Who was Gouverneur Morris?

0:04If you're in the four following situations, and you only get one phone call and it has to be to a founding father. Here are the situations. You've just been thrown into jail. You've just been taken to the emergency room. You need $10,000 immediately. You're throwing a dinner tonight and someone has canceled at the last minute.

0:35Who are you going to call of all the founding fathers? I would say, you would call Gouverneur Morris in all those situations. He would come to jail and he would pay your bail. He did that intervention to protect friends during the French Revolution. He would come to the emergency room and give you intelligent, sympathetic medical advice.

1:00This was a man who lost a leg in a carriage accident. He knew what physical pain and suffering was like and he was very good about it. He would loan you the $10,000. He might not ask you to pay it back. He also did that to held up friends during the French Revolution.

1:21He'd be your best dinner guest ever. Just don't sit him next to your wife. He was from a very fancy New York family. His grandfather had been a colonial governor, and his uncle had been also a deputy colonial governor. He was used to politics, he was used to power.

1:43He was used to it from the top growing up. When the revolution begins, he's an enthusiastic patriot. He's chosen by New York to go to the Continental Congress. I should say that his family's politically divided. He had one half brother who signed the Declaration of Independence, and another who was a general in the British Army, and his mother is a loyalist throughout the war.

2:09He knows the stress and the sorrow that the war caused a lot of Americans. He's a zealous patriot. He goes to Philadelphia to serve in the Continental Congress. Then he stays there to assist Robert Morris, who's the financier, who's trying to pay for the whole revolution, he's his right-hand man throughout the war.

2:33Then in 1787, when Pennsylvania is picking delegates to go to the constitutional convention, they pick him, even though he's not a native born citizen, but he's been there for a number of years and made a good impression. He attends the Constitutional Convention.

2:51He speaks more than any other delegate, even though he misses an entire month. He's a very active, valuable member. A lot of his speeches are very intelligent, very sharp, very useful. He's also not afraid of mixing it up. When the question of how should slaves be counted in the representation of the House of Representatives and therefore the Electoral College, when that comes up he's absolutely opposed to it.

3:23He says, "Are these men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Then why aren't we counting other property like land, and houses, whatnot." He just says that it's offensive to have a government that is supposed to protect the rights of mankind giving power to slave owners and slave drivers.

3:48To people who go to Africa and tear people away from their families and bring them into bondage, and he loses on that. He is a supporter of executive power. He is also a supporter of national greatness. He says, we've been arguing about the role of the states, no one is talking about the future greatness of this country.

4:10Those are the things that inspire him and stir him. There was recently a very interesting essay by Bill Treanor, who's dean of the Georgetown University Law School. He argues, Morris is put on the committee of style of the Constitutional Convention, whose job is to take all the resolutions that have been passed at the end and to write the document.

4:37There are five members of the committee of style and they give Morris the job. The pros that we have is from Morris's pen. Now, obviously he's working with a lot of resolutions that have been passed, but he tightens them, he smooths them, he writes the preamble out of his own head.

4:55He is really the draftsman, the penman of the constitution and Bill Treanor has argued that he really tweaked it in doing this. He made little tweaks and changes. He was acting like a baseball pitching machine, sending slow, fat ones down the strike zone for team federalist to head out of the park.

5:22This would be President Washington, treasury secretary Hamilton, Chief Justice John Marshall. These were men who were all friends of his, who all saw the Constitution and the country in a similar way.