Morris, Gouverneur, , New York 1752 1816 Male Diplomat Statesman statesman and diplomat, was born in the manor house at Morrisania, N. Y. , the son of Lewis Morris, second lord of the manor, by his second wife, Sarah Gouverneur.
From his grandfather, Lewis Morris [q. v. ], the first lord of the manor, and from his father, both of whom had served on the bench and in the assembly of New York, defending the rights of the colonists against the royal governors, he inherited traditions of public service and political autonomy.
His mother was a descendant of a Huguenot family driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685; and it was doubtless the French strain in Morris' blood that lent to his conversation and his writings the charming combination of graceful manner, pervasive humor, and cynical philosophical detachment which contrasts so noticeably with the rather ponderous and prosaic rectitude of most of his revolutionary associates.
While he was at school in the Huguenot settlement of New Rochelle where he had frequent opportunity to hear his mother's language spoken, the French power was driven from America and the quarrel between the mother country and the English colonies drew rapidly to its crisis.
Education
In the year of the Stamp Act Morris entered King's College, New York, from which he graduated in 1768 at the age of sixteen, just as the British government was dispatching regiments of redcoats to Boston to enforce the provisions of the Townshend legislation.
Career
Before he had reached his majority he arrested the attention of the politicians by a vigorous attack upon a bill proposed by the provincial assembly providing for the emission of paper money to liquidate the debt incurred by the French and Indian War.
"I see, and I see it with fear and trembling, " he wrote in 1774, "that if the disputes with Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions the domination of a riotous mob.
.
Yet when the breach came, Morris adhered unreservedly to the American cause, at no small cost to his family and social connections.
Though his half-brothers Lewis and Richard [qq. v. ]
, were active patriots, his half-brother Staats Long Morris became a major-general in the British army and married the Duchess of Gordon; and for writing even a filial letter to his Loyalist mother, Gouverneur Morris fell for a time under suspicion.
To that body, he insisted, should be entrusted the whole responsibility of the negotiations for reconciliation with England, as well as the control of the issue of paper money by the colonies.
Morris sat in the constitutional convention which met in July 1776, and with John Jay and Robert R. Livingston drafted the frame of government, adopted the following year, under which the state was to live for nearly half a century.
As a member of the Council of Safety Morris visited the northern army which was resisting the advance of Burgoyne toward Albany.
He was an ardent supporter of General Schuyler [q. v. ], and with Jay went to Philadelphia on a belated mission to prevent Schuyler from being superseded by Horatio Gates.
Morris' versatility of talent and soundness of judgment were never more in evidence than during the two years 1778-79, when, as a young man in his middle twenties, he sat in the Continental Congress.
These instructions, approved in August 1779, six weeks before John Adams was appointed to carry them out, formed the basis of important provisions in the final treaty of peace four years later.
He could not remain long out of public life, however.
Morris was elected to the Pennsylvania delegation to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and took part in the debates of that body more frequently than any other member on the floor, not even excepting James Madison.
He favored a strong, centralized government in the hands of the rich and the well-born.
He would have a president elected for life, with power to appoint a Senate of life members.
The suffrage for presidential and congressional electors should be limited to freeholders: "Give the votes to the people who have no property, " he argued, "and they will sell them to the rich" (Farrand, post, II, 203).
Considering that "State attachments, and State importance" had been the "bane of this Country, " Morris was willing to see "all the Charters & Constitutions of the States thrown into the fire" (Ibid. , I, 531, 553).
None of the framers of the Constitution had better claims to high office under it than Gouverneur Morris.
His fame as one of the founders of the American Republic had preceded him.
After Jefferson's return to the United States at the close of 1789, Morris was the most influential American in Paris.
He was engaged in plans for opening the tobacco trade on better terms for Americans, for supplying American wheat to the French market, getting the American debt to France transferred to private hands (his own and those of his associates), and selling American lands.
These enterprises brought him often before French ministers and committees to urge the modification of the French customs system for the benefit of American trade.
"You are constantly making remarkable prophecies which turn out to be true, " said the French minister to Great Britain to him in July 1790 (Diary and Letters, I, 336).
The historian Taine, who drew heavily on Morris in his volumes on the French Revolution, ranked him with Arthur Young, Mallet du Pan, and Mounier in value as a source (Derniers Essais de Critique et d'Histoire, 1894; 6th ed. , 1923, p. 307).
The nomination was bitterly fought in the Senate, partly because of Morris' aristocratic views and his unconciliatory manners, partly because of the disappointing results of his special mission to London in 1790-91, when he attempted to settle the controversies over debts, trading-posts, impressments, and commercial privileges left over from the peace treaty of 1783 (see S. F. Bemis, Jay's Treaty, 1923).
Had the senators known that at the very moment of their deliberations Morris was deeply engaged in the plot to get the king out of Paris, they would certainly not have ratified his nomination--even by the narrow margin of 16 to 11 votes.
Still, no one could have represented the United States at Paris better than Morris did in the stormy years 1792-94.
He stayed in the face of repeated insults and perils to vindicate with dignity and courage the full rights of his countrymen, and to offer the asylum of his house to many a refugee in danger of the guillotine.
He was recalled at the request of the French government in the late summer of 1794, as a quid pro quo for the dismissal of "Citizen" Genet [q. v. ] by President Washington.
Morris did not return to America for another four years, however; he spent the intervening time traveling in various countries, from Scotland to Austria, attending to his manifold business interests, studying the confused European political scene, and writing letters to the British Foreign Office reporting his observations (S. F. Bemis, The American Secretaries of State, vol.
II, 1927, p. 21; Sparks, Life, I, 424, III, 83-87, 89, 93).
Though he was but forty-two years old when he quitted his ministerial post at Paris, Morris was practically done with politics.
One son was born of this union.
Morris was active in forwarding the plans for the Erie Canal, and for many years was chairman of the canal commission.
His disgust with the rule of the Republicans at Washington drove him to unfortunate extremes in his opposition to the policies of the national government.
He denounced the Embargo, condemned the War of 1812, approved the Hartford Convention, and even advocated repudiating the national debt incurred by the war.
Perhaps this judgment is too harsh, yet it is distressing to see a man whose faith in the American Republic was so robust in the days of the Constitutional Convention and the mission to France writing to Timothy Pickering in 1814 that he would be "glad to meet with some one who could tell what has become of the union, in what it consists, and to what useful purpose it endures" (Sparks, III, 312).
He rejoiced in the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, but died two years later with his faith in the future of his own country unrevived.
[Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris, with Selections from his Correspondence (3 vols. , 1832); Anne Carey Morris (his grand-daughter), The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris (2 vols. , 1888); Theodore Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris (1888), in the American Statesmen series; H. C. Lodge, "Gouverneur Morris, " in the Atlantic Monthly, Apr. 1886, repr.
in his Hist.
and Pol.
Essays (1892); Adhémar Esmein, Gouverneur Morris, un Témoin américain de la Révolution française (Paris, 1906); Daniel Walther, Gouverneur Morris, Témoin de deux Révolutions (1932), with extensive bibliography and list of manuscript sources; Jared Sparks, The Diplomatic Correspondence of the Am.
Rev. (12 vols. , 1829 - 30); Am.
Rel. , vol.
I (1832); Max Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention (3 vols. , 1911); W. W. Spooner, Hist.
Families of America (copr.
1907); MSS.
in Washington Papers, Jefferson Papers, and William Short Papers, Lib.
of Cong. ]
Religion
Until the clash of arms at Lexington made the breach with Great Britain inevitable, Morris was a conservative.
When Washington arrived in New York with the Continental Army, after the British evacuation of Boston, the courage of the patriots in the congress and the colony was fortified; and when, three months later, Washington read the Declaration of Independence to his soldiers in Bowling Green, New York was ready to accept the responsibility of an independent state.
He thereupon transferred his citizenship to Pennsylvania and resumed the practice of law and the cultivation of polite society in the gay city of Philadelphia.
Politics
Because he refused to enlist the support of Congress for Governor Clinton and his New Yorkers in their claims to Vermont, Morris was defeated for reëlection to the Continental Congress in the autumn of 1779.
But his frankly cynical contempt for "democracy" was a poor asset for the solicitation of votes, and the large interests which he had acquired in various commercial ventures--some of them in association with Robert Morris--tempted him to forsake public life for business.
Connections
It is the interest of all men, therefore, to seek for reunion with the parent state" (Sparks, Life, I, 25).
He had purchased the family mansion at Morrisania from his elder brother and after the Convention he returned to his native state to live, but was hardly settled on the old manor when business took him to France as agent for Robert Morris to press a claim against the Farmers-General rising out of a tobacco contract (Sparks, Life, I, 265, 308).
Sister:
Anne
On Christmas day, 1809, he married Anne Carey Randolph of Virginia, sister of Thomas Mann Randolph q.v..
married:
Anne
On Christmas day, 1809, he married Anne Carey Randolph of Virginia, sister of Thomas Mann Randolph q.v..
