Jesse Wegman
speaker
281 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Jesse Wegman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he can't understand why so many of the other founders resist him.
So that fight, that fight over popular rule versus state equality takes up the entire first half of the summer.
And in the end, Wilson, for all his arguments, actually ends up losing that one.
Wilson and James Madison and a few of the other nationalists had really wanted a government based on population.
They don't get it.
They get a Senate that has equal state power.
And this is one of the ironies of Wilson's life and of his role in our founding.
And it's a complicated one.
And I take him to task for it in the book, which is he really, I think, did not go after slavery with the energy and the commitment of some of the other founders, including slaveholders themselves, who were quite open about the evil, the moral evil of the practice.
Wilson actually introduces the three-fifths clause, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of representation in Congress and for taxation.
Now, Wilson didn't come up with the three-fifths number himself.
It was already there floating around from earlier debates under the Articles of Confederation.
But the fact that he was willing to countenance that, the fact that he –
It's more important for us to have a union here, even if it means the perpetuation of slavery, I think really undercuts a lot of his fundamental commitments to equality, to popular self-rule, to the basic dignity of humans.
And in the book, I quote a number of his contemporaries being very open about the fact that this is an evil.
This is a moral profanity.
And Wilson is really quite muted on this point.
And it's something that there's no good resolution to.
He wanted the union more than he wanted an end to slavery.
And he accepted – although he was opposed to slavery, he accepted this compromise.
Showing 121–140 of 281 · page 7 of 15
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