Today, we launch a new series on Constitution Daily remembering “Forgotten Founders,” from the ratification period through the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond—featuring profiles of individuals who helped define the text and meaning of the U.S. Constitution. We start with Gouverneur Morris, the New Englander who, along with Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, gave the Preamble its unforgettable text: “We the People.”
Gouverneur Morris was an imposing man, standing just over six feet tall. His physical appearance was close enough to George Washington’s that he served as the model for the statue of the general in Virginia’s capital, Richmond. He was born to a prominent New York family and studied at King’s College—now Columbia—in New York City. As a young man, Morris was known for his romantic life, wit, and beauty and was a man of high society who notably had a peg leg—the result of losing his leg in a carriage accident when he was 28.
Morris was just 35 years old at the time of the Constitutional Convention. At the Convention, he was highly instrumental in creating the language and structure of the Constitution, as by his namesake, the “Penman of the Constitution.” (By contrast, James Madison is often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution” for his contributions to the Constitution’s structure and philosophical underpinnings.) Morris was on the two central committees at the Convention (he also served on the committee to consider proportional representation and the committee on the slave trade and navigation)—the “Committee of Style and Arrangement,” charged with editing the final text and details of the document, and the “Committee on Postponed Parts” or the “Committee of Eleven,” which crafted solutions to the intractable problems at the Convention like the selection of the presidency. As Madison recalled in an 1831 letter, “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris . . . A better choice could not have been made, as the performance of the task proved.” It was Morris, for instance, who changed Wilson’s original preamble language referencing “We, the People of the States” to “We, the People of the United States.”
Morris also spoke more than any other member of the Convention, a testament to his famous oratorical abilities. He gave 173 speeches over the course of the Convention, more than second-place James Wilson (168) and third place James Madison (161). He was influential during both the early and late stages of the proceedings, helping Edmund Randolph introduce a three-part plan for a whole new government on May 30, 1787: “(1) That a union of the states must provide for the common defence, security of liberty, and general welfare; (2) That no treaty or treaties among any of the states as sovereign, will accomplish or secure their common defence, liberty or welfare; and (3) That a national government ought to be established, consisting of a supreme judicial, legislative and executive.” Morris, as a leading Federalist, thought there must be one supreme national power and that a mere federal compact was insufficient to bind a nation.
Unlike his fellow nationalist Wilson, Morris did not believe government should be based upon strictly upon popular sovereignty and was more skeptical of putting trust in common people. He believed that while the House of Representatives would represent the people, the Senate should be aristocratic and be composed of virtuous, established men of property who could check the excesses of the House–such as the natural tendency of the House to “run into projects of paper money & similar expedients.” Mutual security would come from the check of the aristocratic interest against the popular interest and vice versa because otherwise Congress would be unable to resist popular pressure to do for instance what Shay’s Rebellion demanded—debt relief and paper money. Thus, on May 30th, he also seconded Madison’s motion to change the principle of representation for the national legislature from proportional to equal representation.
Morris was also one of the loudest voices against slavery at the Convention. According to Madison’s notes, Morris found himself “reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the Southern States or to human nature, and he must therefore do it to the former.” Morris thought the formula for representation should be the same as the one for taxation: If southern states were allowed to count slaves towards their representation, they must also count towards their taxes owed to the national government.
Of the Three-Fifths Compromise, Morris infamously pointedly discussed the hypocrisy of southern defenses of counting slaves for representation: “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 Houses in this city [Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the rice swamps of South Carolina.” Finally, Morris condemned the institution as “in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages.”
Morris was also deeply important to the structure of the presidency. He defended the need for an energic president and to not limiting presidents to a single term, saying, “We must either then renounce the blessings of the Union, or provide an Executive with sufficient vigor to pervade every part of it.” The president needed sufficient powers and independence to ward off legislative tyranny as the “guardian of the people” and, like James Madison argued in Federalist 51, Morris assumed it was human nature to desire glory and thus Morris declared the constitutional system needed to enlist man’s greed for good for without the “Civil road to Glory,” man may be compelled to seek glory “by the sword.”
Morris argued strongly for popular election over congressional election for the president, but for different reasons than Wilson. Morris believed popular election would check the influence of the legislature, saying that, “If the people should elect, they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character, or services; some man, if he might so speak, of continental reputation. If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title to the appointment.”
After the Convention, Morris’ influence waned, as Alexander Hamilton became the lead Federalist and promoter of strong national government. Morris was appointed Minister to France by President George Washington before being elected to the Senate in 1798. After losing re-election in 1804, his final public act was to support the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812 and to even push hard for secession that would create a separate New York-New England Confederation because he saw the war as caused by expansionist dreams of slaveholders. As Richard Brookhiser writes, “The man who wrote the Constitution judged it to be a failure and was willing to scrap it.”
Further Reading:
William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (2003)
Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (2009)
Richard Brookhiser, Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake who wrote the Constitution (2003)
Jack Heyburn, “Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention,” 20 Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (2017) https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1644&context=jcl
Nicholas Mosvick is a Senior Fellow for Constitutional Content at the National Constitution Center.
