Was America supposed to be a democracy? Two books revisit its founding

A review of two books explores James Wilson's overlooked role in shaping the US Constitution and examines the enduring tensions between democracy and republicanism

The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution

by Jesse Wegman

Published by Celadon

369 pages $30

 

The Fall Of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution

by Thomas F Madden

Published by Princeton University Press

448 pages $35

 

By Claire Rydell Arcenas

 

The opening words of the Constitution of the United States — words that have been celebrated across the centuries as the lifeblood of democratic governance — owe their existence to a man few Americans today have ever heard of. His name was James Wilson, and in the summer of 1787 he wrote “We the People” into his draft — the first full draft — of the Constitution. 

 

A decade later, while serving as a justice of the Supreme Court, Wilson was on the run. Addicted to land speculation and deeply in debt, Wilson spent the final months of his life as a fugitive, hiding from creditors in a tavern in North Carolina. When he died, stricken by malaria in 1798, almost no one noticed. 

But, as the former New York Times journalist Jesse Wegman suggests in his riveting new biography, The Lost Founder, few people had as profound an impact and have been as profoundly forgotten as Wilson. Wilsonville, Pa., the only town named for Wilson, was established by the man himself in 1794 as a site for manufacturing rope and cloth. Flooded by the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company in the 1920s, it now lies under the waters of Lake Wallenpaupack. 

To many of his peers, Wilson was an extremist. His belief that everyday people should vote directly for consequential things, like the presidency of the United States, often put him at odds with better remembered founders like James Madison and John Adams. 

The turbulent history of popular sovereignty concerned many of the first architects of the United States. To survive, such voices contended, the fledgling American republic needed layers of separation between the nation’s citizenry and the highest offices in the land. Thus, under the original Constitution of 1787, state legislatures — not the people of the states themselves — were tasked with electing the two senators who represented them. 

Wilson, for his part, saw all this as rubbish. No mere gesture or rhetorical flourish, “We the People” captured the essence of Wilson’s political convictions: His lifelong commitment to what Abraham Lincoln would later call a government of, by and for the people. Indeed, what would become a hallmark of American law in the 20th century — the principle of “one person, one vote” — originated with Wilson. 

And yet when his preference for a directly elected president was rejected, he stepped back, held his nose and (in one of those arresting ironies of history) proposed the first version of what is arguably the most serious inhibitor of democratic action in the United States today: The Electoral College. 

In many respects, Wilson’s democratic egalitarianism seems only natural. Born in the impoverished countryside of the Scottish Lowlands in 1742, Wilson attended St. Andrews on a scholarship and, later, the University of Glasgow, where he studied under the greatest minds of the Scottish Enlightenment, learning from men like Thomas Reid, who argued that all people, no matter their background or status, had the ability to arrive at equally correct moral judgments. 

At the heart of Wilson’s democratic vision for his country was an abiding commitment to human equality, the limits and complexity of which Wegman handles deftly. But does one insistently democratic founder make the founding of the United States a democratic project? 

Many of Wilson’s contemporaries would have balked at the idea. As the historian Thomas F Madden shows in his lively and capacious history, The Fall of Republics, the men who huddled together in the Pennsylvania State House knew their experiment in representative government was not the first. Their libraries were brimming with examples — from the factious city-states of ancient Greece to the demagogues of pre-imperial Rome — that stoked their fears about the potential for what Madden calls a “tyranny of the people”. 

In the late 1780s, John Adams undertook a survey of history’s most notable republics in his “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America”. 

America, Adams believed, should strive to become, in Madden’s words, a “balanced republic” immune to “the radicalism and chaos of unfettered democracy”. 

America’s present political system is under strain. Yet, as Wegman and Madden ably demonstrate, it is a system built for shock. The Constitution, to be sure, was the product of men who had their gazes fixed squarely on the past, men raised on the writings of ancient thinkers, like Polybius and Cicero, who favoured republican government, though they feared the crowd. But it was also the product of a forward-facing vision, however imperfect, however aspirational, of what the United States could become: A durable democracy built on “We the People”.

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The reviewer is a professor of history at the University of Montana

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