THERE HAS BEEN some recent interest in the founder and framer James Wilson, one who played a role in creating the excuse used to insert the Marbury power into the real Court shaped instead of the written Constitution. I will say up front that that excuse, lame as it was to start with, has like the Constitution it has constantly deformed and changed under the pretenses of things like "originalism" and "textualism" isn't the same now as then. Even if there was some plausible excuse for that in the beginning, that has proved to be a lie under use.
I stopped listening to Public Radio in the United States years ago and had always had a bit of an allergy to Fresh Air so I hadn't known about this renewed interest in Wilson until I went looking for more information about him and came across this interesting but arguably overly positive presentation of him by his most recent biographer, Jesse Wegman. It's one of the things I've come to get my guard up over, biographers tend to present their subjects in overly favorable terms.
I, of course, being a sworn and complete opponent of the Marbury power and the idea of judges and "justices" taking on a role superior to a popularly elected legislature for all of the reasons I've given here, am inclined to be far more skeptical of its proponents, especially those who have been or are elite lawyers. I note that in the discussion in which Wilson's official opposition to slavery is mentioned there is no mention of the fact that he kept a man in slavery for a number of years, himself. Whether or not he kept others in slavery, I have yet to try to find out. One is made suspicious by the monumental under-count by his biographers and admirers of those that John Marshall kept enslaved and the clear motive that the enormous wealth their violent enslavement gave to Marshall in his uniformly slavery favoring rulings on the Court. That fact is something for which I am indebted to the current history of Paul Finkelman and his colleague who did what the previous hagiographers failed to do, look at his will and property records to find out the facts. I regard Finkelman as one of our best current historians.
To his eternal discredit, Wilson authored the morally disgusting 3/5th provision and caved on many of the worst anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic aspects of the Constitution. He also indulged in that other major moral abomination of the founders and framers, western land speculation which inevitably involved the genocidal removal of People and the theft of their lands, in the end, it was what broke him and led to him, one of the most prominent lawyers in America, taking on the lam, running from his creditors and the law as he remained an associate justice of the U.S Supreme Court.
I'm going to suggest listening to and reading the transcript of the Wegman interview because we share many of the same ideas about reforming the corrupt Supreme Court and because, skeptical as I am of biographers presentation of their subjects, he gives a lot of introductory information about Wilson who will figure in some of my planned posts.
'The Lost Founder' profiles a brilliant lawyer who helped craft the Constitution
I should finally ask, does anyone prefer to have these links open in a new window or is the way I've always done that OK? I will change that if you want it otherwise.
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