Word: gouverneur
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...contraband and sailors it defined as British deserters. But America had its own imperial dreams: the war's supporters were nicknamed war hawks because of their constant birdlike calls for "Canada, Canada, Canada." Former President Jefferson thought conquering Canada would be "a mere matter of marching." Federalists were appalled. Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged ladies' man who had drafted the Constitution, declared that a war of choice fought for such reasons was "founded in moral wrong"; anyone who supported it would be guilty of "impiety...
...book's subtitle comes from a 1790 letter written by Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia who in 1792 would become the U.S. minister to France. The French, he noted, "have taken Genius instead of Reason for their Guide, adopted Experiment instead of Experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer Lightning to Light." Morris' remark underscores a growing rift between the two nations on the matter of the proper way to run a revolution...
...think it of very great importance," wrote Gouverneur Morris to George Washington in 1790, advising him on how to furnish the presidential mansion, "to fix the taste of our country properly...everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure." Modern Americans are taught to love luxury, to think of it as a reward for success. Those of the late 18th century were more apt to distrust it as a vice. They associated it with frivolity, decadence--colonial rule. Virtue showed itself in plainness, explicitness, pragmatism, "making do," an unfussed directness of craftsmanship. There...
Although they were not supposed to change the substance of what the convention had so far decided, it was hardly accidental that all five were strong-government advocates, and that one of them was Madison. The actual writer was Gouverneur Morris, a one-legged but rather rakish Philadelphian who boasted what he liked to consider a muscular prose style. And prose styles do have an effect. The convention had given the committee a draft that began: "We the undersigned delegates of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay" and so on. Morris rewrote that so it began: "We, the People...
...territories that stretched from Maine to Georgia, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. Armed with their own quill pens, the 650 census takers of 1790 spent 18 months counting the American people. The total: 3,929,214. President George Washington, however suspected an undercount. In a letter to Gouverneur Morris, then U.S. Commissioner to Great Britain, Washington worried about the "indolence of the mass, and want of activity" by many census takers. Proof of this thesis: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was in charge of the tally, had to sign his own name to the list of citizens...