Melanie Randolph Miller, editor of the Gouverneur Morris Papers: Diaries Project; Dennis Rasmussen, author of The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter; and William Treanor, dean of Georgetown Law explore the fantastic life and constitutional legacy of Gouverneur Morris: Founding Father, key member of the Committee of Style, and opponent of slavery. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Melanie Randolph Miller is the editor of the Gouverneur Morris Papers, a project supported by the NEH Scholarly Editions program, since 2007. She has written papers on Morris, edited two volumes of his diaries, and is the author of two books on Morris, including Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution and An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris.
Dennis Rasmussen is a professor of political science and the Hagerty Family Fellow at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is also director of Syracuse University's Political Philosophy Program and a senior research associate at the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. He is the author of five books, including The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought; Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders; and The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter.
William Treanor is the executive vice president of Georgetown University, dean of the law center, and Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair. His writings have principally been in the area of constitutional history, and he has been recognized as one of the 10 most-cited legal history scholars in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Law School’s Brian Leiter. W.W. Norton will publish his forthcoming book, Fathers of the Constitution: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Creation of the American Republic.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, (2023)
- William M. Treanor, Gouverneur Morris and the Drafting of the Federalist Constitution, (2023)
- William M. Treanor, The Case of the Dishonest Scrivener: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of the Federalist Constitution, (2021)
- Melanie Randolph Miller, An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouveneur Morris, (2008)
- Gouverneur Morris Papers
- The U.S. Constitution: Preamble
- The Federalist Papers
- The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Revolution in Government
- Gouverneur Morris, "Slavery and Representation," (Aug. 8, 1787)
Excerpt from Interview: Melanie Randolph Mille argues that negative perceptions of Morris were largely fueled by personal conflicts, misunderstandings, and rivalries, rather than truth.
Melanie Randolph Mille: Well, we wouldn't have reached any agreement with him 'because we didn't like him. He was rude. He was indiscreet. That is not what was happening in those meetings. The British actually liked him. He continued to have correspondence with one of the cabinet ministers for years. But Hamilton couldn't stand that this was all falling to his fingers. So, he repeated this stuff to Washington as though that agent had said it to him, which was not true. Hamilton had said it. The other guy said, "Oh, oh, really? Oh". And when Morris's nomination was being confirmed in the Senate, those same allegations were repeated against him. So, that didn't help him at all. And then there were others. Morris gave LaFayette some pretty darn clear advice about the French Revolution and the way it was going to go. La Fayette did not like that. He wrote to Washington to complain about his appointment at great length. William Short, Jefferson's secretary, really wanted the job as minister to France. And he wrote all these awful letters to Jefferson about what a jerk Morris was. Nobody wanted to talk to him. Not true.
Thomas Paine was another one. There were several people who had these plans for using the American debt to France to make money, and Morris was in the way. So those things got over here and permanently, in my opinion, blackened Morris's character in a way that kind of backwashed over his entire career. So I kind of agree with Bill on all this. There's one scene in his diary where he goes to a place where they're rehabilitating prostitutes in Europe and the amity he feels for these women's suffering, I think that's how he felt about her. And that's why he married her. So I just, and the womanizing stuff, okay. The carriage accident was just that. There were a number of delegates who had seen it and wrote about it the next day. He jumped in the carriage. He never tethered his horses properly. Jumps in, they take off, that's it. His leg is hurt. So I'll quit, but I do feel strongly about these things.
Excerpt from Interview: William Treanor emphasizes Gouverneur Morris's key role in crafting the Constitution, enhancing national power, the presidency, and removing pro-slavery language.
William Treanor: First of all, Morris is an extraordinarily skilled lawyer and very good with text. So as Dennis has said, Hamilton wants Morris to be the coauthor of the Federalist papers, not Madison. He has a sensitivity to language both in terms of rhetoric and in terms of legal meaning that other than James Wilson, nobody has the ability to parse text and nobody at all at the convention has the ability to construct moving language. And Madison is not a very good textualist. So what we have now is originalism focused on the public meaning of the text. First of all, Morris is the author of most of the public meaning of that text and he knows what he's doing. So if we're trying to cover original public meaning, we should look at what Morris wants to do. So at the very end of the convention, they don't really have a constitution. They have a draft that has been about, it's about a month old that the committee has detailed. It's very long. They've been fighting over it. They send it to a committee, which Morris is a member of, to put it, to wrap it all up and to create a final draft.
And so, over about three days he takes a month of debates. He dramatically shortens the constitution. He makes it our constitution that we know today and he pushes in a very subtle way, all the goals that he is, that are meaningful to him. So, we start with the Preamble. What happens when the Committee of Detail is, "We the people of New Hampshire, Massachusetts", Morris changes that. It comes out, "We the people of the United States", it reflects his nationalism. And then, it goes on every end of the Preamble to form a more perfect union and promote justice, domestic tranquility, and provide for the common defense. Morris adds those. Those are the product of the Committee of Style. And they are not debated after the committee finishes its work and the convention is just rushing through to a close. And critically, people now treat the Preamble as fluff, as really just hortatory.
But Morris knew and the Federalists in the Washington and Adams administration know that this is text that matters. So the big government actions, like the Bank of the United States, people justify them by appealing to the Preamble. And we've lost that. So that's part of recovering Morris, is recovering the original meaning. I think he makes subtle changes to create a broad presidency. One other thing that I just wanna add that I think is important because it's focused on a lot is, right, that when the constitution is finalized, it has nothing that indicates that slavery is moral. And that's because of Morris, who's the big opponent of slavery. He calls it an abomination, a scandal against heaven. The fugitive slave clause, as it goes into the Committee of Style has the word justly, that owners are the people who own other people can justly, justly seize them. And Morris takes the word just that.
So abolitionists in the years before the civil war say there is nothing in the constitution that indicates that slavery is moral. And that's because of governor Morris. So he makes a series of changes that are small or large, that are designed to increase the power of the executive, increase the power of the national government and fight slavery. And that's the text that we have today.
Excerpt from Interview: Dennis Rasmussen argues Gouverneur Morris, the Constitution's primary author and a key figure at the Philadelphia Convention, is an overlooked yet pivotal and colorful founder.
Dennis Rasmussen: Well, I think Morris is quite possibly the most interesting of the American founders, just period. And he is, as you suggested, he is almost certainly the most important of the founders, who very few people have even heard of. One scholar declared recently that he may have been the most colorful individual in all of North America at the time of the founding. And that, frankly, sounds about right to me. He was a peg-legged ladies' man, with a really wicked sardonic sense of humor. He was, without question one of the funniest of the founders, granted, that's not a super high bar. But the founders were on the whole and usually serious. But he and Franklin were clearly the funniest of the founders. But I think more importantly for us is his importance. I think he was arguably the single most important or single dominant figure at the Philadelphia Convention that produced the Constitution.
Among other things, he spoke more often at the convention than anyone else. He proposed more motions than anyone else. He had more of his motions accepted than anyone else. When you read through Madison's notes, Morris's speeches, his interventions are very blunt, very provocative. They all but jump off the page at you when you read through the notes. We can talk more about the specifics. He was one of the two chief architects of the presidency as we know it, along with James Wilson, who was far and away the staunchest critic of slavery at the convention. And I think most importantly of all, I may have buried the lead on this, he was the one who wrote the Constitution itself. So at the end of the summer, the delegates formed what was called the Committee of Style to write the final draft of the Constitution.
And all the evidence suggests that the committee basically just turned it over to Morris to write this, which is unbelievable that so few people know this. Everybody knows. Most American schoolchildren can tell you that Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence. Very few people know that Morris wrote the Constitution, no matter how well read they might be. I would bet if you pulled PhDs in political science, it's probably still a pretty small fraction that could tell you who it was that wrote the Constitution. Most people, many people I think assume that Madison must have written it, the Father of the Constitution, or that it was just a collective effort. And of course, in some senses, it was a collective effort. The provisions of the Constitution had been laboriously debated and voted on over the course of the summer.
So it's not like he could just choose the structure of the powers of the government on his own say so. So there had been a draft constitution midway through the summer, produced by the Committee of Detail that had 23 rather sprawling articles. He condensed this down to a neat seven. He changed or chose a great deal of the wording on his own initiative, oftentimes in consequential ways. And so, when we pour over the fine details of the Constitution, we're looking for clues regarding its meaning. We have Morris to thank or to blame for many of those details. And he wrote the famous Preamble, the Constitution's ringing statement of purpose, basically from scratch. So all the stuff about forming a more perfect union and establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquility and so on, that's all Morris. And so, he is more than anyone else, certainly the author of the Constitution. So that would be my case for his importance.
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