Wilson is one of the luminaries of [his] time,” wrote James Bryce in The American Commonwealth (1888), “to whom subsequent generations of Americans have failed to do full justice.” We conspicuously continue to fail. In America’s Forgotten Founders (2008), Mark David Hall and Gary Gregg recounted asking more than one hundred political scientists, historians, and law professors to rank, from a list of seventy-three, the most underrated founders. Wilson, they report, “easily topped the list.” In 1956, Wilson’s biographer, the historian Charles Page Smith, observed that his subject—one of six men to sign both the Declaration and Constitution—was “alone among the great figures of his age [to be] without a biography.” Smith hoped to “restore James Wilson to his proper place among the great figures of our history.” His work, long out of print, remains the only biography ever written about Wilson. Meanwhile, biographies of Founders routinely top the bestseller lists in our day; the reputations of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton have been restored by such efforts.

James Wilson was born in 1742 on a farm in the shire of Fife in the Scottish Lowlands, a coastal region of low windswept hills and misty pastures. His parents, enterprising small farmers, saw that their son, at age fourteen, entered St. Andrew’s College. Each morning young Jamie received a half-loaf of oaten bread and a pint of small beer before settling in to Newton’s natural philosophy, Locke’s psychology, and the epistemology of Hutcheson, Hume, Berkeley, and Shaftesbury. His parents