Gouverneur Morris

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On May 8, 1775, Morris was elected to represent his family household in southern Westchester County (now Bronx County), in the New York Provincial Congress. As a member of the congress, he, along with most of his fellow delegates, concentrated on turning the colony into an independent state. However, his advocacy of independence brought him into conflict with his family, as well as with his mentor, William Smith, who had abandoned the Patriot cause when it pressed toward independence. Morris was a member of the New York State Assembly in 1777–78.

After the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the British seized New York City. Morris's mother, a Loyalist, gave his family's estate, which was across the Harlem River from Manhattan, to the British for military use.

Morris was appointed as a delegate to the Continental Congress and took his seat in Congress on 28 January 1778. He was selected to a committee in charge of coordinating reforms of the military with George Washington. After witnessing the army encamped at Valley Forge, he was so appalled by the conditions of the troops that he became the spokesman for the Continental Army in Congress and subsequently helped enact substantial reforms in its training, methods, and financing. He also signed the Articles of Confederation in 1778 and was its youngest signer.

In 1778, when the Conway Cabal was at its peak, some members of the Continental Congress attempted a no-confidence vote against George Washington. If it had succeeded, Washington would have been court-martialed and dismissed as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. Gouverneur Morris cast the decisive tie-breaking vote in favor of keeping Washington as Commander-in-Chief.

In 1779, he was defeated for re-election to Congress, largely because his advocacy of a strong central government was at odds with the decentralist views prevalent in New York. Defeated in his home state, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to work as a lawyer and merchant.

In 1780, Morris had a carriage accident in Philadelphia, and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Despite an automatic exemption from military duty because of his handicap and his service in the legislature, he joined a special "briefs" club for the protection of New York City, a forerunner of the modern New York Guard.

In Philadelphia, he was appointed assistant superintendent of finance of the United States and served under Robert Morris. He was selected as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During the Convention, he was a friend and ally of Washington and others who favored a strong central government. Morris was elected to serve on the Committee of Style and Arrangement, a committee of five (chaired by William Samuel Johnson), which drafted the final language of the proposed constitution. Catherine Drinker Bowen, in her 1966 book Miracle at Philadelphia, called Morris the committee's "amanuensis," meaning that it was his pen that was responsible for most of the draft and its final polished form.

It is said by some that Morris was "an aristocrat to the core," who believed that "there never was, nor ever will be a civilized Society without an Aristocracy." It is also alleged that he thought that common people were incapable of self-government because he feared that the poor would sell their votes to the rich and that voting should be restricted to property owners. Duff Cooper wrote of Morris that although he "had warmly espoused the cause of the colonists in the American War of Independence, he retained a cynically aristocratic view of life and a profound contempt for democratic theories."

Morris opposed admitting new western states on an equal basis with the existing eastern states for fear that the interior wilderness could not furnish "enlightened" national statesmen. Madison's summary of Morris's speech at the Convention on 11 July 1787 stated that his view "relative to the Western Country had not changed his opinion on that head. Among other objections it must be apparent they would not be able to furnish men equally enlightened, to share in the administration of our common interests." His reason given for that was regional: "The Busy haunts of men not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political Talents. If the Western people get the power into their hands they will ruin the Atlantic interests." In that fear, Morris turned out to be in the minority. Jon Elster has suggested that Morris's attempt to limit the future power of the West was a strategic move designed to limit the power of slaveholding states because Morris believed that slavery would predominate in new Western states.

At the Convention, he gave more speeches than any other delegate, a total of 173. As a matter of principle, he often vigorously defended the right of anyone to practice his chosen religion without interference, and he argued to include such language in the Constitution.

Gouverneur Morris was one of the few delegates at the Philadelphia Convention who spoke openly against domestic slavery. According to James Madison, who took notes at the Convention, Morris spoke openly against slavery on 8 August 1787 and stated that it was incongruous to say that a slave was both a man and property at the same time:

According to Madison, Morris felt that the U.S. Constitution's purpose was to protect the rights of humanity, which was incongruous with promoting slavery:

Morris went to France on business in 1789 and served as Minister Plenipotentiary to France from 1792 to 1794. His diaries during that time have become a valuable chronicle of the French Revolution and capture much of that era's turbulence and violence and document his affairs with women there. Compared to Thomas Jefferson, Morris was far more critical of the French Revolution and considerably more sympathetic to the deposed queen consort, Marie Antoinette. Commenting on her grandfather's sometimes Tory-minded outlook of the world, Anne Cary Morris stated, "His creed was rather to form the government to suit the condition, character, manners, and habits of the people. In France this opinion led him to take the monarchical view, firmly believing that a republican form of government would not suit the French character."

Morris was "the only foreign representative who remained in his post throughout the worst days of the Terror." On one occasion, when Morris "found himself the center of a hostile mob in favor of hanging him on the nearest lamppost, he unfastened his wooden leg, brandished it above his head, and proclaimed himself an American who had lost a limb fighting for liberty," upon which "[t]he mob's suspicions melted into enthusiastic cheers" (even though, as noted above, Morris had in fact lost his leg as a result of a carriage accident).

While Morris was minister, the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been an important participant in the American Revolution, was exiled from France and his family imprisoned, and Thomas Paine, another important figure, was arrested and imprisoned in France. Morris's efforts on their behalf have been criticized as desultory and insufficient. After a change of the French government and after Morris was replaced as minister, his successor, James Monroe, secured Paine's release.

He returned to the United States in 1798 and was elected in April 1800, as a Federalist, to the U.S. Senate, filling the vacancy caused by the resignation of James Watson. Morris served from May 3, 1800 to March 3, 1803 and was defeated for re-election in February 1803.

On 4 July 1806, he was elected an honorary member of the New York Society of the Cincinnati.

After leaving the Senate, he served as Chairman of the Erie Canal Commission from 1810 to 1813. The Erie Canal helped to transform New York City into a financial capital, the possibilities of which were apparent to Morris when he said that "the proudest empire in Europe is but a bubble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries, perhaps of one."

He was one of the three men who drew up the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out the Manhattan street grid.

Morris's final public act was to support the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812. He even pushed for secession to create a separate New York-New England Confederation because he saw the war as a result of slaveholders, who wanted to expand their territory. In the words of the biographer Richard Brookhiser “The man who wrote the Constitution judged it to be a failure and was willing to scrap it.”

Morris was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1814.

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