The Forsaken Founder: Gouverneur Morris, the Unsung Patriot Who Wrote the Constitution, Stood Up to Slavery, and Survived the Reign of Terror

He gazed out the window, and the cool breeze blowing off Long Island Sound carried memories of his consequential life: huddling with George Washington at frozen Valley Forge, strolling with Thomas Jefferson in muddy Paris, comforting Alexander Hamilton as he agonized on his deathbed. As America’s ambassador to France, he had plotted with King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to save them from the guillotine. When the Marquis de Lafayette’s folly landed him in an Austrian prison, he loaned him money and lobbied for his release. He had designed Manhattan’s street grid and even now, at his advanced age, he was fighting for his vision of a great canal connecting the port of New York to the interior of the continent.

For all that, he was most proud of this fact: The hand moving across this very page had written the words that were the bedrock of the nation. James Madison? The president was often drunk on wine or high on opium and so withered that his wife had signaled her openness to an affair. He was the penman of the Constitution, and the sole author of its eloquent Preamble. And while he had failed to excise slavery from the document, he had surreptitiously shaped the final draft in ways that would embolden abolitionists in decades to come.

His antislavery views offended many of his contemporaries—especially the slave-owning Virginians who had a stranglehold on the presidency. His amorous adventures and high living, his effortless wit and good looks also aroused resentment, as did his firm belief that it was a divine imperative to enjoy superb meals and bawdy jokes. If all of that denied him a place in the nation’s pantheon of founders, so be it.

In revolutionary Paris, he had seen people brandishing bloody heads on pikes; he knew what human beings were capable of. Unlike Jefferson, who elevated mankind but assigned too many individual men to the humble rank of fools, he understood that each one of us has strengths and weaknesses. He also believed, despite two crippling injuries, that incidents of pleasure and pain were scattered among human beings more equally than most people imagined. The cards were dealt with fairness; the only thing to do was play the game.

Gouverneur Morris picked up his pen. “Looking back, I can with some little self-complacency reflect that I have not lived in vain; and at the same time look forward with composure at the probable course of future events,” he wrote. “At sixty-four, there is little to desire and less to apprehend. Let me add that, however grave the form and substance of this letter, the lapse of so many years has not impaired the gaiety of your friend.”

Gouverneur Morris is our forsaken Founding Father. Morris reorganized the ragtag Continental Army into a force that vanquished the preeminent military power of the age. He played a pivotal role in putting the new nation on solid financial footing and conceived the country’s first bank. At the Constitutional Convention, he was the delegate who fought hardest to abolish slavery, even as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and other opponents of slavery sat silently. Abraham Lincoln, in his famous 1860 speech at the Cooper Institute in New York City, hailed Morris as one of the “most noted antislavery men of those times.” It was Morris, not James Madison, who composed the soaring Preamble to the Constitution and rewrote the final draft so that it did not endorse slavery—either explicitly or implicitly. His changes transformed the Constitution into a blueprint for a better America, one wielded by Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. Morris succeeded Thomas Jefferson as minister to France and perceived—as his predecessor did not—that that country’s bid to emulate America’s revolution would be drowned in blood.

“There has never been an American statesman of keener intellect or more brilliant genius,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his 1888 biography of Morris, describing his fellow New Yorker as “gallant and fearless” and “absolutely upright and truthful.” Roosevelt ended his book with this definitive declaration: “With all his faults, there are few men of his generation to whom the country owes more than to Gouverneur Morris.”

So why have we forgotten him? Many of Morris’s contemporaries resented his brilliance, his larger-than-life personality, and what Roosevelt called his “extreme, aggressive frankness,” especially in opposing slavery. He was an unabashed ladies’ man, and his romantic adventures scandalized some of his peers and ignited jealousy in others. The rancor these men expressed in their letters and memoirs seeped into the earliest histories of the period, poisoning the perceptions of later generations. Some critics have tarred him—erroneously—as a monarchist. Morris’s activities during the War of 1812 also tarnished his legacy. He perceived the war as a wicked plot by slave-owning Southerners to impoverish the Northeast—and maybe even ally America with Napoleon. That led him to consider (briefly) whether New York and New England should secede from the Union—a stance that did not age well, even though it preceded by nearly fifty years Lincoln’s own observation that the country could not endure half-slave and half-free. For these reasons and others, our most colorful Founding Father has been denied his rightful place in American history. It’s time to set the record straight.