Gouverneur Morris

CONVERSATIONS ACROSS CENTURIES
Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday

As America marks its 250th birthday, ILoveOV continues its year-long series imagining conversations with the founders who built this nation, brought forward in time to sit across the table from us in Oro Valley. These installments are grounded in each figure’s own writings and documented positions, then imagined forward into today’s questions. This month, we sit down with Gouverneur Morris: the Pennsylvania delegate who spoke more often than anyone at the Constitutional Convention, and the penman who turned its pile of resolutions into the final text Americans still read today, including a preamble that begins “We the People of the United States.” Brilliant, candid, and far from blameless, Morris reminds us that someone chose the words we govern by, and that reading them closely is a civic act in itself.

He is heard before he is seen—a firm step, then the knock of a wooden leg on tile, then another step. Gouverneur Morris is a big man, broad through the shoulders, and he fills the doorway with the ease of someone who has never once worried about filling a doorway. He stops at the window, looks a long moment at Pusch Ridge, and lowers himself into his chair with a skilled swing of the peg. “Mr. Madison sat here last month, I’m told,” he says, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “He will have mentioned that I talked too much in Philadelphia. It’s the one charge against me he could prove from his own notes.”

Most Americans have never heard of you, and many who have can’t pronounce your name. Who was Gouverneur Morris?

Guv-er-NEER. It was my mother’s family name, the Gouverneurs, French Protestants who found their way to New York. It is not a title. I was never a governor of anything, which disappointed a great many people who wrote to me expecting favors.

I was born in 1752 at Morrisania, my family’s estate north of Manhattan, in what you now call the Bronx. I finished at King’s College at sixteen, read law, and sided with independence at a time when that was not the family consensus. My half-brother Staats wore a British general’s uniform, and my mother’s house sat behind British lines for most of the war. In 1780, a carriage accident in Philadelphia took my left leg below the knee. I wore a plain wooden peg for the rest of my life, and it never slowed my opinions.

As for why you don’t know me: I was never president, I did not die in a duel, and my most important work was done on the one committee whose job was to make everyone else’s words read better. Editors are not remembered. That is generally how you know they did their work.

In September 1787 the Convention handed its draft to the Committee of Style, and you did the actual writing. What did you do to it?

The committee was five of us: Dr. Johnson of Connecticut, in the chair; Mr. Hamilton; Mr. Madison; Mr. King; and myself. The others were content to allow me to hold the pen. We received a draft of twenty-three articles, sound in substance but written the way committees write, which is to say by accumulation. I had four days. I returned it in seven articles.

The preamble is the part people ask about. The earlier draft opened, “We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts,” and so on through all thirteen. The trouble was that nobody knew which states would ratify. Rhode Island had not even bothered to send delegates. So I wrote “We the People of the United States.” Then I added what the draft had never said plainly, which was the purpose of the whole enterprise: 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.

Mr. Madison was generous about it later. He wrote, many years after, that “the finish given to the form and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.” I will also tell you, since you will find it anyway, that Mr. Gallatin later told the House I had tried to turn a comma into a semicolon in the taxing clause, and that Mr. Sherman caught it. I’ll say only that punctuation is nothing, and that Mr. Sherman had excellent eyes.

You spoke more than 170 times at the Convention. You argued for a Senate of wealthy men serving for life and against letting men without property vote, yet you also gave the Convention’s most forceful speech against slavery. How do you square those?

I don’t, entirely, and I would be a poor witness if I tried. By temperament I was an aristocrat. I believed a republic needed a body of men with enough property that they could not be bought. I told the Convention, “Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.” Your country tested that proposition for two centuries and found me wrong. I say so without much pain. Being wrong in public is the price of speaking 170 times.

On slavery I was right, and I lost. On the eighth of August I called it “a nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed.” I objected that a planter who tore men from Africa should gain votes in a government built to protect the rights of humanity. In contrast, a citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who viewed that practice with horror gained nothing. I said I would sooner pay a tax to free every enslaved person in the country than saddle posterity with such a Constitution.

Then I signed it anyway, three-fifths clause and all, because I judged that no union at all would be worse. I was also raised on an estate where men and women were held in bondage, so I did not speak from any great height. Your country paid for that compromise with a war. I don’t ask to be excused for my part. I only ask that you notice some of us said so at the time.

You also argued that new western states should not enter the Union as equals. Oro Valley sits in one of them. What would you say to Arizona?

That the man who tried to keep you out owes you an apology and has come a long way toward delivering it. In July of 1787 I told the Convention that “the busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness,” were the proper school of political talents, and I worried that new states in the West would one day outvote the old ones on the Atlantic. Late in August I moved to strike the language promising that new states would be admitted on the same terms as the original thirteen, and the motion carried. Years later I disclosed in a letter that when I wrote the article on new states, I went as far as circumstances would permit toward governing distant territories as provinces with no voice in our councils.

When I died in 1816, the ground under this chair belonged to the King of Spain. Arizona came into the Union in 1912 as a full and equal state, and not one person in this town has spent an afternoon feeling grateful that Congress ignored my advice. You should. I have now seen your library, your council chamber with its doors open to anyone who walks in, and a mountain I would have traded Morrisania to look at every morning. The wilderness, it turns out, keeps a respectable school.

You watched the French Revolution up close as America’s minister in Paris, and then, while Madison was president during the War of 1812, you flirted openly with breaking up the Union. What did you learn about the line amid reform and rupture?

I went to Paris in 1789 on private business and stayed as minister from 1792 until 1794, which meant I was there for the worst of it. I was one of the few foreign ministers who did not leave. I lent money to the Lafayette family while the general sat in an Austrian prison. I watched men who began by demanding rights end by demanding heads, and I came away convinced that liberty without fixed rules is simply the strongest faction wearing a nicer coat. That was the lesson. I thought I had learned it well.

Then, twenty years later, an older man in a bad temper, I nearly forgot every word of it. I thought Mr. Madison’s war was a folly, and I wrote letters encouraging the New England men who met at Hartford and said things about separation that I would not care to have read aloud in his presence. Nothing came of it, thank God, and the peace arrived before anyone acted on it.

Mr. Madison warned you last month against treating your fellow citizens as a foreign enemy. I was, for a winter, one of the men he meant. You should know the seed he described can take root in a mind that ought to have known better. Mine did. Watch your own for it, especially when you are certain you are right.

Late in life you chaired the commission that planned the Erie Canal and helped lay out Manhattan’s street grid. Oro Valley voters will decide this fall on Proposition 431, the town’s general plan. What would a planner of your generation tell them?

The canal was three hundred and sixty-three miles through wilderness, and I did not live to see a shovel go into the ground. I’m told your own water arrives in part by a canal of three hundred and thirty-six miles, the Central Arizona Project, lifting river water nearly three thousand feet across a desert. That is the sort of project I would have given my other leg to see finished. The street grid was a different kind of work. In 1811 we drew straight lines across farms and hills for a city whose people had not yet been born. We were mocked for it, and the city grew into it anyway. Planning is a letter written to strangers.

As for your plan, I take no side. It is not my town, and it is not my vote. However, I notice that Arizona asks its voters to ratify such a plan directly, and that is constitution-making on a smaller scale: a document drafted by committee, revised by many hands, and then put to the people. My advice is an editor’s advice. Read the document itself, not someone’s summary of it. Watch the verbs. The difference between “shall” and “should” is the difference between a promise and a wish, and a good deal of government lives in that gap.

If you could leave the country with one instruction, what would it be?

Read it. Not the arguments about it, not the portions quoted by people who want something from you. The thing itself. It runs a little over four thousand words, and you can finish it in the time it takes to drink a pot of coffee. Most of the fighting over what it says comes from people who have not read it lately.

I wrote to Colonel Pickering near the end of my life that “that instrument was written by the fingers which write this letter,” and that having rejected redundant and equivocal terms, I believed it to be as clear as our language would permit. I excepted a part relating to the judiciary, because I am honest, and because I had failed there. It was never perfect. That is why it provides for its own amendment.

But do not skip the first sentence. When I wrote “We the People,” I was solving a practical problem about which states would ratify. Your country has spent two hundred years expanding who that “We” includes, well past what I intended. The words held. That is the most an editor can hope for.

He stands, testing the peg against the floor before he trusts it, and pauses once more at the window. “Twenty-three articles down to seven, in four days,” he says, “and it has lasted two hundred and thirty-nine years. I’ve had worse weeks.” At the door he turns back with a grin. “Mr. Jay is next, I’m told. Have a courtroom ready. He’ll want to know where to sit.” And then he is gone.

Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816) was born at Morrisania, his family’s estate in what is now the Bronx, and graduated from King’s College (now Columbia University) in 1768. He served in New York’s Provincial Congress and in the Continental Congress, where he signed the Articles of Confederation. He later worked as assistant to Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris (no relation). As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he spoke more often than any other member and, on the Committee of Style, wrote the final text of the Constitution, including its preamble. He served as U.S. minister to France from 1792 to 1794, as a U.S. senator from New York from 1800 to 1803, and as chairman of the commission that planned the Erie Canal. He married Anne Cary Randolph in 1809 and died at Morrisania on November 6, 1816, at age 64. This interview draws on Madison’s Convention notes, Morris’s diaries and correspondence, and the historical record, imaginatively projected into a conversation set in present-day Oro Valley.