Early one evening in August 1798, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court named James Wilson died in a sparsely furnished boarding room on the second floor of a North Carolina tavern. He had been holed up there for nearly a year to avoid creditors, to whom he owed unspeakable debts from land speculation. Delirious and destitute, he died from malarial fever, which burned through the Carolinas every summer. There was no public announcement of Wilson’s death. It was an ignominious end to a man who