Jesse Wegman

You know, they can't impose taxes.

You know, all of the things that we know the colonists were arguing over are against this backdrop of parliament being sovereign, parliament having ultimate authority over the colonies.

James Wilson is the first to argue, no, they have zero.

They have no authority over us at all.

Now, this is such a groundbreaking argument that one of his mentors reads it and says, James, you're a young man.

You have a

big career ahead of you, don't put this out there yet.

It's too bold.

So he put it away in a drawer for six years.

But in 1774, he publishes it.

It's published anonymously.

And instantly, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who very quickly says, no, this isn't by me.

It's by a man named James Wilson.

And suddenly, people start to find out who this guy is.

We know that Thomas Jefferson, who was

the writer of the Declaration of Independence, had whole sections of Wilson's essay, this essay on the authority of parliament, pasted into his commonplace book where he kept quotes that were important to him.

We know that the essay as a whole

And historians going back now about 100 years have theorized that Wilson's essay was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, influence on Jefferson as he sat down to draft those famous words of the Declaration.

That's right.

Yeah, so this is in some ways the most shocking riot of the revolutionary period because it is Americans targeting other Americans.