How did we forget the man who coined ‘We the People’?
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James Wilson does not have a flashy Broadway musical named after him, nor is he even featured in Hamilton. But Jesse Wegman’s excellent new biography, The Lost Founder, hopes to bring him back—if not to the stage—at least to the forefront of the American mind. As one historian Wegman cites wrote, Wilson is “the unsungest of the unsung heroes.” According to Wegman, that unsungness is all the more unjustified given Wilson’s many contributions to the American form of government, and a central mystery of the book is unraveling how the man who originated “We the People” could have been erased from history.
Anastasia Boden is director of constitutional scholarship at the Pacific Legal Foundation, where she hosts the Supreme Court podcast, In Dissent. She is also a columnist for SCOTUSblog.
