A Great Statesman: Reclaiming Gouverneur Morris

• Author: Melanie Randolph Miller
• Position: J.D., Berkeley School of Law, 1979
• Pages: 103-130

A Great Statesman: Reclaiming Gouverneur Morris

MELANIE RANDOLPH MILLER*

“The true Object of a great Statesman is to give to any particular Nation the

kind of Laws which is suitable to them and the best Constitution which they

are capable of.”

—Gouverneur Morris to William Carmichael, November 5, 1792

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“I have liv’d too long to regard men’s Expressions: so that all Sentences

rounded off by fair or foul Words, such as Liberty, Patriotism, Virtue, Treason

Aristocracy[,] Crime, are to me the Equivalent of blank Paper.”

—Gouverneur Morris to Madame de Lafayette, July 29, 1793

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In these days of cynical disillusionment with many of our long-revered

Founders, Gouverneur Morris has perhaps found his moment. For the past 200

years, his virtual exclusion from the historical picture and the denigration with

which he continues to be characterized has flattened our perception of that period

of American history. It is very gratifying to think this may be ending. It should

end. Restoring Morris doesn’t just help complete the record, it enriches it in

many ways: by his speeches in the Convention and later in the Senate, his truly

extraordinary diary of the French Revolution, his letters, and the actual events of

his life. His acute observations were made in a modern voice, and his political

comments, whether humorous or agonized, were expressed with an eloquence

that resonates today—sometimes very painfully.

It seemed to me that the best use of this paper would be to offer a selection of

what I have found most enlightening, moving, or unexpected while studying

Morris’s time in France and his later diaries, hoping that it will help fan the new-

kindled interest reflected by this colloquium

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by enhancing an appreciation of his

character and the sophistication of his views. Various eminent historians have for

too long dismissed Morris offhandedly as a “lightweight” and the political princi-

ples he expressed at the Convention as no more than “lawyerly solipsism.”

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* J.D., Berkeley School of Law, 1979; PhD in American history, George Washington University,

2000; editor, Gouverneur Morris Papers project, which is in the process of publishing a modern

documentary edition of Morris’s papers. Transcriptions from Gouverneur Morris’s papers throughout

this article are, unless otherwise noted, mine, made during dissertation research or later work on the

Papers project. © 2023, Melanie Randolph Miller.

1. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, OFFICIAL LETTERBOOK AUG. 1792–APR. 1793 (collection of the Library of

Congress) [hereinafter OFFICIAL LETTERBOOK I].

2. GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, OFFICIAL LETTERBOOK, APR. 1793–JAN. 1795 (collection of the Library of

Congress) [hereinafter OFFICIAL LETTERBOOK II].

3. And by an excellent upcoming book by Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Constitution’s Penman:

Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, forthcoming in 2023.

4. Comment of John Catanzariti, an editor of the Jefferson papers, made to the author. See also JACK

N. RAKOVE, ORIGINAL MEANINGS: POLITICS AND IDEAS IN THE MAKING OF THE CONSTITUTION 76

(1996). In the last 20 years there have been a few excellent biographies of Morris that demonstrate the

fallaciousness of those assessments (e.g., by William Howard Adams and Richard Brookhiser); and an

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Dr. Treanor’s article demonstrates why those superficial assessments are a disserv-

ice to Morris’s brilliance and his importance that summer in Philadelphia. But one

needs to go further: the years I have spent studying Morris have brought me to agree

with Madame de Damas, a Frenchwoman whom Morris sheltered during the Terror,

who left us a candid verbal portrait of him in which she said, “Were I called upon to

distinguish him by a single trait, I should say, he is good.” She saw “the exercise of

this virtue in every action of Mr. Morris’s life.”

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I am convinced that it will take

knowing more about Morris himself and dispelling the falsehoods circulated about

him during his life and repeated today for people to begin to truly appreciate and

properly respect his contributions, as well as value and study his writings. This paper

is a chance to give some of the reasons why that is so.

As a preliminary matter, however, here is a brief discussion of the way in

which the field of documentary editing enables a more complete and accurate

view of Morris. Gouverneur Morris clearly enjoyed sex, and the most tantalizing

but possibly least significant element of his papers is the infamous inked-out text

in his Paris diaries. As anyone who has taken even a cursory look at books on

Morris knows, there are a number of places where words or passages, generally

relating to sex, were covered over with black ink, and in some cases pages were

even torn out. It could have been done by Morris himself in later, more circum-

spect, years or by his wife, who made a note in the diaries after he died that she

had read them before giving them to Jared Sparks. Sparks too felt free to write in

the diaries, but in pencil, so he seems less likely. Or it could have been Morris’s

Victorian-era descendant, Anne Carey Morris.

An example is a passage from the diary entry of June 5, 1789. Morris had

arrived in Paris in February, on what was supposed to be a relatively short business

trip, hoping to salvage financier and Founder Robert Morris’s tobacco contract

with the French Farmers General, sell land, and perhaps arrange a major purchase

of the American war debt to France. Morris had spent the morning at the studio of

Jean-Antoine Houdon posing for a statue of George Washington and agreed to

return on June 9 to have a life mask taken of his face. Although Morris told

Houdon he had no intention of buying a bust, Houdon did make a terracotta bust

from the mask, and it is thanks to him that we have an extraordinary living image

of Morris just as he was on that day over 230 years ago, seen in Illustration 1.

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extremely useful compilation of Morris’s published speeches and essays by J. Jackson Barlow. If you

compare the few inches of Morris-related books on a university library shelf with the multiple shelves

sagging with volumes dedicated to the other Founders, however, it is obvious that the attention of

scholars and educators has long been fixed elsewhere.

5. Madame de Damas, Portrait de M. M*****, American Philosophical Society, Smith Family

Papers, 1659–1985 (early 1790s, date unknown), series 41.

6. 1 GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, A DIARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 107 (Beatrix Cary Davenport ed.,

1939) [hereinafter 1 PARIS DIARY]. See Lois Madison Reamy, In Search of Gouverneur Morris, 40

BRONX CNTY. HIST. SOC’Y J. 82 (Fall 2003). The bust’s vitality is a sharp contrast to the more familiar

paintings of a puffy-faced older gentleman, rendered by later artists. Illustration 1: Jean-Antoine

Houdon, Bust of Gouverneur Morris, unfired clay (1791). Private collection; photograph courtesy of

Daniel Katz Gallery, London.

104 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 21:103