 Wilson
was born in 1741 or 1742 at Carskerdo, near St. Andrews, Scotland,
and educated at the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and
Edinburgh. He then emigrated to America, arriving in the midst of
the Stamp Act agitations in 1765. Early the next year, he accepted a
position as Latin tutor at the College of Philadelphia (later part
of the University of Pennsylvania) but almost immediately abandoned
it to study law under John Dickinson.
In 1768, the year after his admission to the
Philadelphia bar, Wilson set up practice at Reading, Pa. Two years
later, he moved westward to the Scotch-Irish settlement of Carlisle,
and the following year he took a bride, Rachel Bird. He specialized
in land law and built up a broad clientele. On borrowed capital, he
also began to speculate in land. In some way he managed, too, to
lecture on English literature at the College of Philadelphia, which
had awarded him an honorary master of arts degree in 1766.
Wilson became involved in Revolutionary
politics. In 1774 he took over chairmanship of the Carlisle
committee of correspondence, attended the first provincial assembly,
and completed preparation of Considerations on the Nature and Extent
of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. This tract
circulated widely in England and America and established him as a
Whig leader.
The next year, Wilson was elected to both the
provincial assembly and the Continental Congress, where he sat
mainly on military and Indian affairs committees. In 1776,
reflecting the wishes of his constituents, he joined the moderates
in Congress voting for a 3-week delay in considering Richard Henry
Lee's resolution of June 7 for independence. On the July 1 and 2
ballots on the issue, however, he voted in the affirmative and
signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2.
Wilson's strenuous opposition to the republican
Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, besides indicating a switch to
conservatism on his part, led to his removal from Congress the
following year. To avoid the clamor among his frontier constituents,
he repaired to Annapolis during the winter of 1777-78 and then took
up residence in Philadelphia.
Wilson affirmed his newly assumed political
stance by closely identifying with the aristocratic and conservative
republican groups, multiplying his business interests, and
accelerating his land speculation. He also took a position as
Advocate General for France in America (1779-83), dealing with
commercial and maritime matters, and legally defended Loyalists and
their sympathizers.
In the fall of 1779, during a period of
inflation and food shortages, a mob which included many militiamen
and was led by radical constitutionalists, set out to attack the
republican leadership. Wilson was a prime target. He and some 35 of
his colleagues barricaded themselves in his home at Third and Walnut
Streets, thereafter known as "Fort Wilson." During a brief skirmish,
several people on both sides were killed or wounded. The shock
cooled sentiments and pardons were issued all around, though major
political battles over the commonwealth constitution still lay
ahead.
During 1781 Congress appointed Wilson as one of
the directors of the Bank of North America, newly founded by his
close associate and legal client Robert Morris. In 1782, by which
time the conservatives had regained some of their power, the former
was reelected to Congress, and he also served in the period 1785-87.
Wilson reached the apex of his career in the
Constitutional Convention (1787), where his influence was probably
second only to that of Madison. Rarely missing a session, he sat on
the Committee of Detail and in many other ways applied his excellent
knowledge of political theory to convention problems. Only
Gouverneur Morris delivered more speeches.
That same year, overcoming powerful opposition,
Wilson led the drive for ratification in Pennsylvania, the second
state to endorse the instrument. The new commonwealth constitution,
drafted in 1789-90 along the lines of the U.S. Constitution, was
primarily Wilson's work and represented the climax of his 14-year
fight against the constitution of 1776.
For his services in the formation of the
federal government, though Wilson expected to be appointed Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, in 1789 President Washington named him
as an associate justice. He was chosen that same year as the first
law professor at the College of Philadelphia. Two years later he
began an official digest of the laws of Pennsylvania, a project he
never completed, though he carried on for a while after funds ran
out.
Wilson, who wrote only a few opinions, did not
achieve the success on the Supreme Court that his capabilities and
experience promised. Indeed, during those years he was the object of
much criticism and barely escaped impeachment. For one thing, he
tried to influence the enactment of legislation in Pennsylvania
favorable to land speculators. Between 1792 and 1795 he also made
huge but unwise land investments in western New York and
Pennsylvania, as well as in Georgia. This did not stop him from
conceiving a grandiose but ill-fated scheme, involving vast sums of
European capital, for the recruitment of European colonists and
their settlement in the West. Meantime, in 1793, as a widower with
six children, he remarried to Hannah Gray; their one son died in
infancy.
Four years later, to avoid arrest for debt, the
distraught Wilson moved from Philadelphia to Burlington, NJ. The
next year, apparently while on federal circuit court business, he
arrived at Edenton, NC, in a state of acute mental stress and was
taken into the home of James Iredell, a fellow Supreme Court
justice. He died there within a few months. Although first buried at
Hayes Plantation near Edenton, his remains were later reinterred in
the yard of Christ Church at Philadelphia. |
