#1604 Ten Things about Gouverneur Morris

His leg was crushed, either jumping out of a window or it had something to do with the carriage. And this became a kind of a badge of honor for him, if you can imagine. And it didn't slow him down. He was in Europe for about a decade. In fact, he followed Jefferson as the minister to France.

He still was wildly successful with women of all classes. And he writes in his voluminous diaries as if he were James Boswell. And if you've never read Boswell's journals, they're amongst the most, I don't know, sexed-up escapades that we have from anyone's journals except the work of Casanova. So, Gouverneur Morris, also the penman of the Constitution. He wrote the famous preamble to the Constitution.

He was a friend to Alexander Hamilton and gave the eulogy after Hamilton's unfortunate death in 1804 on the dueling grounds of New Jersey.

A founding father that deserves to be much better known. And so this is a program about that. And a few weeks ago, Lindsay got an email from a listener by the name of Rebecca Flint and she said that she had been listening to a Hamilton program and had some thoughts about the famous Mariah Reynolds scandal. But she also knows a good deal, a great deal, about the events at Bizarre, you know, the love triangle between Nancy Randolph and Richard Randolph and John Randolph of Roanoke and her pregnancy, and either the abortion or the infanticide or the stillbirth, or whatever it was, and the scandal that came out of all of this. Jefferson's daughter Patsy was peripherally involved and devastated by the shame of all of this and maybe had a role in it.

Well, you can hear that in the program too. It's fascinating material. So Lindsay and I asked Rebecca to come on and she was on for the second segment and for a little bit at the end of the third segment of this really, really interesting program, one of my favorites, about Gouverneur Morris.

It's amazing that he isn't better known.

I've got a couple of biographies of him, but I'm going to now get his diary. Unfortunately, they're extremely expensive, but it sounds like if you're interested in this era, and I am deeply, deeply interested in James Boswell, who wrote the magisterial biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, maybe the best biography ever written, and a similar man about town, let's call it. Lots of alcohol, lots of women, lots of intrigue and some scandal. So this is really strange, and, as I say in the program, the best named plantation in history is Bizarre, which was the actual name of the plantation where this scandal began to unfold.

Thomas Jefferson then, when his daughter was just overwhelmed. with shame that she was even related to such people,

said to her, at no point does this woman need your support. This is Anne, Nancy Randolph, the woman whose baby was either aborted or still born. At no point does she need friendship more than now. You need to step up. Yes, it's no fun, and yes, you're ashamed, but it's not about you.

Poor Nancy, poor Anne, is now alone in the universe, and you must rise to the occasion of reaching out to her and comforting her. Jefferson believed that Richard was the culprit, and that he was fully to blame for seducing her or preying upon her in some way or other in order to get her pregnant. So it's one of the handful of the greatest letters Jefferson ever wrote. You can see it in any edition of Jefferson's works. So let's go to the program.

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Hello everyone, and welcome to Listening to America. I have the pleasure of sitting virtually across from my friend, Dr. Lindsay Churbinsky. Today's subject, 10 Things About Gouverneur Morris. Now, Gouverneur Morris was not a governor.

That's just an interesting sort of weird pun of names. in the 18th and early 19th century. He was a big figure at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, maybe the closest friend of Alexander Hamilton, a good friend of George Washington, an American diplomat abroad, a man about town, a kind of a playboy, a brilliant prose stylist, and much more. Welcome, Lindsay.

I no longer ask him to do that, but initially I did.

He's utterly fascinating. He's quite important. He's at many of the most important incidents and events of this era. Why has he been ignored as much as he has?

He did spend much of the 1790s abroad, and we are not, as Americans, as generally familiar with our foreign policy history as we are with our domestic history. I think his later life also maybe put him in a little bit of ill repute. He turned away from Congress. He didn't want to serve after 1800 because he felt like Congress was kind of miserable. And although he was supportive of Jefferson's acquisition of Louisiana, he later then was very, very much against the War of 1812 and was supportive of the idea of secession and the Hartford Convention.

And so that's not a great legacy. And a lot of the people who were involved with that have not been particularly celebrated.

So we don't know the full details, but it's pretty colorful stuff. Let's put it that way. What most people know about him, Lindsay, who know anything about him, is that he had a peg leg, that he'd had an amputation. And the story has always been that he said that he got it by trying to escape from a carriage when an angry husband was trying to attack him, and that his leg somehow got caught and got infected and it had to be amputated. Is that true?

And how do we know?

What do you know about this?

At the Constitutional Convention, he was pretty vehemently anti-slavery. in a way, few people were. I think this is important because we often talk about the context of the time. Just for understanding the proper context, his ideas about slavery came up, especially in regards to the Three-Fifths Clause. This was the compromise that counted five Black Americans as three Americans for the purposes of apportioning population for representation in Congress and in the Electoral College.

What he said was he could, either, when he was trying to figure out how to work with the South on this, he said he was reduced to the dilemma of doing injustice to the Southern states or to human nature, and he must therefore do it to the former. When they were debating this Three-Fifths Clause, this language is so unbelievably, remarkably modern, and so I think it's worth hearing. He said, upon what principle. is it that the slaves should be computed in the representation? Are they men?

Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is no other property included? The houses in this city, meaning Philadelphia, are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the rice swamps of.

So just after the part that you read, he says, the admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this, that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, 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 bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizens of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice. He goes on, I would add that domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution. So not only does it perpetuate slavery, which is in direct violation of everything that the American Republic is supposed to represent, but it also brings in an aristocratic feature, as if certain people, southern whites, have special status under our social compact. That's an amazing speech, and I will always think well of him.

It was this ingrained economic hierarchy that smacked of the British system that.

So he gave 173 speeches that summer. Perhaps he made his most impactful long-term contribution, which was changing the opening from we, the states, and enlisting the states to we, the people of the United States. It became a constitution for the.

Touch him and say, hi, buddy. Hi, pal, type of concept. Not that language, obviously. That's 21st century language. But a very informal greeting.

And apparently, Gouverneur Morris took this bet and agreed to go up and do it. And when he had his hand on Washington's back, Washington just turned and looked at him and said nothing and had a complete stone face, which he was pretty good at. And Gouverneur Morris slowly withdrew his hand and walked away. And it must have been one of the most awkward moments, because it didn't go over very well. I love this story.

It says a lot about.

I do too. And one way that I've.

I mean,

Nobody did. And he played it a little more in tune with the old monarchical habits than people like Mr. Jefferson could stand. I give Washington.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. Lindsay, we have a special guest, somebody who is a long-term listener to our programs, who knows something about this subject.

And we thought it would be interesting to have her come on and talk a little bit about Anne, also known as Nancy Randolph Morris, and give a little bit about her life. We talked briefly about Nancy when we did the John Randolph episode. We talked about the scandal at Bazaar. But so first, Rebecca, welcome. Thank you for.

And as soon as she married him, she began signing her letters. Anne Morris, Anne Carey Morris. Yeah, that's interesting.

The baby did not survive. in some fashion. There was evidence that the baby had been placed outside. It became a very scandalous trial. She was acquitted of wrongdoing.

And it had a connection to Jefferson, because his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, testified at the trial. How is that summary in?

I think you said in the John Randolph episode that people were a lot less scandalous than they are now. There was some pretty crazy stuff going on. So she was the daughter. She and Judith were the daughters of Thomas Mann Randolph. So their mother died when Anne and Judith were 15 and 17..

And he very quickly married Gabriella Harvey, who completely ostracized the rest of the children. And Clay can speak to this because Martha Patsy talked to her father a lot about it in letters. She proceeded to have a son, which she renamed Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., who inherited Tuckahoe, their family plantation. So she did not get along with her new stepmother, who was her age.

Her sister, who, by this time, was married to their cousin, Richard Randolph. It was a family tradition. They married cousins. And there was also another brother. there, though.

There was three brothers, and they were the sons of Francis Bland, Randolph and John Randolph. Their father died when they were very young, and she married St. George Tucker, who is a famous lawyer there in Williamsburg. He taught at William and Mary. And he was a great stepfather.

He tried. But there were three brothers. Richard was the oldest, and he married Judith at 19.. And then he had another brother, Theodoric, and then John, the youngest, John Randolph Roanoke. At some point, all of the brothers were there at Bazaar.

Now, supposedly, she was engaged to the middle brother, Theodoric. But there's some question about that. They didn't seem to announce it to anybody outside the household. They didn't seem to indicate it. At one point, John, he was in school.

I think he was at Columbia or King's College at the time. I think he was writing her letters, trying to court her. So at one point, all three brothers were after her. She writes a letter to her father and basically says, Can y'all come, get me? Can y'all send a carriage?

And Gabriella intercepts the letter and writes back, All the horses are lame. We can't come get you. So they kind of left her in this pretty awkward position with these three brothers, all of whom were pursuing her.

How does she meet him?

And he kicks her out about six years later, I think around 1800.

. He kicks her out. And she tries to contact her brothers, William and Tom Jr., but they're not super helpful. She goes to Richmond. She ends up going to Connecticut.

She ends up being kind of a companion to an older lady. And she reaches out to Gouverneur. At that time, she's in pretty desperate circumstances. Because she had met him years earlier at Tuckahoe. He had been there and stayed with Thomas Mann, Randolph at Tuckahoe during the ratification debates of the Constitution long time ago.

She had been a child. She reaches out to him. And we're not quite sure, but they begin a correspondence. At this time, he's going to be gone. But they kind of talk back and forth.

And he decides, I think he was probably pretty interested in her, but he decides that he wants to offer her a job as a housekeeper. Somebody intelligent, well-educated, but yet not marriageable. Because of the scandal and being kicked out, she just wasn't marriageable. So they begin this correspondence. It's very sweet.

And it's pretty clear he's pursuing her. It's pretty sweet. She apparently, at the beginning, tells him about the scandal. We don't know exactly the details of what she tells him, but she tells him because he says, she's told me everything. They kind of negotiate this housekeeper thing back and forth.

And it's pretty clear that she's thinking that he's got something else in mind. So he ensures her, no, I've never had a relationship with my housekeepers. I will be respectful. But it's pretty clear he is courting her. So he goes and gets her.

And Gouverneur Moores has the most wonderful diary. He writes in his diary, April of 1809, he says, brought home Miss Randolph of Virginia. So he goes and picks her up at this boarding house where she's staying with this older lady. And within six months, they're married. Very, very sweet story.

Interesting story about the marriage is Gouverneur actually reaches out to John Marshall before he asked her to marry him. Because John Marshall had been her attorney. He's wanting to know exactly. So he reaches out to John Marshall, and we still have those letters. And John Marshall writes him back very carefully, a very carefully worded letter, and says, I don't remember much about it.

You know, there didn't seem to be a lot of evidence that, you know, she'd even been pregnant. But the fact that her sister took her, continued to live with her, allow her to live with them, tells me that there was nothing to it, that she.

Do you think the child was aborted? Do you think the child was murdered? Do you think the child was stillborn? Yeah. Was the child hidden amongst a woodpile?

So I think.

They were visiting Randolph Harrison and his wife, Mary. I think this baby was born. It was dead. What to do? What to do?

And I think he runs downstairs and I think he hides it under the shingles to deal with it the next morning. I mean, not. this is where, you know, we're talking about a 21-year-old man and a 18-year-old woman. You know, it was not not the best look, but I think that's what happened. Another question I have for you is

I, oh wow, this is something I go back and forth on. John, John Randolph Roanoke, and he says it later, after she marries Gouverneur, that he, he felt like she, she poisoned him. I, I don't know. That's, that's one thing in my research. that's really, I think, personally, I think that he was poisoned.

I think the sexual relationship, I do think Richard was a for baby. By all family letters, by the time she gets pregnant, Theodoric is so sick he can't even.

And that's when we must really step up. One of the best letters that he ever wrote. But Martha testified in this celebrity trial that John Marshall, Patrick Henry, this was a celebrity trial of the century, kind of trial. I just read the other day that Martha Patsy may have given Anne a powder, that's an abortificant, that she may have supplied her with a gum that was used to cause spontaneous abortion.

Reading those, John Marshall was brilliant in terms of deposing them in a way they all knew, they all knew. Deposing them in a way that they didn't perjure themselves. He was super careful. Martha's testimony, Patsy's testimony, was really interesting because he says, did you give her this medicine? They talked about it.

And he said, I sent it to her in a small amount. And then he asked her, did you anticipate that this would be the result? And she said, no, I've known of pregnant women to be given this without any mischief at all. She also said in the deposition notes that she did suspect that Nancy was pregnant. I don't think they talked.

So she winds up in New York City. Gouverneur Morris had met her earlier. He then plucks her out of this reduced circumstance, as he likes to call it, and she becomes his housekeeper. But soon enough, they get married. Lindsay and I were talking about this before you came on.

I'm a little creeped out by this story, Rebecca. It feels like he's a predator picking a woman who's fallen and therefore much more available than she would be if she were a gentle woman. Am I misreading?

I think she was a very vivacious, very chatty person. I think he really liked her. I do. I think he was actively pursuing her. I think the only way that he felt like, I think he wanted to help her.

I feel like the only way because she was still a Randolph. She was still a gentle woman, as he puts it, even if she was reduced. I don't think that she would be willing to go into his household or become his mistress without a marriage. That was the way he did it. I mean, that's the way I read it.

I don't know.

I know you're going to rebuke me for that.

And so credit to her for securing the outcome that made her respectable. We have to remember, this is 18th century society. And you and I have talked a lot about the parallels to Jane Austen, but securing that honorable end is half the battle, more than.

Fine. But everyone should read Oliver Goldsmith's great play, She Stoops to Conquer, which is about this very phenomenon. At any rate, they get married. They do. Let's fast forward here, Rebecca.

John Randolph, the famous John Randolph of Roanoke, eventually then does everything he can to destroy them and their reputation.

What was it about? What did he have to have from her? He had nephews that were very suspicious of Nancy. And I think that was to prove to them that she wasn't after his money. But yeah, so a couple of years later, so Nancy actually does have a child.

She and Gouverneur have a son, a junior. And the nephews, previously mentioned nephews, all of a sudden they're completely, they've lost out on their inheritance. And they're pretty angry. So John actually, David Ogden is the main nephew. John and Ogden get together and they have determined that Nancy's, so he writes a letter.

He writes a letter. So John Randolph of Roanoke writes a letter to Nancy in care of Gouverneur, which is really passive, aggressive, in which it contains the line, a vampire that, after sucking the best blood of my race, has flitted off to the north and struck her herpy fangs into an infirmed old man.

That is in the letter. So Gouverneur reads this. And one of the things I just love about Gouverneur is most men, you know, would have just immediately bowed up. And I mean, that's dual territory, right? And he didn't.

He has some friends of his said, you should sue him for libel. He's like, I don't need the money, you know, kind of thing. He'll get his. basically. So he allows Nancy to respond, which I love.

And she does. She responds to every single accusation and then copies the letter and send it to 20 of his political enemies. Of John Randolph's political enemies.

by the time Gouverneur begins to court her. It makes it less creepy. And that's why I give him a lot of leeway there. And, like I said, she doesn't admit, even admit. she has publicly or even privately in letters that she had a baby, until after she responds to John Randolph.

And she says the baby was Theodoric's, not Richard's. Now, there's some pretty good evidence that on his deathbed, Richard had made her promise that he would never admit. I don't know. I mean, we just don't know. And now I'm going to make something up in my book, what I think, but.

I hope she poisoned Richard. You know, Jefferson believed that Richard was the culprit. That may not be true either. She might have been central to this story. To paint her as entirely innocent, I think, would be a stretch, clearly.

But what strikes to me is that the best named plantation in human history is Bizarre. Bizarre. Yeah. No,

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America, 10 things about Gouverneur Morris. Lindsay, what a fascinating story. I mean, there are so many parts of this. So one is, of course, the sex scandal, whatever it was at Bizarre, and we know something about that. The second thing, of course, is its connection to John Randolph of Roanoke.

The third thing is that the Jeffersons are part of this story. And, as I did research for this, this notion that Martha may have provided a rosin or a gum, which was a known abortificant, is utterly fascinating to me, and I'm not sure quite what to make of it. And then there is Gouverneur Morris of New York, who apparently did some traveling down to Virginia from time to time. And he rescued, I mean, the way they would put it in a 19th century novel is, he rescued this fallen woman and made her more respectable. They had a successful marriage in which there was a child.

He loved Hamilton. They had a great friendship. He does confide to his diary that this isn't going to be easy. Hamilton wasn't universally liked. There were some issues in Hamilton's character and also in his political outlook.

And, says Morris, he was a monarchist. Morris just says, you know what, he was a monarchist. So Jefferson had always claimed that Hamilton was a monarchist, but normally that's beaten back by Hamilton scholars. But Morris, who knew him as well as anybody, said, yeah, it's true. Yeah, so Morris.

He then had to sort of set the tone for responding. And he could have really saber, rattled and tried to whip up fury against Aaron Burr. And he didn't, both, because he knew he was never a fan of mob violence. He had seen what it could do in France. And also he knew that Hamilton had a role in, you know, dueling is not a one person activity.

And so he was not out to make Burr into a bad guy. And then he did give a lovely, a lovely eulogy. And I give him a lot of credit for doing so in a way that is honest, because I'm sure we have all been to funerals where someone is is giving remarks, and you're like, that does not sound like the person that I knew at all. And I find that to be disingenuous. And I like the honesty with which Morris was handling his relationship with Hamilton and understanding his friend towards the end.

Morris, do what you can for us. Is that true?

I'm sure he didn't like Jefferson's politics very much and vice versa. But why did they have such tension, do you think?

One of the other things that was quite different about their lives is they were both in France when the French Revolution began, and they saw the early horrors of the beginnings of the reign of terror. Now, Jefferson left before it got to its peak bloodiness and before the king and queen were executed. But Morris was there the entire time. And so he just fundamentally could not understand why Jefferson was so blasé about the violence and remained so supportive about the French Revolution, because he had seen all of the horrible things that came with it. So I think it was, on one hand, that ideological component.

But then it was also a personality component. I mean, Morris was warm and gregarious, and outgoing and charming, and clearly loved a good joke. We talked about his jokes in the first segment. Loved women in all of the ways. Loved the salon women in Paris.

Loved, you know, was really sort of this vibrant, joie de vivre person. And I think he probably...

He intervened to help certain people that he knew, who were aristocrats who were being ground up by the terror. He was not afraid even to bribe in order to make that happen. It's impossible to regard Jefferson as being willing to bribe for that. They just have different styles. Jefferson is going to be much more played by the book, much more aloof and detached.

But Morris goes on to try to do everything he can to get Lafayette sprung from an Austrian prison and helps take care of Madame Lafayette during this incredibly difficult time in their lives. My admiration for him just soars when I see these stories that he was willing to work the system. And I don't think Jefferson would have even know how quite to work the system when it takes flattery and bribery and interventions at certain targeted moments. That's a savviness that Jefferson I don't think has and probably would not respect in himself. Thank goodness, Morris was more.

Whereas Morris kind of understood what we would think of as the real politic world of terror and war and what you had to do to get people out. He also tried to help save the King and Queen. He tried to help them escape, which I think Jefferson probably would have been horrified by, but Morris was trying to create, I think he was initially supportive of the concept of a revolution, but of a much more moderate revolution. And he felt that the King was an important bulwark against the radical impulses, which did indeed take over.

And you know, that Adams was just like, shrieking, but you know, too, that Jefferson touched up his correspondence late in life. And he actually changed some details in the, in the reign of terror letters to make himself look less gullible and less naive about what actually happened. So he didn't do a lot of that in his life, but he did in this case, because he realized that he had really exposed himself. And as a diplomat, he should have been able to understand where the French revolution was going, in a way that he just did not because he, I think he let his romance with France and his idealism get in the way of, of, of, of sort of an unvarnished view of the world, which is a difference between them. I think Gouverneur Morris saw the world, you know, he knew the way the world works, and it's not always pretty and it's not always even honorable, but it is.

And you deal with the world as you find it, rather than a kind of fantasy agrarian world that you would like to create. And so I think he found Jefferson, as, as did John Adams, as did George Washington, a little too visionary at times and a little ungrounded from the real facts of life. And so you can see why they would have a hard time with each other. And then, of course, also Morris becomes the American minister to France, when Jefferson wanted his protege, William Short, to have that role. And Jefferson was deeply loyal to these proteges of his, and probably that.

I've read snippets. They're very expensive. Melanie Miller is a biographer of Gouverneur Morris and I think edited those diaries. They must be wonderful. I have snippets of them.

So I've got,

actually, I've seen snippets of it and his diary is absolutely amazing. Can I specify just for if?

archives.

gov and it is a compilation, hosted by the National Archives, of all of the editorial projects of Franklin, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, some from Jay. Anyway, they're amazing. I think. Monroe's, I think,

He tended to put things, you know, he used a lot of euphemisms and things like that, but he was pretty straightforward, which I really appreciate. So what is your, what is your sort of?

I mean, you know, it didn't seem, you know, he had a pretty rough, they were orphaned. Those three boys were orphaned by the time they were, you know, like six and St. George, their stepfather really tried. And, you know, and they became, they came of age in an age when really the plantations, the great plantations, were going broke and he knew he would never, you know, inhabit the world of his parents in terms of money and aristocracy. And then he had so many physical ailments, you know, which of course were not his fault.

And I think he just became bitter and so angry. And, you know, he was the last remaining son of John Randolph. And I think he, I think honestly, he didn't like Nancy to begin with, because I think she spurred him in the beginning. And to see her married to someone like Gouverneur Moore, I think, just sent him over the edge in terms of, so. I'm sympathetic to his upbringing and to the world he was born into, you know, but I think he was really an unpleasant person.

And he especially became, you know, the opium addiction, the alcohol, the mental illness, I think, you know, it's very sad. It's very sad. And he died a bitter, angry man,

When can we expect it out? Hopefully, I'll finish it by the end of the.

And what was your first book? You're going to love this. It's titled American Harlot, and the subtitle is The Untold Story of Mariah Reynolds. Oh boy, here we go. Now you're,