Gouverneur Morris

Theodore Roosevelt's lively introduction announces a biography determined to rescue Gouverneur Morris from solemn, flattening historians and restore his wit, force, and political brilliance. From Morris's 1752 birth at Morrisania, the book traces a restless heir to a powerful New York family whose Dutch-American and Huguenot roots helped shape his originality, ambition, and sharp social intelligence. As a young man of modest means, he turns to law with practical self-confidence, then rises through the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, diplomacy, and later Senate politics. Roosevelt presents Morris as a perceptive outsider everywhere he goes: in Paris salons he delights in the sparkle of society while seeing through its vanity, and in correspondence with Washington, Paul Jones, and others he offers blunt, useful counsel marked by dry humor and realism. His political instincts are repeatedly tested by the French Revolution and by the hidden machinery of salon politics, especially around Madame de Staël and Madame de Flahaut. Though proud, reckless, and sometimes unreliable, Morris emerges as fearless, honest, and indispensable to independence, the Constitution, finance, the Erie Canal, and America's standing in France. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.