Founding Rogue

Interestingly, this is the Founder with whom Brookhiser has had the most fun–perhaps because Morris is such an odd duck among his fellow rebels: a blue-blood, a wit, an epicure, and a limping Lothario with a wooden leg. The descendant of two generations of colonial governors, he was born rich and grew richer: one of the rare Americans who wasn’t a social climber, as there was no social class to which he could climb. Unlike his friends George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, he did not have to scheme and marry his way out of obscurity. Republican simplicity was not Morris’s métier. “His determination to live in the style to which he had become accustomed could make his countrymen gape,” Brookhiser observes. “Upon entering the inn,” wrote a traveler who crossed his path, “I found Gouverneur Morris with two French valets, a French travelling companion, and his hair buckled up in about a hundred papillottes [paper curlers]. His wooden leg, papillottes, French attendants, and French conversation made his host . . . stare.” A notorious rake until his marriage late in life, he was no ardent fan of conventional morals. The bride he chose was suspected of incest and murder.

All this makes Morris a fascinating figure but an unlikely rebel. He was the statesman as sybarite, a serious man who expressed himself lightly and who made time to enjoy himself hugely though caught up in dire events. He cared deeply about rights, wrongs, wars, and nations–but, at the same time, for food, wine, women, and good conversation. “He is fond of his ease, does his best to procure it, and enjoys it as much as possible,” said one woman who knew him. “His imagination inclines to pleasantry, . . . being abundantly gifted in what the English call humor, united to what the French call esprit.”

Perhaps that was his weapon against pain and darkness, of which he saw much. He watched his family divided by the revolution, French mobs tearing people to pieces, and his countrymen suffering at Valley Forge. As a boy of fourteen, he upset a kettle of boiling water and burned his right arm “fleshless.” At twenty-eight, he caught his left leg in a carriage wheel and had it amputated just under the knee. Morris never complained, turned the loss of leg into a subject for joking (much of it ribald), and wore his false leg like a fashion accessory. It was God’s will, he believed, that we accept all the ills of providence with “sincere resignation”–and all the blessings of providence with sincere enjoyment. And so he did.

Morris served three years in the United States Senate and nearly three more as Washington’s representative to France. But his real claim to history’s notice lies in the twelve years between 1775, when he became a twenty-three-year-old member of the New York Provisional Congress, and 1787, when, as a thirty-five-year-old delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he shaped, edited, pruned, and essentially wrote the American Constitution, one of the greatest and most consequential political documents in human history.

THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, he was not merely a rebel involved in the war effort (largely by helping with financial arrangements). He was also a leading light in the small group–Washington, Hamilton, and his school friends John Jay, Rufus King, and Robert R. Livingston–who believed the colonies should be not only free but cohere as a nation. “A national spirit is the natural result of national existence,” he wrote John Jay the year the war ended. “True it is that the general government wants energy, and equally true it is that this want will eventually be supplied.”

Supplied it would be four years later. The Great Convention was Morris’s moment, when, with Hamilton sulking and Washington silent, he carried the ball for his side. He was a fountain of words, wit, indignation, and eloquence, speaking, Brookhiser tells us, “173 times at the convention, more often than any other member, despite the fact that he missed all of June.” He had an original take on the theme of class warfare, suggesting that rich and poor be segregated, “each in their own branch of Congress, so that their pride would encourage mutual distrust.” And he made a tremendous and sadly forgotten assault on slavery, in which he not only condemned the “nefarious practice” but pointed out its corrosive effect on the country. “Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery. . . . Proceed southwardly, and every step you take through the great region of slavery presents a desert increasing with the increasing proportion” of slaves. Slavery, he said, was “the curse of heaven” on the states that allowed it.

But his main concern was for the “dignity and splendor of the American empire,” which needed only a forceful and unified government. “There were other nationalists at the convention,” Brookhiser says. “None were as rhapsodic as Morris. He attacked every centrifugal or sectional force.” It was this that would win him his great plum assignment: the composition of the final draft. That, and his rare gifts of style and sprightliness.” His draft was done in four days.

Even Madison, commonly called the Father of the Constitution, wrote later, “A better choice could not have been made.” Morris would give the early, unwieldy draft its final cohesion and power. Thickets were cleared to reveal clean thoughts and clean phrases. Alliterations and half-rhymes were used to good effect. And it was Morris who moved the source of the government’s authority from “the states, in Congress assembled,” to “We the People of the United States.” Morris had dreamed of beholding “a race of Americans,” and he did his best to create one.

With the American Revolution, Morris had seen a rebellion go well. With the French Revolution, he saw just how wrong one could go. When Washington became president on April 30, 1789, Morris had been five months in Paris, tending to business, spreading esprit in upper-class salons, and seducing aristocrats’ wives. By July 14, the Bastille had fallen, and soon Morris would see his first political victim, “the head on a pike, the body dragged naked” by the mob through the streets. He described these things and more in his letters to Washington, and in February 1792 (filling a post vacant since Jefferson left it) he was nominated as America’s representative to France. “The best picture I can give of the French nation is that of cattle before a thunderstorm,” he wrote Washington. “We stand on a vast volcano, we feel it tremble, and we hear it roar.”

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a war about rights waged by an educated middle-class populace. The French Revolution by contrast was the volcanic eruption of unlettered people held down for centuries by a frivolous upper class. The Paris mob was not like the farmers at Concord and Lexington, the Estates General were not like the Continental Congress, and Hamiltons and Madisons did not abound. Morris knew from the start that the two revolutions were different, and he looked for no good from the toxic mixture of a bone-headed king, clueless aristocrats, and an illiterate, desperate mob. As he was leaving France, he wrote the president: “I saw misery and affliction every day and all around without power to mitigate or means to relieve, and I felt myself degraded by communications I was forced into by the worst of mankind.”

In December 1798, Morris at last came back to America, where he would observe the decline of the Federalist party and the deaths of too many friends. In December 1799, he delivered the eulogy for George Washington at St. Paul’s Church in Manhattan. In July 1804, he sat by the deathbed of Alexander Hamilton. He served three years in the Senate, where he described the new national capital as “the very best city in the world for a future residence” and penned the line quoted in every book about Washington: “We want nothing here but houses, cellars, kitchens, . . . well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of the kind.” He refurbished his house, promoted the Erie Canal, and designed the plan for the streets of Manhattan. And he got married, at age fifty-seven, to one of the most intriguing women in his world.

Twenty-two years younger than Morris, Nancy Randolph had been born in 1774 into the very first of Virginia’s great families. At age sixteen, she left home to live with her sister Judith, Judith’s husband (and cousin) Richard Randolph, and Richard’s brothers Theodorick and John. Nancy quickly won the affections of all three of the brothers and became engaged to Theodorick, who sickened and died. Soon after, the Randolphs’ neighbors became intrigued by three different developments: Richard and Judith did not get along well, Richard and Nancy got along all too nicely, and Nancy appeared to be putting on weight. Gossip about Nancy’s thickening waistline crested when the family went off on a trip to a neighbor’s plantation in August 1792. There Nancy had a mysterious illness; soon after, the body of a newborn infant was found on the plantation by slaves.

Silent at the time, Nancy said later that she had borne a child, that it was born dead, and that its father had been Theodorick: “I had been betrothed to him, and considered him my husband in the presence of . . . God.” Rumor assumed that the father was Richard, who was brought to trial some months later for murder of the infant. It was the mother of all celebrity trials, with Patrick Henry and John Marshall, the future chief justice, appearing for Richard Randolph–“the greatest defense team that has ever appeared in an American court,” Brookhiser declares. Found innocent in the eyes of the law, but guilty enough in the eyes of the public, the Randolphs went home to their own tortured company. Richard died three years later, leaving Nancy to the mercies of his brother and wife. Not surprisingly, relations grew worse, and in 1805 Nancy, thirty-one years old and lacking resources, was turned out of what had been her home. When Morris met her three years later, she was living in a boarding house in what is now Greenwich Village.

This was the woman that Gouverneur Morris, the greatest catch of his age, a man who had seduced the most glittering women in the United States and Europe, decided to wed. Morris’s idea of a courtship–or perhaps “tryout” might be a better description–was to offer Miss Randolph a job. In April 1809, thirty-four-year-old Nancy Randolph moved into his home as housekeeper. “I will love you as little as I can,” he wrote her. There was also in their correspondence a delicate reference to her history: “I once heard, but have no distinct recollection, of events which brought distress into your family. Do not dwell on them now.”

In early December, when he had made up his mind, he made discreet queries to Chief Justice Marshall and received a reply that was a model of discretion. Virginians had disagreed about the case, but circumstances were “ambiguous,” and Judith Randolph, “who was the most injured by the fact if true,” had let Nancy live under her roof for twelve years. On Christmas Day, after dinner, the pair were married in front of the fire to the disappointment and fury of Morris’s nephews and nieces, who had looked forward to spending his money. They were more annoyed than ever four years later when Nancy, then thirty-eight, bore her sixty-one-year-old husband a son. By all accounts, the marriage was happy. And so was Morris, when he died four years later, survived by his wife, his son, Gouverneur II, and the Constitution of the United States.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.