James Wilson signs the Declaration

Some revolutions are made by soldiers and orators; others by lawyers who, years before anyone is listening, work out on paper the constitutional ground a country will one day stand on. When the hour comes, such a man does not need to be persuaded. He has already done the thinking. He only has to put his name to it.

THE PAMPHLET OF 1768

James Wilson is 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, and lands at Philadelphia in 1765 with a Latin grammar and the lecture notes of Adam Smith's moral philosophy. By 1767 he is called to the Pennsylvania bar at Reading in Berks County. In 1768, in chambers above a Carlisle counting-house, he writes a pamphlet which sets down, in lawyer's prose, that no British Parliament has authority to bind a people who have not consented through their representatives. He does not publish it. The argument has no takers. He files it in a drawer and rides circuit.

Six years pass. The pamphlet comes out of the drawer in August 1774, under the title Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, printed at Philadelphia by William and Thomas Bradford. By then the country is listening. By the second of July 1776 the argument of the pamphlet is the constitutional position of the Continental Congress. The lawyer who wrote it is thirty-three years old and a delegate from Pennsylvania.

THE ASSEMBLY ROOM, CHESTNUT STREET

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, in heavy summer light through the south windows. The room smells of ink, beeswax, and the river. Wilson is in the long black frock coat of the Philadelphia bar, a powdered wig, plain bands at the throat. He has been a delegate of the Continental Congress for two years; he has the slight stoop of a man who reads at a desk by candle.

On the table at the head of the room is the engrossed Declaration, 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 already signed at the head, in the famous large hand. Most of the New England and middle-colony men have signed. The Pennsylvania delegation, by the protocol of the Congress, signs together, in order: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Wilson, Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, George Ross.

A SECOND AT THE INKSTAND

The quill is in the inkstand by Morris's right hand. Morris signs. Rush signs. The quill comes down the table. Wilson takes it, dips, holds it a moment above the parchment. The seconds dilate. Carskerdo to this room is six thousand miles and eight years, and the argument he set down in chambers at Carlisle in 1768, that no legislature can bind a people who have not consented through their representatives, is the constitutional ground on which the parchment rests. He has read the engrossed text three times. He knows what the document is. It is, in the technical language of the law he was trained in at St Andrews and Reading, a writ of high treason against the King he was born under. The penalty under the statute is the gallows.

He notices, in the way a lawyer notices, the practical situation of the country whose Congress is signing. Long Island is being lost as he sits here; Manhattan will fall within weeks; Philadelphia may fall by autumn. If Philadelphia falls, this parchment goes into the British Privy Council file as the evidence at the trial of every man whose name is on it. He notices also, in the way the same lawyer notices, that he has signed instruments in this room for ten years that committed him to less and risked him more, and that the case for the country has been, since 1768, his own case. The document on the table is not an argument he is being asked to accept. It is an argument he is being asked to countersign.

He thinks, briefly and without sentiment, of the next ten years of work. The Declaration settles only the question of separation. The harder question, what constitutional architecture replaces the Crown-in-Parliament, is not in this document. The answer to that question will have to be written, and the writing of it will be a lawyer's work, not a soldier's.

He sets the quill to the parchment and signs his name in the careful copperplate of the Philadelphia bar, James Wilson, the seventh signature in the Pennsylvania column. He passes the quill to Franklin, sitting at his right elbow. Franklin signs Benja. Franklin and passes the quill to Morton. The Pennsylvania column closes.

THE TABLE AFTER

Hancock is in the chair, marking each signature in his ledger. Charles Thomson, the secretary, stands at his shoulder. Outside on Chestnut Street, a dray passes; somewhere a bell strikes two. Franklin, who is seventy and has signed more public instruments than any other man in the room, says little. The Pennsylvania chairs are pushed back; the Maryland delegation moves up. The parchment is rolled, sealed, and set aside for the press. By the end of the afternoon, fifty signatures are on it; the remaining six will be added in the weeks following. None of the signatories, leaving the room into the August heat, can say whether what they have signed is the founding document of a country or the indictment at their own trial.

THE CONVENTION OF 1787

The war is won. Yorktown comes in 1781; the Peace of Paris in 1783. The harder question, the one not in the Declaration, comes due in the summer of 1787 in the same Assembly Room on Chestnut Street. Wilson is forty-four. He is, by the testimony of Madison's Notes, the man at the Convention who speaks most often after Madison and Gouverneur Morris, and the man whose case for a national government founded on the direct consent of the people, and not on the consent of the states, carries the structural argument. He proposes the popular election of the President; the Electoral College emerges as the compromise on his proposal. At the Pennsylvania ratifying convention that winter, in long speeches preserved in Wilson's Works of 1804, he sets down the federalist case in the prose of the pamphlet of 1768, twenty years older and finally addressing the country it was always written for.

In September 1789, President Washington appoints him to one of the first six seats on the Supreme Court of the United States. He sits as Associate Justice. He drafts the revision of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790, the text on which the modern state constitution rests. He delivers, in the winter of 1790-91, the Lectures on Law at the College of Philadelphia, the first sustained attempt in the new republic to set its jurisprudence on a philosophical footing.

EDENTON, 1798

The land speculations come due. Wilson, like many of his generation, has put his name to bonds on Yazoo and Pennsylvania frontier tracts that the market does not redeem. He is bankrupt; he is, briefly, in debtors' confinement at Burlington, New Jersey, while still a sitting Justice. He rides south to escape his creditors and to attend the federal circuit at Edenton, North Carolina. He puts up at the Horniblow Tavern. He takes yellow fever. He dies there on the twenty-first of August 1798, fifty-five years old, and is buried at Edenton in an unmarked grave at the request of his second wife.

In 1906, at the petition of the Pennsylvania bar, his remains are exhumed and reinterred at Christ Church, Philadelphia, beside Franklin. The plaque to him on the wall of the United Free Church at Carskerdo is put up in 1976, on the bicentennial of the second of August.

CARSKERDO

The country whose constitutional ground he set down in chambers at Carlisle in 1768 is now, on the bicentennial, two hundred years old. The Fife farm where he was born is less than fifty acres. The local tradition there holds that Carskerdo has produced two men of national consequence: the Auchterfardel 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. The signatures on that parchment, kept under low light in the National Archives at Washington, are fading; Hancock's bold hand at the head, the Pennsylvania column below the fold, and seventh in that column, in the careful copperplate of the Philadelphia bar, the name James Wilson.