Nationalizing 'the Curse of Heaven': Gouverneur Morris on the Constitution and the Slave Power

• Author: J. Jackson Barlow
• Position: Charles A. Dana Professor of Politics, Juniata College
• Pages: 25-49

PAPERS

Nationalizing “the Curse of Heaven”: Gouverneur

Morris on the Constitution and the Slave Power

J. JACKSON BARLOW*

“Time, my dear sir, seems about to disclose the awful secret that commerce and

domestic slavery are mortal foes; and, bound together, one must destroy the other.”

—Morris to Harrison Gray Otis, April 29, 1813

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. SLAVERY AND NATURAL RIGHTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

II. SLAVERY, ARISTOCRACY, AND AGRARIANISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

III. THE NATIONAL INTEREST VS. STATE INTERESTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

IV. MORRIS’S ANTI-SLAVERY CONSTITUTIONALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Gouverneur Morris was the dazzling but “inconstant” Framer—the womaniz-

ing, peg-legged, irresponsible, and irrepressible one, “better known for his blunt-

ness than for originality. ”

2

Recent biographers have improved our knowledge of

Morris’s life, but his political orientation and outlook remain elusive: he never

wrote a political treatise, his forays into elective office were few, and his argu-

ments often speak to the moment without touching on larger principles. He was a

conservative but not an ideologue, an aristocrat who criticized aristocrats. He was

also a keen and prescient student and observer of political life, and he was con-

sistent in his belief that the institution of slavery would poison American politics.

At the Constitutional Convention, Morris gave the most powerful denunciation of

slavery and the clearest prophecy of disaster from its power to occupy

Americans’ minds.

3

The Convention took an obsolescent labor practice, and from

* Charles A. Dana Professor of Politics, Juniata College. © 2023, J. Jackson Barlow.

1. Letter from Gouverneur Morris to Harrison Gray Otis (Apr. 29, 1813), in 2 THE DIARY AND

LETTERS OF GOUVERNEUR MORRIS 552 (Anne Cary Morris ed., 1888) [hereinafter DIARY AND LETTERS].

2. WILLIAM HOWARD ADAMS, GOUVERNEUR MORRIS: AN INDEPENDENT LIFE 162 (2014).

3. See DENNIS C. RASMUSSEN, THE CONSTITUTION’S PENMAN: GOUVERNEUR MORRIS AND THE

CREATION OF AMERICA’S BASIC CHARTER, chapter 9 (forthcoming 2023). See also LEONARD L.

RICHARDS, THE SLAVE POWER 28–51 (2000); PAUL FINKELMAN, SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS: RACE

AND LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF JEFFERSON 1–33 (1996).

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it, created the most powerful single force in American politics, later to be called

the Slave Power. Once George Washington was out of politics, that Power

asserted itself as a force, using its constitutional status and advantages to elect

Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Jefferson’s party, as the agent of the Slave Power, pro-

ceeded to capture the Constitution’s mechanisms and, in Morris’s judgment, to

turn them against the commercial states.

Morris’s arguments on slavery at the 1787 Convention took place within the larger

context of his thought and action with respect to constitutions and constitutionalism.

Writing a good constitution, of course, was one objective. Ridding America of slavery

was another. Preserving a polity in which trade and commerce were free to flourish

was yet another. These objectives were often, but not always, congruent. In the New

York constitutional convention of 1777, Morris advocated a provision that would pro-

vide for gradual emancipation, on the ground that, while a commitment to natural

rights required emancipation, the reality of New York politics was not favorable to im-

mediate freedom. At the Constitutional Convention, Morris saw, and said, that both

natural rights and commerce depended on paring back state autonomy and preventing

the rise of an agrarian aristocracy. In the Jefferson-Madison years, Morris watched

with growing sadness as his predictions of 1787 were realized. State autonomy and

agrarian aristocracy combined with slavery to crush commerce and cement the Slave

Power as the most potent force in American politics until the Civil War.

The first and most obvious ground of Morris’s opposition to slavery was his

dedication to securing natural rights. By definition, these rights belonged to

everyone, and Morris knew that in practice the only way to secure them was to

create a legal system that would guarantee civil rights to all. The distinctions

needed to preserve slavery would create and entrench an aristocracy, he thought,

and so his second reason for opposing slavery was a care to preserve a dynamic

society in which status was earned, not inherited. Finally, creating a superior class

would be facilitated, he thought, if the states were left to themselves to define

social hierarchies or pursue separate economic strategies. To prevent this, it was

necessary to strengthen the federal government and weaken the autonomy of the

states. All three of these objectives were related to his basic constitutional prem-

ises of balance among the institutions of society and preferring the whole to

the parts. These arguments converged powerfully in his comments at the

Constitutional Convention, and they would re-emerge after 1800 with his opposi-

tion to the Jefferson-Madison policies leading to the War of 1812. We can begin

by looking to his natural-rights reasons for opposing slavery.

I. SLAVERY AND NATURAL RIGHTS

The 1776 “Political Enquiries” is as close to a standard treatise on political

theory as we have from Morris.

4

In this document, probably notes for the coming

task of setting up government in New York, he sets a skeptical, practical direction

4. The “Enquiries” are carefully analyzed in Arthur P. Kaufman, The Constitutional Views of

Gouverneur Morris 39–79 (1992) (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University).

26 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 21:25