Gouverneur Morris

American politician and diplomat

• Born: January 31, 1752
• Birthplace: Morrisania, New York, New York
• Died: November 6, 1816
• Place of death: Morrisania, New York, New York

Morris played major roles in writing not only the New York State constitution but also the U.S. Constitution, including its preamble. Also, the creation of the American presidency during the Constitutional Convention owes more to Morris than to any other Founding Father.

Early Life

Gouverneur (guhv-ehr-NEER or guhv-ehr-NOHR) Morris was the youngest son of Lewis Morris, Jr., second lord of the manor of Morrisania, which occupied nineteen hundred acres of what became the were chosen borough of the Bronx. His mother, Sarah Gouverneur, was of French Huguenot descent and enrolled her son in a French language elementary school. In 1766 he upset a kettle of boiling water, scalding his right arm and destroying much of the muscle. Morris graduated from King’s College (later Columbia University) at sixteen years of age, apprenticed himself to a leading New York lawyer for three years, and was admitted to the bar in October 1771 before his twentieth birthday.

Morris was well on his way to becoming a highly successful attorney when he became involved in revolutionary politics. Proud to consider himself a member of the landed aristocracy and contemptuous of the lower orders—he expressed shock upon learning that ordinary people were receiving officer commissions in the revolutionary army—Morris nevertheless vigorously joined the patriot cause after the outbreak of violence at Lexington.

Life’s Work

In May of 1775, Gouverneur Morris was elected to the New York Provincial Congress. His oldest brother, the last lord of the manor, went to the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence; his second oldest brother sided with Britain, becoming a general in the British army and a member of Parliament. Morris played a significant role in debates on the state constitution, successfully arguing for property qualifications for voting but failing to convince delegates to establish a strong governor with veto power.

Morris defeated attempts to limit the religious freedom of Catholics, but his arguments in favor of abolishing slavery in the state were ignored. During the rest of his life Morris maintained the positions he articulated in the 1770’s, advocating a strong government to control the common people while defending personal and religious freedom.

The New York congress elected Morris to the Continental Congress in October, 1777. There he proved a staunch nationalist, urging expansion of congressional power over the states and rejecting peace proposals from Britain that did not recognize the complete independence of the United States. Morris admired and strongly supported General George Washington in his dealings with Congress. Recognizing his literary skills, Congress appointed Morris to draw up letters of instruction for American diplomats.

Defeated in his campaign for reelection in 1779, Morris moved to Philadelphia and resumed his legal career. He was soon notorious for squiring (escorting) married women around the city. On May 14, 1780, setting out to visit a lady friend, Morris was thrown from his carriage. His left leg caught in a wheel, and the badly broken limb was amputated below the knee. The replacement wooden peg leg thereafter defined his image. In 1781, U.S. supervisor of finance Robert Morris (no relation), appointed Gouverneur Morris assistant supervisor. The two struggled to raise funds for Washington’s army and to protect the credit of the United States. After the peace, he joined Robert Morris as a junior partner, investing in upstate New York land that ultimately made him very wealthy.

The Pennsylvania legislature chose Morris to represent the state at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. At first unwilling to attend, once the convention opened Morris spoke more frequently than any other delegate. He forcefully advocated his long-held conservative beliefs, but then helped craft compromises that produced a document most members supported. Morris desired a strong executive branch. He proposed a president elected for life by popular vote of property holders, unimpeachable, with a veto over legislation and the power to appoint senators to life terms. However, he accepted a president chosen indirectly by a college of electors for a four-year term, impeachable for treason and corruption, with a veto subject to a two-thirds override by Congress. Morris reluctantly agreed to the formation of a federal-level senate in which each state had equal representation as a necessary compromise to keep the support of smaller states. He strongly objected to any concessions to slavery in the Constitution, unsuccessfully opposing clauses keeping the slave trade open for twenty years and awarding southern states seats in the House of Representatives based on their slave population.

Congress appointed a “committee on style” to turn the agreements reached during the discussions into a single consistent document. The committee, impressed with Morris’s literary talent, asked him to compose the text. Morris took the rambling set of twenty-three articles recording the decisions of the convention and condensed them into seven coherent and rationally ordered articles. In addition, he added the preamble, with its powerful invocation of his nationalist beliefs.

In December of 1788, Morris left for France to pursue his partners’ interest in land sales and the tobacco trade with Europe. Morris’s aristocratic manners and command of French earned him entrée into the upper levels of French society, where he enjoyed their relaxed sexual attitudes. His diary records a long-running affair with the mistress of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the bishop of Autun and later the foreign minister in the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and monarchical governments. The diary, which Morris kept until early 1793, when he decided continuing it had become too dangerous, provides a firsthand view of the French Revolution by a privileged observer. Morris was shocked by mob violence. Recording the scene as Parisians paraded with heads of victims impaled on pikes, Morris noted how mild American people are in comparison. He instinctively sided with the monarchy, insisting the French needed a strong leader, predicting that the republic would inevitably degenerate into a dictatorship.

In January, 1790, President Washington asked Morris to undertake an informal mission to London to see whether Britain was ready to settle differences between the two countries. After months of waiting, without receiving satisfactory answers to his queries, Morris informed Washington that Britain showed no interest in addressing American complaints.

Washington named Morris the American minister plenipotentiary to France in January, 1792. Morris promised to maintain neutrality in French politics, but he found his pledge impossible to keep. He advised the king on how to conduct himself as a constitutional monarch, a role Louis XVI could not perform, and he helped arrange an unsuccessful attempt by the king to flee France. He was the only foreign representative to remain in Paris throughout the Reign of Terror and opened his house to endangered royalists, helping smuggle them out of France. In 1794 the Jacobin government, the French Revolution’s most famous radicals, requested Morris’s recall.

Morris spent the next four years traveling through war-torn Europe attending to business matters before returning to New York on December 23, 1798. In April, 1800, the Federalist New York legislature elected him to fill the last three years of an unexpired U.S. Senate term. Morris proved an ardent partisan, breaking rank with the Federalists only once—supporting Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Morris’s travels in upstate New York convinced him of the need for a canal from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, so he joined Governor De Witt Clinton in urging construction of the Erie Canal. Morris bitterly opposed the War of 1812, calling it a conspiracy by slave states to annex Canada. Deviating in his old age from the nationalism he had espoused since 1775, Morris not only endorsed the 1814 Hartford Convention but also advocated New York’s and New England’s immediate secession from the Union.

On Christmas Day, 1809, Morris married Anne Cary Randolph, twenty-two years younger than Morris, ignoring rumors of incest, adultery, and murder of a newborn child that had driven her out of Virginia. They had one son.

Significance

Gouverneur Morris played a critical role in the development of the United States in its formative years. Despite his aristocratic and conservative beliefs, Morris wholeheartedly enlisted in the cause of American independence. He was critical to the success of the revolution and the writing of the Constitution. Personally, he would have preferred a nation in which birth and wealth were the predominant determinants of political participation and leadership, one in which the executive branch was in effect an elective kingship. His political pragmatism, however, led him to compromise and join in establishing a democratic republic.

Morris’s lasting gift to the new nation was the clarity and simplicity of the language he provided for the text of the Constitution and the inspiring prose of his preamble, with its promise to “form a more perfect Union, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Bibliography

Adams, William Howard. Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. A thorough, scholarly biography that exaggerates Morris’s significance, while denigrating the significance of most revolutionary leaders.

Brookhiser, Richard. Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution. New York: Free Press, 2003. Brookhiser’s work stresses Morris’s colorful life.

Crawford, Alan Pell. Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman, and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth Century America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. An entertaining biography of Morris’s wife that is not always accurate in its depiction of Virginia history and culture.