Background
William Wilson was born on April 27, 1794, in Loudoun County, Virginia, United States.
William Wilson was born on April 27, 1794, in Loudoun County, Virginia, United States.
Left fatherless at an early age, William and his only brother worked in a store to help support their mother. William's spare time was spent reading, and, at age of eighteen, he began the study of law in Virginia.
As is already known, at the age of eighteen, Wilson began the study of law. However, brief military service in the War of 1812 (he served in the United States Army under General Andrew Jackson in New Orleans, Louisiana) interrupted his preparation for the bar, but in 1817, he felt sufficiently prepared for his chosen profession and went on to seek a location in the West. Then, William began practice in White County, Illinois, and in 1818, before he had been in the state for a year, he received fifteen votes in the legislature for an associate justiceship of the newly organized supreme court. This number was barely short of the majority, required for election, but when the first vacancy on the court occurred, in August 1819, the governor appointed Wilson to the place.
Upon the expiration of his term as an associate justice in 1824, the legislature elected Wilson to the chief justiceship. Thus, at the age of thirty, he became the third chief justice of the supreme court of Illinois, in which capacity he served until 1848, when after twenty-nine years on the bench, he retired, to pass the remainder of his life on his farm in White County, where he died.
It's worth noting, that, Wilson's most important decision was probably that, given in 1839 in the case of Field vs. The State of Illinois ex. rel. McClernand (2 Scammon, 79), in which the power of the governor to remove a secretary of state, appointed by the governor's predecessor, was denied on the ground, that the constitution did not expressly place any limitation upon the duration of the term of office. The case was argued by an array of the state's foremost legal talent and attracted wide interest.
A Whig in early life, Wilson became a Democrat upon the organization of the Republican Party, but he was never a strong partisan nor did he cultivate the arts of the politician.
Throughout his life, William was interested in agriculture and livestock, and upon his estate in White County, he bred many horses, cattle, sheep and swine of a superior type. A noted storyteller, amiable and hospitable, he attracted a host of visitors and friends to his country home.
Physical Characteristics: Wilson, when young, was described by contemporaries as noble-looking. In later years, his voice acquired a cracked and unnatural quality, and because of a chronic stomach ailment, he became a laudanum addict.
Wilson married Mary S. (Davidson) Wilson in April 1820 and they gave birth to ten children, of whom four sons and two daughters survived him.