GOUVERNEUR MORRIS by Theodore Roosevelt

The man who drafted the US Constitution

Gouverneur Morris wrote the Constitution of the United States with Madison and is properly known as it’s father.  Born into a wealthy household, he slowly and reluctantly joined the American Revolution and became close friends with the father of his country, George Washington.  Another great American, Theodore Roosevelt,  contributed not only political leadership but also a number of important books, this biography being one of the most pertinent.

Gouverneur Morris, like his far greater friend and political associate,
Alexander Hamilton, had about him that “touch of the purple” which is
always so strongly attractive. He was too unstable and erratic to leave a
profound mark upon our political developments, but he performed two
or three conspicuous feats, he rendered several marked services to the
country, and he embodied to a peculiar degree both the qualities which
made the Federalist party so brilliant and so useful, and those other
qualities which finally brought about its downfall.Hamilton and even Jay
represented better what was highest in the Federalist party. Gouverneur
Morris stood for its weakness as well as for its strength.Able, fearless, and
cultivated, deeply devoted to his people, and of much too tough fibre ever
to be misled into losing his affection for things American because of
American faults and shortcomings, as was and is the case with weaker
natures, he was able to render distinguished service to his country. Other
American ministers have been greater and more successful diplomats
than Morris was; but no one has better represented those qualities of
generous daring and lofty disinterestedness which we like to associate
with the name American, than did the minister who, alone among the
foreign ministers, kept his residence in Paris through the “Terror.” He
stood for order. He stood for the honest payment of debts. Unlike many
of his colleagues, he was a polished man of the world, whose comments
on men and things showed that curious insight and power of observation
which come only when to natural ability there is added special training.
But he distrusted the mass of the people, and especially the mass of the
people in other sections of the country than his own, who had not the
habits of refinement and the ways of looking at life which he and his
associates possessed; and thus it happened that,when the Federalists sank
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into a secessionist faction, the name of Gouverneur Morris was
associated with the names of the others who at that time lacked the
power, but not the will, to split a great nation into a chaos of feeble and
quarrelsome little States.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.