The fun-loving founding father: Gouverneur Morris, the first modern American.

• Author: Wilkinson, Will
• Position: Book Review

Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, by Richard Brookhiser New York: Free Press, 221 pages, $26

Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life, by William Howard Adams, New Haven: Yale University, Press, 296 pages, $30

In 1887 a young Teddy Roosevelt penned an appreciation of the life of his fellow New York pol, die founding father Gouverneur Morris. From this middling pinnacle of historical recognition, Morris slipped to a low plain of neglect and obscurity on which he has languished ever since, consigned to footnotes, unmentioned in civics classes, and omitted from the national mythology.

But it's hard to keep a brilliant, peg-legged man down. The recent glut of Morrisania--two full-length biographies--marks a welcome revival of the Founding Father Time Forgot. It's an important resurrection. The Founders would still recognize their Morris-drafted Constitution today; it has proven a sturdier instrument than they had dreamed. But most of the Founders would hardly recognize their America in ours.

Gouverneur Morris, however, just might. Though Morris' visage was never carved into a mountain, immortalized in marble on the National Mall, or emblazoned on legal tender, our America--this cosmopolitan, materialist, commercial republic we call home is in no small part his monument.

Richard Brookhiser's Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution--the latest book in his series on the American Founders--is an easy, rollicking sketch of a suave, determined yet mercurial, razor-witted strategist with a heart of gold. William Howard Adams' Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life is a more academic and comprehensive treatment. Adams is so intent on thoroughness that his narrative, though often elegantly written, at times drags on like an annotated list of events.

Any way you write him, Morris is damned interesting. Both Brookhiser and Adams recognize they've stumbled on a biographical treasure. This is not to say that they approve of the man in all Iris particulars. But here is a perfect specimen of pater patriae, preserved from the ravages of scholarly disputation, free from the accretions of mythmaking and ideology. Because his legacy has so long slumbered, Morris has not been inflated, valorized, or spun for dubious political purposes.

This neglect may have been a consequence of Morris' all-too-transparently human life and his evident unconcern for the respect of posterity. You can't be knocked from a pedestal you refuse to mount. Morris was no statue of Republican virtue. He liked making money, and he was good at it. He also liked sleeping with other men's wives. He was good at that, too, and he wasn't sorry about any of it.

Morris had the good sense to be born to a family of "winners in the lottery of the British Empire," as Brookhiser puts it. Morris' grandfather and uncle were colonial governors of New Jersey and New York. His father was a powerful judge. After graduating from King's College (Columbia) at 16, the fresh-faced Morris commenced a clerkship in the law offices of William Smith Jr., a power player in New York politics and finance. His precocious intelligence and savoir-faire were evident to everyone, including...