Signing Their Rights Away Read online

  In 1798, probably after his release from one of those prisons, an on-the-run Wilson hid in a decrepit North Carolina tavern, where he was discovered by his wife, thirty years his junior and younger than some of his own grown children. Sick with malaria, he initially recovered but then suffered a stroke. Fellow justice James Iredell took pity on the couple and offered them shelter at his home in Edenton, North Carolina. (That house is now open to the public.) There, Wilson’s mind finally snapped. He mumbled deliriously about arrest and bankruptcy before dying, close to his fifty-sixth birthday. He was buried at a nearby plantation. In 1906, his bones were moved just outside the walls of Christ Church in Philadelphia.

  The Playboy with the Wooden Leg

  BORN: January 31, 1752

  DIED: November 6, 1816

  AGE AT SIGNING: 35

  PROFESSION: Lawyer, merchant

  BURIED: St Anne’s Episcopal Churchyard, Bronx, New York

  If you can quote from memory just one line of the Constitution, chances are it’s the famous opening written by Gouverneur Morris. A playboy with a gift for both gab and gallivanting, Morris was born at Morrisania, a spectacular estate named for his family (his mouthful of a moniker comes from his mother’s maiden name) in what was then Westchester County, now the heart of the Bronx, New York. His family was one of the wealthiest and most influential in New York; his half-brother Lewis was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Morris had every advantage, and then some: tutors when he was young, a stint at the Academy of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania, established by that city’s patron saint, Ben Franklin), and a degree at King’s College (now Columbia University). He was a great student, sure, but more notably he loved to write and had a way with words, whether spoken or written. The former of these gifts would earn him a reputation as someone whose tongue sometimes got away from him. The latter would give the Constitution its preamble, some of the most stirring language in the entire document.

  Morris studied law in New York and then set up shop. Despite his money, connections, and some loyalist relatives to boot, Morris was a Whig, albeit a conservative one. He entered New York politics in 1775 and, in 1776, helped write that state’s constitution, along with future chief justice John Jay and Robert R. Livingston. Throughout his life, Morris made speeches that were notable, if far from subtle: “Trust crocodiles, trust the hungry wolf in your flock, or a rattlesnake in your bosom—you may yet be something wise. But trust the King, his ministers, his commissioners—it is madness in the extreme!”

  In a somewhat strange move for someone of his social and financial position, Morris took up with the New York militia. In 1777, he was a member of his city’s Council of Safety, a wartime civilian watchdog group, and worked in the state legislature. He was a natural to attend the Continental Congress, and did so in 1778. He was immediately sent off to Valley Forge to check on how things were going with Washington and was gob-smacked at what he found there, describing to Congress the “naked, starving condition” of the army.

  Morris did not mince words, whether on the floor of Congress or in the presence of ladies of a variety of reputations. But this talent did not always work to his advantage. In 1779, he was not reelected to Congress because of his disparaging comments about New York governor George Clinton, a known patriot and friend of Washington. Morris decided to remain in Philadelphia to work as a lawyer and merchant. He soon fell in with another wealthy and well-connected colleague who shared his surname—Robert Morris—signer of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

  The Morris–Morris friendship was a fruitful one. When Robert Morris was appointed the nation’s superintendent of finance in 1781, he made Gouverneur his assistant, and the two worked together until 1785. Their alliance produced the charter for the country’s first bank, the Bank of North America, a model upon which Alexander Hamilton likely based the first Bank of the United States. Gouverneur Morris suggested the decimal-based money system and offered the word cent in place of the oh-so-British term penny (although penny has hardly been eradicated from the modern American-English lexicon). But the nation found his system too complicated and switched to one suggested by Thomas Jefferson a few years later.

  Morris’s big moment came in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, which he attended as part of the Pennsylvania delegation. That was where he shined. He was there at the very start but then was called away to New York for a month. Despite this absence, he made more speeches than any other delegate, a whopping 173. His presence was powerful and hard to miss. “Mr. Governeur Morris … winds through all the mazes of rhetoric, and throws around him such a glare that he charms, captivates, and leads away the senses of all who hear him,” wrote Georgia delegate William Pierce. “With an infinite stretch of fancy he brings to view things when he is engaged in deep argumentation, that render all the labor of reasoning easy and pleasing.… This Gentleman … has been unfortunate in losing one of his Legs, and getting all the flesh taken off his right arm by a scald, when a youth.”

  The leg incident to which Pierce refers was the result of a carriage accident that injured Morris’s leg. Nowadays, such an incident would result in a little surgery and eight weeks in a cast—but the founding fathers didn’t have the luxury of modern medical technologies. Morris’s accident occurred out of town and far from his fancy Philadelphia physician. The limb was removed and he was fitted with a wooden leg that the six-foot-tall Morris wore for the rest of his life. When he returned home to Philadelphia, his personal physician said the leg probably could have been saved. Regardless, the injury apparently did not dampen his extracurricular activities. A popular rumor held that Morris—a bachelor with a reputation for being a bit of playboy—had in fact lost his leg while leaping from a window to escape an angry husband who caught Morris attempting “a great compromise” with the man’s wife.

  At the convention, Morris was among the large-state nationalists favoring the Virginia Plan, and he believed that taxes should be paid in proportion to a state’s population (that is, the bigger the population, the higher the taxes the state should pay). He did not want the president to be chosen by Congress, but rather by citizens. (Yet, to this day, the Electoral College remains one of the most contested and, for many, annoyingly outdated, vestigial organs of the Constitutional Convention.)

  Morris was also one of the most frequent and forceful—if not the most forceful—voices against slavery, referring to it as “the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed.” In addition, he proposed the idea of a presidential cabinet, calling it the “Council of State,” and served on a couple committees. While John Rutledge and the rest of the Committee of Detail were working to roll all the ideas proposed at the convention into some sort of workable first draft, the other delegates took a break. Morris traveled with George Washington and others to Valley Forge, where they reminisced about the old days and fished for trout.

  So on September 8, 1787, as everyone was hoping to wrap up the convention, they took a look at the draft created by Rutledge’s team. The content got a pass, but it was agreed that the prose was lacking. Enter the Committee of Style and Arrangement, charged with polishing the draft. The chairman of this committee was Connecticut’s William Samuel Johnson, whose team included Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King, and Morris. Many claimed that Morris was to the Committee of Style what Jefferson was to the Committee of Five, which drew up the Declaration of Independence; as Madison himself later wrote, “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution, fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.”

  His pen gave the United States the beautiful, most oft-quoted words of the Constitution, the Preamble: “We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

  U
pon completion, the stylized version was presented to the convention, edits were made, and an engrossed copy (read: fancy paper, fancy penmanship) of the Constitution was ordered from Jacob Shallus, a clerk working in the State House (see “The Penman of the Constitution”).

  On September 17, the chips were down. Franklin called for unanimous acceptance of the completed document. Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, who had stayed to the bitter end of the convention, said he couldn’t do it—there was no way nine states would ratify what the men had created, and he left without signing. According to Madison’s notes, Morris responded that, sure, the document wasn’t perfect, but it was “the best that could be attained.” He later wrote to John Dickinson: “In adopting a republican form of government, I not only took it as a man does his wife, for better or worse, but what few men do with their wives: I took it knowing all its bad qualities.” The time had come to decide whether there would be a national government. If not, chaos would reign. “The moment this plan goes forth all other considerations will be laid aside—and the great question will be, shall there be a national Government or not?”

  After ratification, Morris traveled to France and England. In 1792, Washington officially appointed him the U.S. Minister, or ambassador, to France, replacing Thomas Jefferson. While in that country, Morris witnessed the French Revolution, which he described in his diaries and letters. Morris was replaced in 1794 by James Monroe, but he stayed in Europe for travel, business, and, hey, let’s be frank—probably the company of some lovely French ladies. His diary entries from that period are at once salacious and sublime. He recounts steamy encounters with numerous women—married and single, old and young, sisters—in passageways, carriages, even a Parisian convent. Some of the entries read like a modern-day bodice-ripper: “She had the remains of a fine form and a countenance open and expressive … but they were wearing fast away. Neither had nature quite lost her empire, for the tints, which love in retiring to the heart had shed over her countenance, were slightly tinged with desire. I thought I could, in a single look, read half her history.” Ooh-la-la! Morris even set his sights on Dolley Madison (wife of fellow signer James Madison) and at one point writes in his diary of seeing her in a low-cut dress and wondering if she is “amenable to seduction.”

  When Morris returned to the United States, he moved into Morrisania, his family’s vast estate. He was a senator for the state of New York in 1800, serving until 1803. A staunch Federalist, he campaigned in favor of John Adams and against Thomas Jefferson in the testy election of 1800. He feared mob rule and thought government posts should be reserved for those with money and family clout.

  As he aged, Morris suffered from gout and other ailments, but the peg-legged playboy still had a few tricks up his sleeves. On Christmas Day 1809, he shocked his family and friends by announcing that he was getting married—and then called in a preacher and his fiancée and got hitched on the spot! His bride was Anne “Nancy” Cary Randolph, a woman with a checkered past from a prominent Virginia family. At age eighteen, she had given birth to the baby of her brother-in-law Richard, who was later charged with murdering the child. The great patriot Patrick Henry defended the pair, and they were acquitted. But the scandal ruined Anne’s reputation as well as her chances of landing a husband, and so she fled north, where she eventually ended up working as a housekeeper in Morris’s house. Their marriage was apparently a happy one. They had a son, who was burdened with his father’s name—Gouverneur II—but was bolstered by his father’s wealth. Morris had become a dad at sixty-one.

  In the last years of his life, Morris worked on the Erie Canal and became president of the New-York Historical Society. (His wooden leg is on display there, in the same case as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio brace.) Just three years after the birth of his son, Morris died at Morrisania in the same room in which he was born. His grave can be visited today, an underground vault under an oasis of green in the urban sprawl of the Bronx.

  VII. Delaware

  The Signer Who Signed Twice

  BORN: September 18, 1733

  DIED: September 21, 1798

  AGE AT SIGNING: 53

  PROFESSION: Lawyer

  BURIED: Immanuel Episcopal Churchyard, New Castle, Delaware

  George Read is one of only six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and, on both occasions, he was something of an exception. When he put his pen to the Declaration, he was the only signer who had voted against independence on July 2, 1776. And when he signed the Constitution, he did so twice—the first time for himself, and the second for a friend.

  Born in Maryland, Read and his family moved to Delaware when he was a child. He later journeyed to nearby Philadelphia to study law in the office of John Moland, the same office in which his friend and fellow signer John Dickinson learned his trade. Eventually Read knew enough to set out on his own, and he opened his own practice in New Castle, Delaware. There he married Gertrude Ross Till, the widowed sister of soon-to-be fellow Declaration signer George Ross, and the couple got to work making their family of five children. Read was a stand-up guy, by all accounts, and in 1763 was working for the Crown as attorney general of the Three Lower Counties, as Delaware was then known. But in 1765, his role in public life changed. That was the year of the Stamp Tax, the notorious British levy on all paper documents and products, which Read protested. He resigned his post as attorney general and became a member of the Delaware legislature.

  When Read attended the first and second Continental Congresses, he wasn’t your typical tar-and-feather patriot. Yes, he was against the taxes the British kept lobbing across the pond. And yes, he was all for punitively reducing British goods. He even raised money to help Boston citizens when they were reeling from the closing of their port (punishment for the famous Tea Party). But like his friend and fellow signer John Dickinson, Read desired neither war nor independence—at least not yet. On the contrary, Read hoped that the colonies and Mother England would find some way to kiss and make up.

  Alas, that was not to be. But Read, a principled kind of guy, voted his conscience on July 2, 1776. And his conscience said no—the colonies should not break with Britain. It was a unique position: there were plenty of waffling congressmen who abstained from the vote or who abstained and later signed it. Read was alone in that he voted “no” and then proceeded to sign the treasonous Declaration of Independence anyway. (Years later, Read’s grandson wrote a book attempting to explain his grandpa’s motivation. Simply put, Read thought that taking on the Crown was too risky; Britain was a world superpower, and the colonies barely had enough money to buy ammunition for their small, inexperienced military. Hard to argue with that.)

  But the majority had spoken, and Read respected their wishes—he signed the Declaration along with the rest of them. Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway said Read did so “with a rope about his neck.” Read quipped, “I know the risk, and am prepared for all consequences.”

  He supported the war effort wholeheartedly. Back in Delaware, he chaired the committee to draft the Delaware Constitution and was also vice president (assistant governor) of the state. Along the way, he experienced an up-close-and-personal scare at the hands of the enemy. When Governor John McKinly was captured by the British, assistant governor Read was called to take over. While heading south from Philadelphia with his family, Read attempted to cross the Delaware River, but their small boat ran aground in sight of a British ship. When the Redcoats descended, quick-thinking Read told them he was just a local guy taking his wife and kids home. The soldiers believed the ruse and even helped the treasonous colonial governor to shore.

  Read served until 1778, and shortly after his health began to decline. He resigned from his public activities for a spell but returned in 1782 as a judge of the court of appeals in admiralty cases. When the Annapolis Convention came around, Read was there. He didn’t want the Articles of Confederation to be altered; he wanted them scrapped, period. Anything less, Madison qu
oted him as saying, “would be like putting new cloth on an old garment.”

  Read brought this same passion to the Constitutional Convention, where he was a major force for the rights of small states. Since Rhode Island played hooky at the gathering, Read and the other Delaware delegates were representing the smallest state. Although he was a straightforward man who believed in speaking his mind, he was not exactly celebrated for his off-the-cuff speaking skills. Still, anyone who underestimated Read didn’t do so for long. He was a respected delegate, one of the few who had also signed the Declaration of Independence, and his distrust of large states had been brewing for a long time. He’d had a hand in shaping Delaware’s instructions for the convention delegates, which included a mandate not to give up the “one state, one vote” right that had been in the Articles of Confederation. So when Madison proposed, and Gouverneur Morris seconded, the idea of representation based on population, Read told them to table the conversation or Delaware would “retire from the Convention.” It was only May 30, just two weeks into the proceedings, and already a small state was threatening to hit the road. Read’s wishes were respected, and the representation discussion was postponed.

  Read said he favored the United States “doing away with the states altogether, and uniting them all into one society.” So, like New Jersey’s David Brearley, he was ready to erase boundaries and redraw the national map. Read had equally strong feelings about paper money and was vehemently opposed to giving Congress the power to “emit bills,” or print paper money. Read said those words had to go, and, if they did not, it “would be as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelations.” His point: paper money was intrinsically worthless. Why should one man’s paper money be valued the same as another man’s gold? The line was removed.