Gouverneur Morris Wrote the Final Words of the Constitution and Spoke the Most

Quick: who wrote "We the People of the United States"? Most Americans would guess Madison, or Jefferson, who was in Paris at the time and had nothing to do with it. The answer is a one-legged New York aristocrat with a quick tongue, a famous wit and a habit of talking more than anyone else in the room. His name was Gouverneur Morris, and his first name was his mother's maiden name, not a title, which has confused schoolchildren for two centuries.

Morris is the most important Founder that most Americans cannot place. He spoke at the Federal Convention more often than any other delegate. He argued against slavery more bluntly than anyone there. He fought for an independent executive. And when the arguing was done, he sat down with the Committee of Style and turned a pile of resolutions into the document we still live under. If the Constitution reads like a constitution and not like a committee report, we owe that to him.

A New York patrician in a revolution

Morris was born on January 31, 1752, at Morrisania, his family's estate in what is now the Bronx. The Morrises were a powerful New York family; his half-brother Lewis Morris would sign the Declaration of Independence. Gouverneur entered King's College, the predecessor of Columbia, as a boy and graduated in 1768, then read law and was admitted to the bar.

When the break with Britain came, many New York families of his class stayed loyal to the Crown, including some of his own relatives. Morris chose independence. He served in New York's Provincial Congress and helped draft the New York Constitution of 1777. He was then elected to the Continental Congress, where he served in 1778 and 1779, worked on military supply during the hard years of the war, and signed the Articles of Confederation.

His time in Congress taught him what a weak central government costs. He watched Washington's army go hungry while Congress begged the states for money it had no power to collect. That experience shaped everything he argued later. When he lost his seat in 1779, partly because New Yorkers thought he cared more about the national cause than their state's interests, he moved to Philadelphia.

In 1780 a carriage accident cost him his lower left leg. He walked on a wooden leg for the rest of his life and, by every account, did not let it slow him down. From 1781 he served as assistant to Robert Morris, no relation, the Superintendent of Finance, helping to manage the Confederation's desperate finances and to plan a national bank and a decimal coinage. Few men in America understood better how close the Union came to bankruptcy in those years.

The most talkative man in Philadelphia

Pennsylvania sent Morris to the Federal Convention in 1787. He missed part of June on personal business and still spoke more often than any other delegate, by the usual count of Madison's notes. Madison spoke a great deal too; Morris spoke more.

He was not just loud. He was usually the delegate willing to say the uncomfortable thing plainly. Three of his positions stand out.

He argued for a strong, independent executive. In July the Convention was leaning toward having Congress choose the President. Morris attacked the idea relentlessly. If the legislature chose the executive, he argued, the executive would be the legislature's creature, and the great danger in a republic was legislative tyranny. He wanted the President chosen by the people or by electors, eligible for re-election, and strong enough to act as a check. He called the executive the guardian of the people against the legislature's encroachments. Most of what he argued for eventually prevailed: a single President, chosen by electors, with a qualified veto and no term limit. The electoral system itself was hammered out in a committee in early September on which Morris sat, and he defended its report on the floor.

He argued against slavery. On August 8, 1787, during the debate on representation, Morris delivered the most forceful antislavery speech of the Convention. He called slavery "the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed." He compared the prosperity of free regions with the misery he saw in slave regions. He asked why the importation of human beings from Africa should increase a state's power in a government instituted to protect the rights of mankind. He said he would sooner submit to a tax to pay for the freedom of every enslaved person in the country than saddle posterity with such a Constitution. He lost the vote on that motion, but no one could say the case had not been made.

He distrusted the democratic passions he saw in state legislatures. Morris was no populist. He wanted the Senate to be a stable, propertied body, and he worried openly about the instability of popular assemblies. Modern readers sometimes find his views on that point uncomfortably aristocratic. But his fear was the same fear that runs through the Federalist: that majorities in the states had been passing debtor-relief laws and paper-money schemes that trampled contracts and property. His solution was structural: an independent executive, a stable Senate and a judiciary with life tenure.

The draftsman: from resolutions to a Constitution

On September 8, 1787, the Convention appointed a Committee of Style and Arrangement to put the agreed provisions into final form. Its members were William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut as chair, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King and Gouverneur Morris. The committee assigned the actual drafting to Morris.

He had a few days. The material he started with was the draft reported by the Committee of Detail on August 6, as amended through five weeks of debate. It ran to twenty-three articles. Morris cut it to seven, organised by branch: legislature, executive, judiciary, the states, amendment, supremacy and debts, ratification. He tightened the language throughout. The Committee of Style reported on September 12, and the Convention signed on September 17.

His most famous change is in the first line. The August draft began: "We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut," and so on through all thirteen states. That list was a problem. No one knew which states would ratify, and naming Rhode Island, which had refused to send delegates, was awkward. Morris replaced the list with a single phrase and added a statement of purposes:

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.

The change was practical, but it carried a meaning that the Anti-Federalists noticed at once. Patrick Henry demanded in the Virginia ratifying convention to know what right the drafters had to say "We, the people" instead of "We, the states." The answer, which Madison gave and the ratification process confirmed, was that the people of each state, meeting in conventions, were the ones who would establish the Constitution. Morris's phrase described the actual source of authority.

Notice what the Preamble is and is not. It states purposes; it does not grant powers. The "general Welfare" in the Preamble is an aim, not an authorisation, and courts have long held that the Preamble is not an independent source of federal power. For why the Preamble limits rather than expands government, see We the People Wrote a Preamble That Limits Government Instead of Licensing It.

Years later, in an 1831 letter, Madison credited Morris with the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution. Coming from the man most associated with the document, that is high praise. Morris himself, in an 1814 letter, claimed the instrument as the work of his own hand and said he had rejected redundant and equivocal terms to make it as clear as the language allowed, excepting part of what relates to the judiciary. He knew exactly how much of it was his.

Paris in the Terror

At the end of 1788 Morris sailed for France on business, arriving early in 1789. He stayed nearly a decade. He kept a remarkable diary of the early French Revolution, which he watched with sharp scepticism. He thought the French were trying to build a republic without the habits, morals and institutions that make self-government possible, and he predicted it would end in tyranny.

Washington appointed him minister to France, and he served from 1792 to 1794. That put him in Paris through the worst of the Terror. Most diplomats left. Morris stayed at his post, and he used his position to help people in danger where he could. His reports home were blunt about where the Revolution was headed.

The contrast he drew between the two revolutions is worth remembering. The American Revolution was fought to preserve the rights of Englishmen and was followed by a written charter that divided and limited power. The French Revolution tried to remake human nature on the authority of abstract reason, and it devoured its own leaders. Morris saw both from the inside. He understood, as Burke did from London, that liberty depends on inherited institutions and restraint, not on slogans.

Federalist senator and builder

Back in New York, Morris served as a United States senator from 1800 to 1803, as a Federalist. When Alexander Hamilton was killed in his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, it was Morris who delivered the funeral oration. He later chaired the commission that planned the Erie Canal, and he served on the commission whose 1811 plan laid out the street grid of Manhattan. The Founder who gave the country its constitutional grid also gave New York its street grid, which is either a coincidence or a personality trait.

His later politics were the hard-edged Federalism of the opposition to Jefferson and Madison. He opposed the War of 1812 and the embargo policies that preceded it, and in his frustration he said things about the Union that admirers wish he had not. A fair profile should note that. He died at Morrisania on November 6, 1816.

The objection, and the answer

The strongest case against honouring Morris goes like this. He was an elitist who distrusted the common people, wanted a Senate of the wealthy, and in his late years flirted with disunion. Why should a conservative movement that speaks for ordinary Americans hold him up as a model?

Here is the answer.

1. His fear was of concentrated power, not of the people. Morris distrusted state legislatures because he had watched them pass laws that broke contracts and debased money. The cure he sought was a structure in which no single body, however popular, could do whatever it wanted. That is the conservative insight, and the Constitution embodies it.
2. His most important arguments were for the people's liberty. He argued for an executive answerable to the people rather than to Congress. He argued against slavery more plainly than any delegate. A man who calls slavery a curse in a room full of slaveholders is not a mere defender of privilege.
3. His drafting changed the source of authority from the states to the people. "We the People of the United States" is the most democratic sentence in the document, and he wrote it.
4. Late mistakes do not erase early achievements. We judge the Founders as whole men. Morris's opposition to the War of 1812 and his intemperate words in that period do not undo the Preamble, the seven-article structure or the August 8 speech.

The verdict: Morris was a difficult, brilliant, sometimes wrong man who gave the Constitution its voice. The proper response is not to put him on a pedestal or to tear him down, but to read what he wrote.

What to learn from Morris

First, words matter. Morris understood that a constitution is a legal text that will be read by people who want to stretch it. His tight, plain drafting is one reason the Constitution is short enough to read in half an hour. Compare it with the length of modern statutes and you see what discipline looks like.

Second, conviction and compromise can live together. Morris argued for what he believed, lost many votes, and still signed. The Constitution was not his ideal document. It was the best document available, and he put his skill to work making it as good as it could be.

Third, the Founding was not a single act of genius. It was a team of very different men, with very different temperaments, arguing in a hot room for four months. Morris was the loudest member of that team and its best writer. For other members of it, see James Wilson, the Forgotten Founder Who Put the People at the Center and Hamilton the Constitutionalist Was Not the Monarchist His Enemies Painted. For the committee that designed the electoral system he defended, see The Committee of Eleven Invented the Electoral College in the Final Weeks. For the case for the single executive he championed, see The Executive Power Shall Be Vested in a President, and Every Word Counts.

The case in brief

1. Gouverneur Morris, born in 1752 at Morrisania, served New York in the Revolution, signed the Articles and helped run the Confederation's finances before representing Pennsylvania in 1787.
2. He spoke at the Convention more than any other delegate, fought for an independent executive and called slavery a curse on August 8, 1787.
3. As the Committee of Style's draftsman, he cut twenty-three articles to seven and wrote the Preamble, replacing a list of states with "We the People of the United States."
4. His years in revolutionary France taught him that liberty depends on restraint and institutions, not abstractions.
5. His late errors are real, but the Constitution's voice is his, and that is reason enough to read him.

What you can do: read the Preamble and Article I on the Constitution page aloud with your family, then look up Morris on the Founders page and count the articles he drafted.