Rediscovering America’s Forgotten Founders: Architects of the Constitution

Sure.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Jesse Wegman, and I just want to say...

Thank you to the National Constitution Center for hosting this event and to Vince and to Julie and to Charles for making this all happen and making us all feel so welcome.

This is amazing.

I was walking around earlier today.

I attended the naturalization ceremony, which was very moving.

And I just find this place a national treasure.

So we're lucky to have it.

I have written what I think is the, I'm sure is, the first mainstream biography of James Wilson, but I'm certainly not the first person to be shocked at how completely he was erased from American history.

And I'm just gonna read you this this quote, which is one of my favorite quotes on that subject.

This is from a historian in the early 1990s, so 30-something years ago.

The neglect of Wilson, the unsungest of the unsung heroes, is so often deplored in the retellings of the events of the American beginnings that in the select world of books, his unsungness is sung.

So that definitely, as a journalist, it perked my ears up.

What also perked my ears up was how I found Wilson.

This was, I would say, eight years ago.

I was working on a book about the Electoral College, the history of the adoption of the Electoral College and how it functions.

And I went to James Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention to find the moment when the framers chose this way of electing the president.

And I run into this strange, long-winded Scottish guy who just keeps talking about things in a very different way from the other framers on the issue of electing the president.

He had stood up and said, I think we should have a popular vote for president, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

And I didn't remember anybody saying that in Philadelphia in 1787.

I was like, how can I not know who this is? I went to law school.

I write for the paper of record about the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

I should know all the big founders.

And the more I read Wilson, the more I was just blown away by his ideas.