Though Wilson was a nationalist, he recommended the new Constitution to the minds of his countrymen with civility and rigor, considering the arguments of critics as honest expressions of concern about the new Constitution. The nationalists, who misleadingly called themselves вЂњfederalists,вЂќ showed a troubling tendency to use invective and censorship to bully into acquiescence those Americans who did not like the proposed Constitution. This speech is important in part because of its influence on the tone of debates about the Constitution that were to follow. The speech was delivered in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, where the Constitution had been approved just days before, and so his defense has come to be known as the State House Yard Speech. The Convention ended on 17 September, 1787 and nineteen days later, on 6 October, Wilson gave a speech defending the Constitution from critics. Wilson was one of the original six justices of the Supreme Court appointed by George Washington and, as the first professor of law at the College of Philadelphia (which became the University of Pennsylvania), taught the first course on the Constitution to President Washington and his cabinet in 17. So, having taken the general temper of his colleagues, Wilson proposed the electoral college as a state-based process for choosing a president. This proposal was not going to pass out of the Convention because the United States was not a nation under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, but a confederation of sovereign states, and there was little expressed desire to create a unitary nation with a sovereign, central government. Wilson was a nationalist who wanted the president to be elected by Americans considered as one national body of citizens, rather than as citizens of separate, sovereign states. He is regarded as the principal designer of the executive branch of government in the Constitution. He served on the Committee of Detail that produced the first draft of the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. James Wilson was a Scottish-born Pennsylvanian who was one of the leading jurists in the early years after the ratification of the Constitution.

Principle of federalism