Gouverneur Morris
An Independent Life
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
A plainspoken, racy patrician who distrusted democracy but opposed slavery and championed freedom for all minorities, an important player in the American Revolution, later an astute critic of the French Revolution, Gouverneur Morris remains an enigma among the founding generation. This comprehensive, engrossing biography tells his robust story, including his celebrated love affairs during his long stay in Europe.
Morris’s public record is astonishing. One of the leading figures of the Constitutional Convention, he put the Constitution in its final version, including its opening Preamble. As Washington’s first minister to Paris, he became America’s most effective representative in France. A successful, international entrepreneur, he understood the dynamics of commerce in the modern world. Frankly cosmopolitan, he embraced city life as a creative center of civilization and had a central role in the building of the Erie Canal and in laying out the urban grid plan of Manhattan.
William Howard Adams describes Morris’s many contributions, talents, sophistication, and wit, as well as his romantic liaisons, free habits, and free speech. He brings to life a fascinating man of great stature, a founding father who receives his due at last.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Richard Brookhiser's just-published biography of Gouverneur Morris (Forecasts, Mar. 24), he makes the man appealing. Adams (The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson) goes further: he makes Morris significant in a more searching, thorough and authoritative work. Morris was a man "unapologetically comfortable with himself" who stepped onto the political stage in 1775, a rare urbanite among the nation's founders, an early opponent of slavery and champion of religious tolerance. Wielding one of the great pens of his era and matching in edgy brilliance perhaps only Alexander Hamilton, he helped write New York's first constitution, made substantive contributions to the Constitution of 1787 (centrally shaping the American presidency, drafting the epochal preamble and styling the whole document) and served as ambassador to Britain and then France during the tumultuous early years of the French Revolution. Back in the U.S., he helped lay out New York City's grid system and influentially promoted the Erie Canal. Because of Morris's involvement in so much, Adams's book is really half a history of an entire epoch, and yet it never loses its focus on Morris. Unlike Brookhiser, who strains to make Morris attractive as a generous-spirited "rake," Adams allows Morris's nature to emerge from his hugely significant acts. The result is a compelling portrait of an admirable conservative who today would be brought down by his nonideological approach to issues if not by his stylish philandering. This full, sympathetic, engrossing yet clear-eyed biography of a near-great forgotten founder, a work whose graceful prose only enhances its deep scholarship, will now be the standard biography of its subject.
