Jesse Wegman

Alexander Hamilton, I think, being the one people are most aware of, he was an immigrant.

And he was born into a poor farming family in the lowlands of Scotland outside of Edinburgh.

And so he has this pretty standard Scottish upbringing for a young farm boy of the, you

He grows up in the Presbyterian church, which is far more democratic in its governance than, say, the Anglican church or the Catholic church.

The parishioners vote for the elders.

There's much more involvement by the regular people in the church than in these other churches where it's much more of a top-down hierarchy.

So Wilson is – he's imbued with this –

democratic notion of governance early in his life.

He's also educated in schools in Scotland that are explicitly there to educate all Scottish children.

Everybody is expected to get an education.

Everyone is expected to learn to read and write.

So Wilson, you know, by the time he's a teenager, he is already sort of filled with these just very natural ideas of democracy,

democratic rule, the equality of all people, and the sense that everybody, no matter what their station in life, where they come from, has equal access to the truth and has an equal right to govern themselves.

And that's what he brings over to America.

And it's true, you know, few if any of the other founders that he worked with had that kind of background, had that kind of upbringing.

So Wilson does not have a direct role in the drafting of the Declaration itself.

That's obviously Thomas Jefferson and

John Adams and a few of the others that we know well.

But what Wilson did do was write this essay that he first drafted in 1768, arguing that the British Parliament had no authority at all over the colonies.

This was a groundbreaking argument at the time because everyone else was trying to argue that, well, Parliament has some power over us, Parliament is sovereign over us, but