The Story of the Real—and Mostly Unknown—Author of the U.S. Constitution, Gouverneur Morris

On this episode of Our American Stories, our next story is about a Founding Father who wrote the most famous seven words in American history: “We the People of the United States.” Professor of political science at Syracuse, Dennis C. Rasmussen is also the author of The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter—he is also a Jack Miller Center Fellow.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Our next story
is about a founding father who wrote the most famous
seven words in American history, We the people of the
United States, those words, of course, appearing in the preamble
of the US Constitution. Dennis C. Rasmussen is a professor
of political science at Syracuse University. He's also a Jack

(00:31):
Miller Center Fellow. Dennis is also the author of The
Constitutions Penman, Governor Morris, and the Creation of America's Basic Charter.
Let's take a listen to the story.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Governor Morris is relatively little known today, but he's one
of the most important and fascinating figures of the American
founding era. One scholar declared recently that Morris may have
been the most colorful individual in all of North America
at the time of the founding, and frankly, that sounds
about right. Morris was a peg legged ladies man with
a really wicked, sardonic sense of humor. He was, without questioning,

(01:02):
one of the funniest of the founders, although granted that
perhaps not a super high bar. Morris also led an
immensely fall life. He was originally from New York. He
came from a wealthy family that owned most of the
southwest part of what was now the Bronx. As a
young man, he helped to push New York to belatedly
join the independence movement, and he's one of the principal
architects of the first New York State Constitution. I mentioned

(01:24):
that Morris had a wooden leg. He had his leg
amputated when he was twenty eight years old as a
result of a bad carriage accident, although there were always
rumors throughout his life that he'd in fact shattered the
leg jumping out of bedroom window in order to escape
the wrath of an ill timed husband. In seventeen seventy eight,
Morris became a delegate to the Continental Congress and spent
that terrible winter at Valley Forge with George Washington and

(01:45):
his troops, where he was sent to oversee the army's needs.
He was also a signer of the Articles of Confederation,
the nation's first stab at a national constitution, although he
deemed the Confederation government to be woefully inadequate from the
get go. Morris served as a confederation his deputy superintendent
of Finance for several years, and in that role he
drew up a plan for a new national currency, in

(02:06):
which he proposed to use the word dollar after the
widely used Spanish dollar, and he invented the word sent
to denote one of the smaller coins. So Americans used
words chosen by Morris pretty much every day. Is thanks
to him that we have dollars and cents for our currency.
Morris was destined to be an important player, and not
just one, but two of the great revolutions of the
modern age, because in seventeen eighty nine he went to

(02:27):
Paris and eventually followed in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin
and Thomas Jefferson by becoming the American Minister to France.
He was there at the convening of the Estates General,
and he was the only foreign diplomat from any nation
to remain in country all the way through the Bloody Terror.
After Morris's ministry ended, he traveled around Europe for a
few more years and then came back to the US

(02:48):
and served the second half of his senatorial term during
a critical period when Jefferson and the Republicans came into
power and the capital moved to Washington, d c. This
was from eighteen hundred to eighteen oh three. In eighteen
oh four, after the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and
Aaron Burr, Morris was the one who sat by Hamilton's

(03:09):
side at his deathbed and then gave his official eulogy
at the request of Hamilton's widow, Eliza, who told Morris
that he was the best friend that Hamilton had in
the world. Not that that would be enough to earn
Morris even a bit role in the musical, which is
a real shame and a real missed opportunity if you
ask me. In any case. Late in life, Morris undertook
two more great projects, one helping to lead a commission

(03:30):
that planned the grid layout for the streets of Manhattan
and another that planned the Eerie Canal On the more
personal side of things, At age fifty seven, Morris finally
became the last of the founders to marry. He married
a woman named Nancy Randolph, who was a sort of
fallen aristocrat who was then serving as his housekeeper and
who had earlier been accused of conspiring to murder her

(03:52):
own newborn baby fathered by her brother in law. That's
a long story in itself. As you may imagine, they
had a son together on the Moorris die before he
even turned four. Even Morris's death was colorful, if rather grizzly.
He seems to have frequently suffered from painful blockages in
his urinary tract, perhaps the result of venereal disease, and
when he was sixty four, he tried using a whalebone

(04:13):
to remove the blockage, and he died from the resulting lacerations.
My sincere apologies for getting bat image stuck in your mind.
In the summer of seventeen eighty seven, Morris played an
absolute pivotal role at the Philadelphia Convention that formulated the
US Constitution. Morris spoke more often at the convention than
any other delegate. He proposed more motions than any other delegate,

(04:34):
and he had more of his motions accepted than any
other delegate. His interventions were often extremely blunt and provocative,
so they all but jump off the page at you
when you read through James Madison's notes of the debates.
He also served on a number of the committees that
did so much of the hard work in actually crafting
the Constitution that summer, and most importantly of all, Morris
was the one who wrote the Constitution itself. At the

(04:57):
end of the summer, the delegates formed what was called
the Committee of Style to compose the final draft of
the Constitution, and the Committee, in turn simply handed the
test to Morris. It is absolutely remarkable that so few
people know this. Everyone knows most American school children can
tell you that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence,
and yet very few people know that Morris wrote the Constitution.

(05:19):
Even among folks with PhDs in political science is probably
a pretty small fraction who could tell you that I
have done any kind of formal poll. But I've asked
many many people this question over the past couple of years,
and most assume that it must have been James Madison,
the called Father of the Constitution, who wrote it, or
that it was just a collective effort. Now, in some senses,

(05:40):
of course, the Constitution was a collective effort. His provisions
had been laboriously debated and voted on over the course
of the summer before Morris took up his pen, and
so his leeway in choosing the structure and powers of
the proposed government was minimal. But Morris single handedly and
rather radically reorganized the draft constitution that had been produced
by the Committee of Detail. Midway through the summer, he

(06:02):
consolidated twenty three sprawling articles down to neat seven, and
he changed or chose a great deal of the wording
on his own initiative, oftentimes in consequential ways. So when
constitutional lawyers and scholars pore over the fine details of
the Constitution looking for clues regarding its meaning, they have
Morris to thank or to blame for many of those details.

(06:24):
Anne Morris wrote the famous preamble, the Constitution's ringing Statement
of Purpose, basically from scratch. All the stuff about forming
a more perfect Union, establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, and
the like that was all Morris. The preambles become one
of the most celebrated sentences in the annals of democracy.
So something of an irony that it was written by

(06:45):
a man of somewhat elitist inclinations who's all but forgotten today.
But perhaps Morris's finest hour at the Convention, from today's perspective,
came in the debates over slavery. No one spoke more
passionately or eloquently, or at greater length about the evils
of slavery than Morris. Did. He described it as a
nefarious institution and the curse of heaven on the states

(07:06):
where it prevailed. A long speech that Morris delivered on
August eighth has been called the first abolitionist speech in
American public life, which may be a bit of an exaggeration,
but does have at least a grain of truth to it.
And it's all the more remarkable when you remember the
audience that probably a couple dozen people sitting there in
the room listening to him were themselves slaveholders. So Morris

(07:26):
gave this speech in opposition to the notorious three fifths clause,
that is, to counting three fifths of the enslaved population
toward representation in the House of Representatives and hence also
at least eventually the electoral college that would choose the president.
And his basic point was that there was no good
reason why enslaved people should count at all according to
any ratio. After all, he suggested, if enslaved people were

(07:49):
human beings, then they should be made citizens and allowed
to vote, But if they were mere property, as some
of the Southern delegates condended, then they shouldn't have been
included in the population counts at all. Given that no
other property was included. The three fists clause was just
a way of augmenting the political power of the slaveholding South,
and moreover, one that would encourage them to impoorse still
more enslaved people, so that their political cloud would be

(08:11):
still further increased. Let me read the climax of Morris's
speech in opposition to this clause. The admission of slaves
into the representation would fairly explained. Comes to this that
the inhabitant of Georgia or South Carolina, who goes to
the coast of Africa, and, in defiance of the most
sacred laws of humanity, tears away as fellow creatures from

(08:31):
their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage,
shall have more votes in a government instituted for the
protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of
Pennsylvania and New Jersey views with laudable horror so nefarious
a practice. Morris goes on to say that giving the
South extra representation on behalf of the people whom they'd
enslaved would require a sacrifice of every principle of right,

(08:56):
of every impulse of humanity. This was as courageous and
far sighted as any speech that was delivered that summer.
Of course, for all of his moral clarity and passion
and eloquence, Morris failed to make much headway against slavery.
The Three Fists clause, as well as the clause protecting
to oversee slave trade until eighteen oh eight, and the

(09:18):
fugitive slave Clause were all included in the Constitution over
his fearce objections. On that note, there's a sense in
which Morris's speech against slavery not only makes him look
pretty good, but also makes many of the other founders
look worse by comparison. After all, Morris was one of them,
and he knew better, and he told them so.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hangler and I special thanks to
Dennis C. Rasmussen, who's a professor of political science at
Syracuse University and the author of the Constitution's Penman Governor Marris,
and the creation of America's Basic Charter. Dennis is also
a Jack Miller Center Fellow, and the Jack Miller Center

(09:58):
is a nationwide network of scholars teachers dedicated educating the
next generation about America's founding principles and history. To learn more,
visit Jackmillercenter dot org. It's a terrific organization worthy of
your support. And my goodness, what a story he told here.
We all know that Thomas Jefferson was given the assignment

(10:18):
of writing the Declaration of Independence, but I didn't know
until recently. Most people don't know who Governor Marris is,
the role he played in the framing and formation of
the Constitution, and the fact that he and he alone
wrote the document to preamble and indeed all of it,
and his arguments against slavery, A man ahead of his time.

(10:40):
The story of Governor Morris, one of the most important
founding fathers and one of the least well known here
on our American Stories