Sulla

Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris -- The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, by Richard Brookhiser (Free Press, 251 pp., $26)

The first question this excellent book provokes is: What has taken so long? Why has a readable life of Gouverneur Morris not appeared sooner? It is true that Theodore Roosevelt, who, like Morris, was the offspring of New York gentlefolk, produced such a life -- but that volume appeared in 1888, more than a century ago. Roosevelt was a lunatic genius; and the protective Morris family not unnaturally declined to permit even such a well-bred maniac as T.R. to review the papers of their Gouverneur. The future president was forced to improvise.

Richard Brookhiser has not improvised; and as the reader turns the delicious pages of this book he at first suspects what, by the time he has got through the Paris scenes, has acquired all the force of a settled conviction, that there is more good living, more elegant theater, and certainly more documented sexual seduction in Morris's life than in that of any other member of our republic's heroic generation. In feats of voluptuousness Morris was without a superior, perhaps without an equal; only Aaron Burr can possibly compete with him in attested gallantry in bedrooms and Parisian salons. But, unlike Burr, Morris found time, in between what he called his oblations to Venus, to write the Constitution of the United States.

The solution to the mystery of Morris's obscurity is not hard to find. Americans are not yet confident enough of their democracy -- it is, after all, only two centuries old -- to admit an alien spirit, however blithe, into their pantheon of world-historical greatness. Of course none of the Founders were democrats in the modern sense; yet many of them were sympathetic to the idea of popular rule. Morris, bred to place and power in New York, was not. His views were closer to those of his friend and fellow New Yorker, Alexander Hamilton, than they were to those of Thomas Jefferson. "Your people, sir," Hamilton once told an enthusiastic democrat, "is a great Beast."

This is not to say that Morris was a reactionary, or even a Tory. Quite the contrary: He was a patriot and a Whig. But the essence of Whiggery, for Morris, was law and order; and if he believed, too, in liberty, he believed in a decent, chartered liberty. Freedom, for Morris, was to be found in blots of ink on parchment -- in privileges and immunities enumerated in law books -- not in the whims of the mob. He had no faith in the popular will; and talk of the virtues of a democratic civilization would have seemed to him cant.

Yet Morris, as a 35-year-old lawyer and politician who had recently set up as a businessman in Philadelphia, was a delegate to the Convention that gathered in that city, in May 1787, to create a new charter for the United States. When assigned the task of putting the Convention's work into readable form, Morris not only wrote the Constitution, he also penned its most famous paragraph, the preamble: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union . . ."

How did a man of aristocratic temper -- the intimate friend of Livingstons and Jays, the de facto lord of the manor of Morrisania (as the Morris estate, in what is now the Bronx, was called) -- come to write words that will long be as memorable, in the annals of democracy, as Jefferson's Declaration of Independence? Precisely because he did not believe a word of what he wrote. Popular rule was, Morris believed, mob rule; he championed the cause of the new Constitution because he was convinced that, under the Republic's first charter -- the Articles of Confederation -- the U.S. would expire amid convulsions of popular anarchy. He was one of the movers in the Newburgh affair, a melancholy effort to use the Army to compel Congress to attend to such elementary duties of sovereignty as collecting taxes, paying veterans, and providing for the common defense.

The scheme was ill-advised; it is odd that a man who, like Morris, knew by heart the history of Sulla and Caesar should have wished to see the legions cross the river and invade the precincts of civil authority. A wiser man, General Washington, had a more instinctive understanding of the danger of thrusting battle-standards into the red faces and senatorial paunches of legislators; he quashed the conspiracy.

The 1787 Convention offered a more satisfactory means of restoring authority in the land. Law professors to this day lose sleep over the fact that the work of the Convention was illegal: The Articles of Confederation required that any amendment of its terms be approved by Congress and "confirmed by the legislatures of every state." The Philadelphia framers dispensed with this requirement, maintaining that only nine state conventions need ratify the proposed Constitution to make it the law of the land in the contracting states. Morris and his colleagues knew that in a crisis of order the scruples of lawyers must yield to the necessity of preserving authority and property.

Opponents of the Constitution cried foul. The new charter, they said, would infringe upon the liberties of the people. These "anti- federalists" described the Philadelphia Convention as a work of counter-revolution: a conspiracy of the greatest figures in the state against the commonalty. This is why, from the point of view of the Philadelphia conspirators, Morris's rhetoric was so attractive: He adroitly used popular verbiage in the effort, not to degrade, but to restore authority: "We, the people of the United States," not "We, the happy few at Philadelphia." Yet the rhetorical trick became, in time, an incontrovertible truth. Morris, always entranced by the vagaries of life, would doubtless have savored the way an exercise in the manipulation of words became, in time, the first principle of a popular republic more powerful than Rome's.

Morris subsequently left Philadelphia for France; having unwittingly written one of the grandest documents in the history of democracy, he whiled away the next decade in the golden glow of a dying aristocracy. Brookhiser's book contains what is surely one of the most luxurious accounts of the follies of Paris in the twilight of the ancien r?gime since Lytton Strachey's essays. In Paris, Morris perfected his Epicureanism in the company of degenerate noblemen and complaisant courtiers; he learned to curl his hair in paper curlers, as Lord Byron was later to do, and he made love to Talleyrand's mistress, Ad?le, Countess de Flahaut.

The countess had, apparently, a weakness for cripples: Talleyrand was lame, and Morris suffered from a double disfigurement. As a young man he had spilled boiling water on his right arm, and the severity of the scalding had left the limb permanently withered. Later he lost a leg after he was thrown from a phaeton. (A friend, attempting to console the amputee, painted the virtues of life without the leg so beguilingly that Morris supposedly replied, "I am almost tempted to part with the other.") The prodigiously ugly John Wilkes, another 18th-century rou? with a passion for politics, once said that in conversing with a pretty lady he could "talk away my face" in a matter of minutes. Morris possessed the same high charm; and having talked away the oaken peg on which he hobbled about the h?tels of Paris, he and Madame de Flahaut offered up their sacrifices (so Morris recorded in his diary) to the "Cyprian Queen," Venus; and they performed, on those lascivious altars, the "rites" of Eros. We are very far, here, from the severe neoclassicism usually associated with the founding generation; Morris had forsaken the examples of Addison's Cato and the American Cincinnatus, General Washington, for the pretty, perfumed classicism of Boucher and Fragonard.

Not long after Morris arrived in Paris the Bastille fell, and with his own eyes he witnessed the unhappy fate of M. de Foulon, one of the king's men. The head of the magistrate was paraded about "on a pike, the body dragged naked on the earth." Morris deplored the progress of the French Revolution. No gentleman could applaud the triumph of vulgar characters like Robespierre and Danton; and no sensualist could look kindly upon a movement that threatened to gibbet his own high-born girlfriends.

In 1798 Morris sailed for America and made his way back to Morrisania. There he grew old; his mind, so powerful in its prime, became tired, and gave off only intermittent light. During these intervals of mental dozing Morris propounded many stupid ideas. During the War of 1812, he was wrought to fury by the policies of the latest Virginia dynast to occupy the White House; and in his rage at James Madison, whom he accused of being either drunk or under the influence of opium, Morris advocated scrapping the Constitution he had written 25 years before and cutting the Union into pieces. At the same time, he was consumed by eagerness to see the Erie Canal dug. This was like investing in typewriters on the eve of the personal computer. Not long after the canal was finished, the railroad did for flooded ditches what Bill Gates has done for carbon paper.

These acts of folly may perhaps be accounted the harmless idiosyncrasies of a man who had outlived his age. But in casting a geometric net over Manhattan Morris did less excusable, because less easily reversible, damage. His plan called for "a vast grid of twelve parallel avenues running eight miles up the length of the island and 155 streets at right angles to them." A duller and more mechanical approach to the design of a city is difficult to conceive; and New Yorkers have paid dearly for Morris's determination to cast their souls into the proportions of gridirons.

I have only one (minor) quibble with this charming book. Brookhiser says that Morris's example is "still useful." No doubt. He goes on to say that the "Founding Fathers can show us how to live as citizens." That proposition is, in one sense, irrefutable; at the same time it seems to me excessively optimistic. The young Abraham Lincoln once said that subsequent generations of Americans could never hope to know the fullness of civic life the Founders knew. The founding generation led; the rest of us can only follow. Lincoln found this circumstance troubling: Some men, he knew, do not like to follow. Lincoln's apprehensions seem now to have been exaggerated -- no aspiring Caesar, eager to soar above what Lincoln called the "beaten path" the Founders cleared, has yet risen up to crush the Republic. But Lincoln's prophecy of a decline in civic vigor has undoubtedly been realized. For the bulk of our citizenry today who have never been in the armed forces, and have no interest in seeking public office, civic works occupy a rather smaller place in their lives than going to the movies. Certainly citizenship consumes less of our daily existence than getting our bread, attending to our families, and surfing the Internet.

What, under such conditions, does "living as citizens" mean? Does it mean anything more than casting a vote on Election Day and attending an occasional P.T.A. meeting? Morris, ever the unsentimental man, would doubtless tell us that, if we would candidly examine the obligations of citizenship today, we should find that, however exalted the word sounds, as a practical matter citizenship in our time means very little. Is the dissolution of the civic imagination a proof of the extent of our progress, or is it rather the harbinger of tragedy? On this question the oracle of Morris is silent. But on much else his example is amusing and instructive; Brookhiser has once again demonstrated his mastery of the elogy, a portrait in which all that is superfluous is banished, and in which a judicious art has yielded the essence of a life.

COPYRIGHT 2003 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group