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Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution

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Does Richard Brookhiser plan to write a biography for every single Founding Father? Based on the three books of his I've read so far (on George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and now Gouverneur Morris), one can only hope so.

Brookhiser's latest biography is of a somewhat neglected Founding Father, whose greatest accomplishment was his authorship/editorial work of much of the U.S. Constitution. Late in his life, Morris also played an invaluable, but often overlooked role in pushing the U.S. to create a system of canals linking New York State's Atlantic coast with the northern interior of North America. (These canals were, once created, as important for the young country's economic growth in the early nineteenth century as railroads would be for it in the late nineteenth century.)

For a major public figure, Morris led a balanced life. His serious pursuits did not keep him from enjoying women, travel and outings, or a well-told joke. He was a good friend, especially towards those who he felt were unfairly treated by others. As Morris would drift in and out of public service throughout his life, much of the biography focuses on this personal side of the man.

Brookhiser's skill as a biographer is to reveal aspects of his subject's character with just a well-written phrase or two. He does this in a straightforward way without the need for any conceptual baggage (such as Freudianism). Few biographers nowadays are willing to be so concise or risk interpreting their subjects in such a direct manner.

But unlike with two of his previous and better-known subjects (Washington and Hamilton), Brookhiser is perhaps too brief in dealing with Morris's life. Whereas the basic outlines of both Washington and Hamilton's lives are fairly well-known to most readers, and therefore more amenable to Brookhiser's kind of abbreviation, Morris's life is not. As a result, the transitions in Morris's life covered in the book seem to rush by and background information is uneven. This is still a fine work, one I can easily recommend, but it is not as impressive as Brookhiser's earlier biographies.

With his well-written and highly entertaining biography, "Gentleman Revolutionary," author Richard Brookhiser has resurrected the memory of founding father Gouvernor Morris for the modern reader. Among his many accomplishments, as the book's subtitle points out, it was Morris who wrote the final version of the American Constitution, the single greatest document of governance in world history. For that accomplishment alone, his memory should not be allowed to fade in comparison to his contemporaries.

Morris's career encompassed, among much else, two terms in the Continental Congress during the height of the American Revolution. His financial expertise was vital to keeping the war effort afloat until the victory at Yorktown secured American independence. He also served as America's Ambassador to France during the French Revolution, keeping a meticulous account of events as they unfolded. Much of the rest of his life was spent as a successful lawyer and financier, who occasionally enagaged in such acts of public service as championing the Erie Canal and laying out the streets of Manhattan.

All of this Brookhiser captures with his lively narrative prose. The book is a relatively quick read at just over 200 pages of narrative, and Brookhiser concentrates his efforts on those periods of Morris's life that were devoted to public service. A generous helping of illustrations are also provided. Brookhiser also avoids being too overly fawning of his subject, pointing out those ideas of Morris's that were either dangerously flawed or just plain wrong.

Overall, a fascinating biography that can be enjoyed by history buffs as well as general readers.

Most accounts of the American Founding are filled with tales of prim and proper Puritans or unremarkable commercial men. Not so with Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), a New York aristocrat whose ancestral roots in this country went back to Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam. His family owned much of the Bronx in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Morris had an astonishingly varied career. A friend of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, and Thomas Paine, Morris was the primary architect of the U.S. Constitution. He was a successful ladies' man, enjoying a succession of lovers before finally marrying in his late 50s. An expatriate in France during the French Revolution, he advised Louis XVI and wrote a constitution for that troubled nation. A senator from New York, he opposed the War of 1812 and advocated the secession of Northern states. Back in New York, while practicing law and tending to business interests, he found time to establish Manhattan's street grids and begin work on the Erie Canal. He started a family in his early 60s. Above all, he enjoyed life.

Observers make much of the fact that as a teenager Morris sustained severe burns to his right arm and later lost part of a leg in a carriage accident, but these are arguably the least interesting things about the man.

The one black mark on an otherwise admirable record was his anti-Catholicism. Brookhiser says little about it apart from arguing that Morris, a deist, wasn't as anti-Catholic as some of his Protestant colleagues. In other words, "Morris could have been worse," the author seems to say.

This is a quick and easy read. Brookhiser writes well. Still, it's not altogether clear why the author, a senior editor at the neoconservative National Review, would want to write about someone like Morris. It's not even clear that in the end the author finds him particularly appealing. Brookhiser's critical remarks about Edmund Burke and John Randolph of Roanoke, both of whom admittedly are more interesting figures, detract from the story and may turn off more conservative-minded readers.

Why is Morris important to us? America, especially New York, has changed considerably since Morris's time; some might say it has become decidedly less civilized. We live in an age of mass democracy, globalism, and consumerism where monetary values are held to be supreme, the sole measure of one's worth. The state of once-grand places like the Bronx, as Brookhiser shows in the concluding chapter, is a living symbol of this decline. If Morris was a rare enough individual in his own time, he would be inconceivable in ours. Yet, his rich life represents to modern Americans a model for a better way of living. Take heart from his cheerful fortitude, his aristocratic acceptance of life's vicissitudes, the sheer pleasure he got out of living according to God's plan. As Morris said: "To enjoy is to obey". Life is good.

To most people who read of the era of the founding fathers, Gouverneur Morris is at best a peripheral character, mentioned in passing while the spotlight featured the bigger names of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, et al. Brookhiser gives us the opportunity to learn about this man and his role in early U.S. history.

Morris was generally a peripheral character in the Revolutionary Era, but he did play a significant role in the drafting of the Constitution. His writing skills put the Constitution into its essentially final form, and the Preamble is almost entirely his creation. Beyond this, however, he was a more minor political player.

A lot of this was by Morris's own choice, since he wasn't all that interested in higher office. He was an interesting enough person, in many ways more human than the semi-immortals with whom he worked with. Relatively easy-going and with a good sense of humor, Morris was also - despite a maimed hand and a missing leg - quite the ladies' man, even having an affair with one French woman who was not only married, but already the mistress to another. When he finally married late in life, he successfully avoided social pressure by choosing a wife with a bit of a reputation.

Brookhiser - a rather politically conservative writer - has a lot of sympathy for the Federalists such as Hamilton and Morris. He, nonetheless, has written a good, objective book, the best of the three of his I read (the other two were on Hamilton and the Adams family). While Morris is rightly accorded a lesser light in history, he does deserve some illumination and Brookhiser's book does the job well.

This concise, highly readable biography resurrects Gouverneur Morris, a forgotten Founding Father, who drafted the final version of the Constitution, writing its immortal preamble, and was instrumental in the development of New York into the world's greatest city, planning both the Erie Canal and the street grid of modern Manhattan. Morris was also a notable eccentric, a one-legged Lothario who shared a mistress with Talleyrand, and ultimately married a Southern lady with an unspeakable scandal in her past.

Morris was an elitist and a man of property, like his friend Alexander Hamilton. Less egalitarian than Jefferson, he was more clearsighted than the Virginian in condemning the rankness and hypocrisy of slavery. Another reviewer calls him anti-Catholic, which is untrue. He was quite critical of Catholicism, but defeated a provision in the New York state constitution banning Catholic worship. A champion of liberty of conscience, he was a Deist, like many of the Founders, and sceptical of organized religion in general.

Richard Brookhiser is a conservative commentator and editor at the National Review. However, his historical writings are as fair-minded, sensible, and free from dogma, as his journalism is not. This brief biography reflects its subject: charming, witty, and learned.

"Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included?" "The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice." This voice during the American Constitutional Convention belonged to Gouverneur (his mother's maiden name) Morris. "Morris spoke 173 times at the Convention, more often than any other member, despite the fact that he missed all of June (while Madison, who attended every session spoke 161 times).

So it wasn't very surprising when, on 8 September 1786, the convention selected a five man committee which in turn gave Morris, of of its members, the task of putting together a draft based on all the previous proceedings that summer. Four days later Morris produced a clear, simple document avoiding legislative repetitions as far as possible; in one instance drafting down 23 articles from the Committee of Detail into a much more concise 7. And he also wrote this which ought sound familiar: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Thank Morris for the coinage of "We the People." Convention drafts previously referred to "We the People of the states." A most important distinction. Brookhiser: "When Gouverneur Morris changed 'We the people of the states' into 'We the people,' he created a phrase that would ring throughout American history, defining every American as part of a single whole. Those three words may be his greatest legacy."

"As Jefferson immortalized the Continental Congress's view of first principles, so Morris had applied his finish to the Constitutional Convention's view of fundamental law. And he defended it later. Consider when Republicans "proposed a bill to disband the new federal courts" in 1801, notwithstanding that the Constitution provided for federal judges and expressly stated that such judges were not to be removed during good behavior. Argued an incredulous and sarcastic Morris at the time: "[Y]ou shall not take the man from the office, but you may take the office from the man; you shall not throw him overboard, but you may sink his boat under him; you shall not put him to death, but you may take away his life."

The man who witnessed the French Revolution up close and personal (being a minister to France between 1792 & 1794, and resident in Europe until December 1798---see Melanie Randolph Miller's Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution) knew a thing or two about the importance of power remaining balanced, or at least subject to some checks. Though Morris did have some sympathy for the predicament the Jeffersonians, in Morris's view, faced: "Time...seems about to disclose the awful secret that commerce and domestic slavery are mortal foes; and, bound together, one must destroy the other. I cannot blame Southern gentlemen for striving to put down commerce, because commerce, if it survives, will, I think, put them down...."

"Morris did not leave his country on paper," however. Besides his work on the American Constitution and his historically important published diary impressions from those tumultuous years he spent in France, "Morris performed two special services as a public man." In addition to the above Morris also "worked to plan a canal that should make it bloom. A handful of other men might have buffed the Constitution almost as smoothly, but he was the one who did it; a handful of New Yorkers pushed for the Erie Canal---he was one of the most eloquent and energetic. For the rest, he gave many hours of intelligent and industrious labor as a New Yorker, a financier, and a diplomat;" as well as having been a member of the Continental Congress, and one who was instrumental in reviving the Continental Army's supplies after visiting GW at Valley Forge and recognizing the urgent need for such. (The details of many such efforts, I ought point out, are not especially delved into by Mr. Brookhiser in this somewhat short book---inclining this reader to regret not having at least considered some of the more substantive examinations of Gouverneur Morris' life before choosing this one).

With an injured arm and one leg, Morris evinced those who believed (as he did, in these words) "that the happiest mortals are those who have been taught, through some sad experience, the value of this world's goods." Like Hamilton, who came from nothing Morris was one who refused, in Mr. Brookhiser's words, "to be satisfied with airy ideals or soothing phrases" thanks, in part, "on the hard things each had seen in his life." (Interestingly, Morris delivered the eulogy at Hamilton's actual funeral in NY; and before that, gave the eulogy, also in NY, upon Washington's death.)

Postscript: Should you find yourself in Morrisania, or on Morris Avenue, or anywhere in the Morris Park section of the Bronx Borough of New York, perhaps even stopping at the Morris Park Bakery, pause a moment to reflect on the more important legacies of this founding father. In addition, a few blocks north and east of 138th Street and Brook Avenue (roughly the middle of where in the Bronx that Morris's estate Morrisania once could be found) stands St. Ann's Church where this founding father now rests. (07Jun) Cheers

I was really looking forward to reading this book. I am a nut for anything to do with the American Revolution. I'd read Brookhiser's short, concise bio on George Washington and enjoyed it very much.
I was so disappointed with this book. Just looking at the cover and reading the blurbs made me expect too much I guess.
Morris was known for 3 things: losing his leg, writing the Constitution, and scoring with the ladies. How could his life be turned into a snoozefest?
Maybe it's the writing...I just finished reading Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton bigoraphy, which is 3 times longer than this Morris bio. It was absolutely riveting. I was sorry when I finished it; I just did not want it to end. I could not finish the Morris book fast enough; I ended up skipping pages here and there to get to Morris; he seems to be missing in his own biography. Brookhiser gave me no sense as to the kind of man Gouverneur Morris really was.
Very disappointing!

Most people know a little something about George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. But how many can tell you about the public life of Gouverneur Morris?

Whenever you quote golden words from the U.S. Constitution, chances are that you are quoting parts written by Gouverneur Morris. After many votes, the Constitutional Convention gave the task of turning the various resolutions into a cohesive, easy-to-read document. Gouverneur Morris bore the burden of doing this writing. Mr. Brookhiser did a nice job of showing the changes that Gouverneur Morris made . . . and I'm sure you will agree that they are improvements. The preamble, for example, was his: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility . . . ."

The American Revolution succeeded in large part because of the support provided by France's Louis XVI. As the French Revolution loomed, Gouverneur Morris found himself in the delicate position of being Ambassador to France. To whom was he supposed to pay attention? To whom was the United States to repay its bonds? What role could he play in trying to help friends of the American Revolution? In the process, Morris played a double role of trying to make friends with the ever-changing regimes during the French Revolution and helping America's friends avoid the guillotine. In his spare time, he courted his mistress who also played that role with the pivotal French political figure, Talleyrand.

Upon his return to the United States, he found useful roles in important public projects like the Erie Canal and laying out the grid structure for New York City's streets and avenues.

Morris suffered from two major physical disabilities, a withered arm as the result of being scalded as a youth and an amputated foot from a carriage accident. Despite these physical infirmities, he was able to play a continuing role in politics when he chose and to attract the wives of other men.

In addition, he suffered a major mental disability, a love to hear his own voice . . . whether his ideas made sense or not. He was the most frequent orator at the Constitutional Convention, but his ideas sometimes made no sense. However, all admired his ability to turn a phrase.

Although he played a role in putting the Constitution together to replace the Articles of Confederation, he also flirted with the New England secession movement during the French crisis.

I would have preferred a book about Morris that went into more detail than this one did about his public life. For example, where did the language he wrote in the Constitution turn out to be important in later Supreme Court cases? What views that he expressed in all of those speeches seemed to have influenced others in close votes that occurred later? The material on his influence on the Erie Canal also seemed sketchy rather than comprehensive.

There was also too much about his various private affairs compared to the public material.

Having just read Ron Chernow's brilliant biography of Alexander Hamilton, it was hard not to compare the two books to the detriment of this one.

But if you know next to nothing about Gouverneur Morris, I'm not aware of a better book on the subject, so you should start your learning with this one.

My biggest problem with the book is that I felt it was poorly written and conceived. Morris definitely is an interesting character, and I give credit to Brookheiser for reviving his legacy, but the book has a tendency to simply relate the facts without going into background material or much analysis or synthesis.

I felt the book was rushed and not adequately researched. Many areas need to be fleshed out better. Morris definitely belonged to the Founding Fathers clique and had an interesting personal life. If Brookheiser had simply delved into several periods or aspects of Morris' life, as Ellis did with American Sphinx, the book would have been better reading.

Having said that, the only people who are likely to read this book are those who have already done some reading on the birth of the USA and are motivated and able to deal the way the book was written to learn about this interesting character who pops up in biographies on Hamilton, Washington, and Jefferson, etc.

Most accounts of the American Founding are filled with tales of prim and proper Puritans or unremarkable commercial men. Not so with Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), a New York aristocrat whose ancestral roots in this country went back to Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam. His family owned much of the Bronx in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Morris had an astonishingly varied career. A friend of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, and Thomas Paine, Morris was the primary architect of the U.S. Constitution. He was a successful ladies' man, enjoying a succession of lovers before finally marrying in his late 50s. An expatriate in France during the French Revolution, he advised Louis XVI and wrote a constitution for that troubled nation. A senator from New York, he opposed the War of 1812 and advocated the secession of Northern states. Back in New York, while practicing law and tending to business interests, he found time to establish Manhattan's street grids and begin work on the Erie Canal. He started a family in his early 60s. Above all, he enjoyed life.

Observers make much of the fact that as a teenager Morris sustained severe burns to his right arm and later lost part of a leg in a carriage accident, but these are arguably the least interesting things about the man.

The one black mark on an otherwise admirable record was his anti-Catholicism. Brookhiser says little about it apart from arguing that Morris, a deist, wasn't as anti-Catholic as some of his Protestant colleagues. In other words, "Morris could have been worse," the author seems to say.

This is a quick and easy read. Brookhiser writes well. Still, it's not altogether clear why the author, a senior editor at the neoconservative National Review, would want to write about someone like Morris. It's not even clear that in the end the author finds him particularly appealing. Brookhiser's critical remarks about Edmund Burke and John Randolph of Roanoke, both of whom admittedly are more interesting figures, detract from the story and may turn off more conservative-minded readers.

Why is Morris important to us? America, especially New York, has changed considerably since Morris's time; some might say it has become decidedly less civilized. We live in an age of mass democracy, globalism, and consumerism where monetary values are held to be supreme, the sole measure of one's worth. The state of once-grand places like the Bronx, as Brookhiser shows in the concluding chapter, is a living symbol of this decline. If Morris was a rare enough individual in his own time, he would be inconceivable in ours. Yet, his rich life represents to modern Americans a model for a better way of living. Take heart from his cheerful fortitude, his aristocratic acceptance of life's vicissitudes, the sheer pleasure he got out of living according to God's plan. As Morris said: "To enjoy is to obey". Life is good.