The Eventful Life of US Founding Father Gouverneur Morris (#114)

Morris was born on January 31, 1752, on the family estate, Morrisania, on the north side of the Harlem River, which was then in Westchester County but is now part of the Bronx. He was the son of Lewis Morris Jr. a wealthy landowner and judge, and his second wife, Sarah Gouverneur. Morris's first name derived from his mother's surname.

Morris, a gifted scholar, enrolled at King's College, now Columbia University in New York City, at age 12. He graduated in 1768 despite missing an entire year of classes - as a 14-year-old, he accidentally dropped a kettle of boiling water that scalded his right arm and side. Luckily, he avoided gangrene, which would have required amputation of the limb, and even went on to receive a master's degree in 1771. He studied law with Judge William Smith and attained admission to the bar in 1775.

On May 8th that same year, Morris was elected to represent his family household in southern Westchester County (now Bronx County), in the New York Provincial Congress. As a member of the congress, he, along with most of his fellow delegates, concentrated on turning the colony into an independent state. Even though this aligned him with his half-brother Lewis Morris, who (spoiler alert) also went on to sign the Declaration of Independence, it set him apart from another half-brother who served as a general in the British army, two of his sisters who married Loyalists, his own Loyalist mother, as well as with his mentor, William Smith, who had abandoned the Patriot cause when it pressed toward independence. The decision also left him homeless as his mother allowed the British to camp at Morrisania.

Morris was appointed as a delegate to the Continental Congress and took his seat in Congress on 28 January 1778. He was selected to a committee in charge of coordinating reforms of the military with George Washington. After witnessing the army encamped at Valley Forge, he was so appalled by the conditions of the troops that he became the spokesman for the Continental Army in Congress and subsequently helped enact substantial reforms in its training, methods, and financing. He also signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778 and was its youngest signer.

In 1778, when the Conway Cabal was at its peak (a group of senior Continental Army officers in late 1777 and early 1778 who aimed to have George Washington replaced as commander-in-chief of the Army during the American Revolutionary War) some members of the Continental Congress attempted a no-confidence vote against George Washington. If it had succeeded, Washington would have been court-martialled and dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. Gouverneur Morris cast the decisive tie-breaking vote in favour of keeping Washington as Commander-in-Chief.

However, a year later in 1779, he was defeated in his home state for re-election to Congress, and he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to work as a lawyer and merchant. It was here in Philadelphia that Morris had his next odd incident - in 1780, Morris reportedly had a carriage accident which left him with a mangled left ankle and several broken leg bones. Reportedly, you might ask? Well, rumours forever swirled that Morris, a known ladies’ man, had actually injured himself jumping from a paramour’s balcony to escape the wrath of an irate husband. Whatever the true story is, it turns out that his regular doctor was out of town, so the attending physicians recommended amputation of the left leg below his knee. Morris consented. Showing a stunning lack of bedside manner, his regular doctor told Morris upon his return that the leg likely could have been saved. The Founding Father didn’t let the loss of a limb slow him down. According to Richard Brookhiser, author of “Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris—The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution,” he continued to ride horses, climb church steeples, shoot river rapids and shake his (wooden) leg dancing. Nor did it diminish his trysts with married women, so much so that friend John Jay wrote that he wished Morris “had lost something else.”

Still, he didn’t let his lack of limb affect him, and was appointed assistant superintendent of finance of the United States and served under Robert Morris. After living nearly a decade in Philadelphia, the New York native was selected as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During the Convention, he was a friend and ally of Washington and others who favoured a strong central government. In spite of missing an entire month of the proceedings, Morris proved the most loquacious of the delegates, giving more speeches than any other delegate - 173 speeches in total - topping the 168 by James Wilson and 161 by James Madison. Morris was among the few delegates who stood up and delivered passionate orations denouncing slavery, as well as vigorously defended the right of anyone to practice his chosen religion without interference, arguing to include such language in the Constitution. However, Morris was "an aristocrat to the core," and alleged thought that common people were incapable of self-government because he feared that the poor would sell their votes to the rich and that voting should be restricted to property owners. Swings and roundabouts.

Speaking of the Constitution, Morris was elected to serve on the Committee of Style and Arrangement, a committee of five which drafted the final language of the proposed constitution. According to Madison, “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris,”. A gifted writer called the “Penman of the Constitution,” Morris tightened the text and made it sing. Perhaps his biggest contribution was to change the document’s preamble from “We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts…,” which continued with a litany of individual states listed from north to south, with simply “We the People of the United States.”

After helping make history in the United States as one of its Founding Fathers, Morris traveled to Paris on a business venture in 1789, and three years later President George Washington appointed him minister to France. Morris saw the worst violence of the French Revolution during his five years in Paris, but he was the only diplomat to remain in the city throughout the Reign of Terror. Compared to Thomas Jefferson, Morris was far more critical of the French Revolution and considerably more sympathetic to the deposed queen consort, Marie Antoinette.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for the one legged bachelor, as his French liaisons included a three-year love affair with the novelist Comtesse Adélaïde de Flahaut, who was married to a count 35 years her senior and lived in an apartment inside the Louvre before its conversion to an art museum. Morris shared his mistress with French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, who would later sell the Louisiana Purchase to the United States as Napoleon’s foreign minister. Also, on one occasion, Morris found himself the centre of a hostile mob in favour of hanging him on the nearest lamp-post. To get out of it, he unfastened his wooden leg, brandished it above his head, and proclaimed himself an American who had lost a limb fighting for liberty, upon which the mob's suspicions melted into enthusiastic cheers.

He returned to the United States in 1798 and was elected in April 1800, as a Federalist, to the U.S. Senate, serving until March 3, 1803. After leaving the Senate, Morris was appointed to a three-man commission tasked with planning for the growth of New York City, which was rapidly becoming the largest city in the United States. He helped draw up the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out Manhattan’s iconic street grid system with 12 parallel avenues intersected by 155 streets, as Morris believed that “Straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in.” Morris was also instrumental in the construction of the Erie Canal, which would provide a huge economic boost to New York. He had envisioned a canal as early as the 1790s, and as chair of the seven-man Erie Canal Commission that plotted the waterway he pushed for a longer route connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie, rather than Lake Ontario, which helped to transform New York City into a financial capital.

During this time, at age 57, the long-time bachelor married his housekeeper 35-year-old Ann Cary Randolph (nicknamed "Nancy”). The ladies’ man decided to turn a Christmas party into a surprise party by making the shocking announcement. And sure, marrying a woman who was 22 years his junior is one thing, but what made the marriage particularly scandalous was because Nancy, back when she lived with her sister Judith and her brother-in-law Richard Randolph on a plantation called Bizarre in Farmville, Virginia, had been accused in September 1792 of killing a newborn baby who was suspected of being their illegitimate child. Nancy forever insisted that the child had been stillborn.

Morris was apparently undisturbed by the rumours that had caused Nancy to leave Virginia. By all accounts, their marriage was a happy one; Morris became a father for the first time at age 61 when Nancy gave birth to a boy in 1813 – their son, Gouverneur Morris Jr., who went on to a long career as a railroad executive.

However, his new adventure into fatherhood was short lived; after suffering from crippling gout throughout the fall of 1816, the Founding Father’s pain grew even worse when he began to experience a urinary tract blockage. From the don’t-try-this-at-home department, Morris then attempted to clear the obstruction by using a piece of whale bone as a catheter. The unsuccessful procedure led to further internal injuries and infection. Morris passed away on November 6, 1816, in the same room in which he was born 64 years earlier on his family’s estate, Morrisania, in what today is the South Bronx.