The Benjamin Franklin - James Wilson Dynamic at the Constitutional Convention

To a great extent, James Wilson was Benjamin Franklin’s voice at the Constitutional Convention. On five occasions, the elderly and ailing Franklin chose to put his speeches on paper and have his friend and colleague James Wilson deliver them. Specific imagery in three of Franklin’s speeches is mirrored in the margins of Wilson’s copy of Analysis.

First, the sunrise image captures Franklin’s famous comment that he had wondered “often and often in the session” if the carved sun on Washington’s chair was rising or setting. Franklin, being a renowned conversationalist, almost certainly posed this evocative question to his fellow Pennsylvania delegates during informal moments in the long Convention.

Second, Wilson delivered Franklin’s speech on presidential compensation, warning about monarchy’s avarice and corruption, as personified by the Insatiable Crown image.

Third, the repurposing of Franklin’s Join or Die snake image, updated for Franklin’s two-headed snake anecdote, is a classic example of collegial flattery and mission collaboration.

While these three images attest to the Franklin-Wilson alliance, other images in the Blackstone margins are purely James Wilson’s in nature. The full sun image, superimposed with a capital “P” and adjacent to the vesica piscis, is James Wilson’s intellectual signature. Wilson, having grown up in a poor farming family in Scotland, was virtually alone among the Founders in ardently promoting a commonwealth nation based on We the People.

One image that is uniquely associated with Wilson is his people-based “pyramid of government” imagery, first introduced by Wilson at the Convention, and shown on the following page.