The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution with Jesse Wegman (Celadon Books, 2026)

About this episode

David N. Gellman interviews Jesse Wegman on The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon Books, 2026). Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal. As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He went on to write the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation. Wilson believed that in a democracy, the…