Signing Their Rights Away (17 page)

How could someone so smart be so clueless? When the money stopped flowing, Wilson owed hundreds of thousands of dollars that he couldn’t repay. Creditors hounded him to the point that he confided to a friend he was being “hunted like a wild beast.” He became a liability on the high court because he couldn’t travel to certain states to hear cases—he risked being arrested by local sheriffs. But that didn’t stop him from going on the lam. While still serving on the nation’s highest court, he was arrested and served time in debtors’ prisons in New Jersey and North Carolina. His confinement was embarrassing for him, his second wife, Hannah Gray, his children, President John Adams, and the United States as a whole. He is not so much a forgotten founding father as one that many prefer to forget.

In 1798, probably after his release from one of those prisons, an on-the-run Wilson hid in a decrepit North Carolina tavern, where he was discovered by his wife, thirty years his junior and younger than some of his own grown children. Sick with malaria, he initially recovered but then suffered a stroke. Fellow justice James Iredell took pity on the couple and offered them shelter at his home in Edenton, North Carolina. (That house is now open to the public.) There, Wilson’s mind finally snapped. He mumbled deliriously about arrest and bankruptcy before dying, close to his fifty-sixth birthday. He was buried at a nearby plantation. In 1906, his bones were moved just outside the walls of Christ Church in Philadelphia.

The Playboy with the Wooden Leg

BORN
: January 31, 1752

DIED
: November 6, 1816

AGE AT SIGNING
: 35

PROFESSION
: Lawyer, merchant

BURIED
: St Anne’s Episcopal Churchyard, Bronx, New York

If you can quote from memory just one line of the Constitution, chances are it’s the famous opening written by Gouverneur Morris. A playboy with a gift for both gab and gallivanting, Morris was born at Morrisania, a spectacular estate named for his family (his mouthful of a moniker comes from his mother’s maiden name) in what was then Westchester County, now the heart of the Bronx, New York. His family was one of the wealthiest and most influential in New York; his half-brother Lewis was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Morris had every advantage, and then some: tutors when he was young, a stint at the Academy of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania, established by that city’s patron saint, Ben Franklin), and a degree at King’s College (now Columbia University). He was a great student, sure, but more notably he loved
to write and had a way with words, whether spoken or written. The former of these gifts would earn him a reputation as someone whose tongue sometimes got away from him. The latter would give the Constitution its preamble, some of the most stirring language in the entire document.

Morris studied law in New York and then set up shop. Despite his money, connections, and some loyalist relatives to boot, Morris was a Whig, albeit a conservative one. He entered New York politics in 1775 and, in 1776, helped write that state’s constitution, along with future chief justice John Jay and Robert R. Livingston. Throughout his life, Morris made speeches that were notable, if far from subtle: “Trust crocodiles, trust the hungry wolf in your flock, or a rattlesnake in your bosom—you may yet be something wise. But trust the King, his ministers, his commissioners—it is madness in the extreme!”

In a somewhat strange move for someone of his social and financial position, Morris took up with the New York militia. In 1777, he was a member of his city’s Council of Safety, a wartime civilian watchdog group, and worked in the state legislature. He was a natural to attend the Continental Congress, and did so in 1778. He was immediately sent off to Valley Forge to check on how things were going with Washington and was gob-smacked at what he found there, describing to Congress the “naked, starving condition” of the army.

Morris did not mince words, whether on the floor of Congress or in the presence of ladies of a variety of reputations. But this talent did not always work to his advantage. In 1779, he was not reelected to Congress because of his disparaging comments about New York governor George Clinton, a known patriot and friend of Washington. Morris decided to remain in Philadelphia to work as a lawyer and merchant. He soon fell in with another wealthy and well-connected colleague who shared his surname—Robert Morris—signer of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

The Morris–Morris friendship was a fruitful one. When Robert Morris was appointed the nation’s superintendent of finance in 1781,
he made Gouverneur his assistant, and the two worked together until 1785. Their alliance produced the charter for the country’s first bank, the Bank of North America, a model upon which Alexander Hamilton likely based the first Bank of the United States. Gouverneur Morris suggested the decimal-based money system and offered the word
cent
in place of the oh-so-British term
penny
(although
penny
has hardly been eradicated from the modern American-English lexicon). But the nation found his system too complicated and switched to one suggested by Thomas Jefferson a few years later.

Morris’s big moment came in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, which he attended as part of the Pennsylvania delegation. That was where he shined. He was there at the very start but then was called away to New York for a month. Despite this absence, he made more speeches than any other delegate, a whopping 173. His presence was powerful and hard to miss. “Mr. Governeur Morris … winds through all the mazes of rhetoric, and throws around him such a glare that he charms, captivates, and leads away the senses of all who hear him,” wrote Georgia delegate William Pierce. “With an infinite stretch of fancy he brings to view things when he is engaged in deep argumentation, that render all the labor of reasoning easy and pleasing.… This Gentleman … has been unfortunate in losing one of his Legs, and getting all the flesh taken off his right arm by a scald, when a youth.”

The leg incident to which Pierce refers was the result of a carriage accident that injured Morris’s leg. Nowadays, such an incident would result in a little surgery and eight weeks in a cast—but the founding fathers didn’t have the luxury of modern medical technologies. Morris’s accident occurred out of town and far from his fancy Philadelphia physician. The limb was removed and he was fitted with a wooden leg that the six-foot-tall Morris wore for the rest of his life. When he returned home to Philadelphia, his personal physician said the leg probably could have been saved. Regardless, the injury apparently did not dampen his extracurricular activities. A popular rumor held that Morris—a bachelor with
a reputation for being a bit of playboy—had in fact lost his leg while leaping from a window to escape an angry husband who caught Morris attempting “a great compromise” with the man’s wife.

At the convention, Morris was among the large-state nationalists favoring the Virginia Plan, and he believed that taxes should be paid in proportion to a state’s population (that is, the bigger the population, the higher the taxes the state should pay). He did not want the president to be chosen by Congress, but rather by citizens. (Yet, to this day, the Electoral College remains one of the most contested and, for many, annoyingly outdated, vestigial organs of the Constitutional Convention.)

Morris was also one of the most frequent and forceful—if not
the
most forceful—voices against slavery, referring to it as “the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed.” In addition, he proposed the idea of a presidential cabinet, calling it the “Council of State,” and served on a couple committees. While John Rutledge and the rest of the Committee of Detail were working to roll all the ideas proposed at the convention into some sort of workable first draft, the other delegates took a break. Morris traveled with George Washington and others to Valley Forge, where they reminisced about the old days and fished for trout.

So on September 8, 1787, as everyone was hoping to wrap up the convention, they took a look at the draft created by Rutledge’s team. The content got a pass, but it was agreed that the prose was lacking. Enter the Committee of Style and Arrangement, charged with polishing the draft. The chairman of this committee was Connecticut’s William Samuel Johnson, whose team included Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King, and Morris. Many claimed that Morris was to the Committee of Style what Jefferson was to the Committee of Five, which drew up the Declaration of Independence; as Madison himself later wrote, “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution, fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.”

His pen gave the United States the beautiful, most oft-quoted
words of the Constitution, the Preamble:
“We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Upon completion, the stylized version was presented to the convention, edits were made, and an engrossed copy (read: fancy paper, fancy penmanship) of the Constitution was ordered from Jacob Shallus, a clerk working in the State House (see “
The Penman of the Constitution
”).

On September 17, the chips were down. Franklin called for unanimous acceptance of the completed document. Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, who had stayed to the bitter end of the convention, said he couldn’t do it—there was no way nine states would ratify what the men had created, and he left without signing. According to Madison’s notes, Morris responded that, sure, the document wasn’t perfect, but it was “the best that could be attained.” He later wrote to John Dickinson: “In adopting a republican form of government, I not only took it as a man does his wife, for better or worse, but what few men do with their wives: I took it knowing all its bad qualities.” The time had come to decide whether there would be a national government. If not, chaos would reign. “The moment this plan goes forth all other considerations will be laid aside—and the great question will be, shall there be a national Government or not?”

After ratification, Morris traveled to France and England. In 1792, Washington officially appointed him the U.S. Minister, or ambassador, to France, replacing Thomas Jefferson. While in that country, Morris witnessed the French Revolution, which he described in his diaries and letters. Morris was replaced in 1794 by James Monroe, but he stayed in Europe for travel, business, and, hey, let’s be frank—probably the company of some lovely French ladies. His diary entries from that period are at once salacious and sublime.
He recounts steamy encounters with numerous women—married and single, old and young, sisters—in passageways, carriages, even a Parisian convent. Some of the entries read like a modern-day bodice-ripper: “She had the remains of a fine form and a countenance open and expressive … but they were wearing fast away. Neither had nature quite lost her empire, for the tints, which love in retiring to the heart had shed over her countenance, were slightly tinged with desire. I thought I could, in a single look, read half her history.” Ooh-la-la! Morris even set his sights on Dolley Madison (wife of fellow signer James Madison) and at one point writes in his diary of seeing her in a low-cut dress and wondering if she is “amenable to seduction.”