Caleb Bryan
“We the People of the United States,” the opening phrase of the U.S. Constitution, is well known to many Americans who have sat through an eighth-grade civics class or a high school government course. What is rarely known is the brilliant and controversial man who penned the iconic phrase and Preamble to the world’s longest-living (amended) constitution. Gouverneur Morris, the often overlooked but significant figure, is the one who wrote this opening phrase. If you examine Barry Faulkner’s painting, “The Constitution,” painted in 1936, and scan to the right of George Washington (center), you will discover the peg-legged man, Gouverneur Morris, known as “the Penman of the Constitution.”
The American Revolution split the Morris family into loyalists and Patriots. Gouvernor’s sisters married loyalists, and his mother gave quarter to the King’s soldiers for the duration of the war. This division within the family reflected the broader societal and political tensions of the time. To the crown, the Declaration of Independence was a treasonous document, and those who signed it were guaranteed to die a traitor’s death. Despite their family’s allegiances, Gouverneur and his half-brother, Lewis, affixed their names to the Declaration, which required them to circumvent their immediate family for the entirety of the war.
The controversy over Gouverneur’s decisions, a known ladies man, continued into the post-revolutionary era. Identified as a modern-day mate poacher, the discovery of a husband’s wife having an affair with Gouverneur led to an injury, giving Morris his peg leg. His injury would not slow down his tryst escapades with married women.
Good friend, Federalist Paper author and first Chief Justice to the Supreme Court John Jay, once said that he “had wished Morris would have lost something else” instead of his leg. If it weren’t for these controversies, Gouverneur Morris would be as well-known as other Constitutional Convention signers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Compared to Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs, we cannot dismiss that the Clinton presidency (from 1998 to 2001) was the last to run a budget surplus since 1970. Though I do not condone the cavalier actions of Morris, it would be unfair to dismiss his contributions to the Constitutional Convention and the document itself.
From May 1787 to September of the same year, new and returning delegates went to Philadelphia to meet in Independence Hall, where America declared its independence 11 years earlier. In the summer of 1787, Gouverneur Morris displayed the brilliance of his intellect and pen. As the most garrulous orator of the convention, he delivered 173 speeches, 12 more than “The Father of the Constitution,” James Madison. One of his highly esteemed speeches was entitled, “The Cruelty of Slavery,” where he claimed that slavery is “in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages.” In layperson’s terms, slavery is going to divide the nation in the most cruel of ways.
A Civil War that killed more Americans than World War I and World War II combined hallmarks Morris’s sentiment. At the Constitutional Convention, Morris was instrumental in pushing through the 3/5ths Compromise (I will speak more on this in a future article), ultimately recognizing an enslaved person as 3/5ths of a person. Furthermore, he assisted the Connecticut delegates with the Great Compromise that laid out the current structure of our Congress (also to be discussed in a future article). These pivotal compromises that allowed our Constitution to seek ratification from the states did not earn Gouverneur Morris the title “Penman of the Constitution.”
The original draft of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution went as follows: “We the people of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and our Posterity.”
On the Committee of Style, Morris used his eloquent pen to shift the ideology of a collection of states to a unified nation of people by rewriting the Preamble to its current form. If the delegates adopted the language of the original draft, it could give preferential treatment to the original 13 states and diminish the value and importance of the subsequent states in the coming centuries. The phrase “We the People of the United States” supersedes the ideology of “We the States” or “We the Party.” “We the People of the United States” is tailor-made for our nation’s motto: E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One,” and we can thank a mate poaching, peg-legged, patriot-abolitionist for bringing ideology of unity to fruition.
Caleb Bryan is a resident of Callahan and teaches Advanced Placement U.S. History, Government and Macroeconomics at West Nassau High School.