Gentleman Revolutionary

Gouverneur Morris--The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution

by Richard Brookhiser

Free Press, 251 pp., $26

THINK OF THE MAN least likely to have written the governing charter for a bourgeois republic born in rebellion, and you are apt to light upon Gouverneur Morris, the subject of "Gentleman Revolutionary," fourth in Richard Brookhiser's series of books on the Founding Founders.

Interestingly, this is the Founder with whom Brookhiser has had the most fun--perhaps because Morris is such an odd duck among his fellow rebels: a blue-blood, a wit, an epicure, and a limping Lothario with a wooden leg. The descendant of two generations of colonial governors, he was born rich and grew richer: one of the rare Americans who wasn't a social climber, as there was no social class to which he could climb. Unlike his friends George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, he did not have to scheme and marry his way out of obscurity. Republican simplicity was not Morris's métier. "His determination to live in the style to which he had become accustomed could make his countrymen gape," Brookhiser observes. "Upon entering the inn," wrote a traveler who crossed his path, "I found Gouverneur Morris with two French valets, a French travelling companion, and his hair buckled up in about a hundred papillottes [paper curlers]. His wooden leg, papillottes, French attendants, and French conversation made his host . . . stare." A notorious rake until his marriage late in life, he was no ardent fan of conventional morals. The bride he chose was suspected of incest and murder.

All this makes Morris a fascinating figure but an unlikely rebel. He was the statesman as sybarite, a serious man who expressed himself lightly and who made time to enjoy himself hugely though caught up in dire events. He cared deeply about rights, wrongs, wars, and nations--but, at the same time, for food, wine, women, and good conversation. "He is fond of his ease, does his best to procure it, and enjoys it as much as possible," said one woman who knew him. "His imagination inclines to pleasantry, . . . being abundantly gifted in what the English call humor, united to what the French call esprit."

Perhaps that was his weapon against pain and darkness, of which he saw much. He watched his family divided by the revolution, French mobs tearing people to pieces, and his countrymen suffering at Valley Forge. As a boy of fourteen, he upset a kettle of boiling water and burned his right arm "fleshless." At twenty-eight, he caught his left leg in a carriage wheel and had it amputated just under the knee. Morris never complained, turned the loss of leg into a subject for joking (much of it ribald), and wore his false leg like a fashion accessory. It was God's will, he believed, that we accept all the ills of providence with "sincere resignation"--and all the blessings of providence with sincere enjoyment. And so he did.

Morris served three years in the United States Senate and nearly three more as Washington's representative to France. But his real claim to history's notice lies in the twelve years between 1775, when he became a twenty-three-year-old member of the New York Provisional Congress, and 1787, when, as a thirty-five-year-old delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he shaped, edited, pruned, and essentially wrote the American Constitution, one of the greatest and most consequential political documents in human history.

THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, he was not merely a rebel involved in the war effort (largely by helping with financial arrangements). He was also a leading light in the small group--Washington, Hamilton, and his school friends John Jay, Rufus King, and Robert R. Livingston--who believed the colonies should be not only free but cohere as a nation. "A national spirit is the natural result of national existence," he wrote John Jay the year the war ended. "True it is that the general government wants energy, and equally true it is that this want will eventually be supplied."