followed the failure of his land-speculation enterprises in the Yazoo and the Pennsylvania frontier. He was fifty-five years old. He was buried at Edenton in an unmarked grave at the request of his second wife. In 1906 his remains were exhumed at the petition of the Pennsylvania bar and reinterred at Christ Church, Philadelphia, beside Benjamin Franklin. The St Andrews Wilson plaque on the wall of the United Free Church at Carskerdo was put up in 1976 on the bicentennial. The local tradition holds that Carskerdo, a Fife farm of less than fifty acres, has produced two men of national consequence: the Auchter-fardel ploughman who fed the famine of 1782, and the lawyer who put his name to the Declaration of Independence on the second of August 1776 in Philadelphia.