Merrymaking Forefather

THE EXTRAORDINARY MR. MORRIS (483 pp.)--Howard Swiggett--Doubleday ($5).

On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, while zealous Massachusetts patriots were heaving tea into Boston Harbor, one young patriot-to-be was, by his own admission, "up all night making merry" on his private account. The circumstance was symbolic if nothing else, for 21-year-old Gouverneur Morris of New York was never to lose his offhand knack for mixing pleasure with the business of the republic.

Deplored by straitlaced contemporaries as "an irreligious and profane man," and largely ignored by historians, Morris has dangled like a flippant footnote from the history he helped to make. As a result, though every schoolboy is taught that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, few ever learn that if was Morris who wrote the final version oi the U.S. Constitution.

Venus & Morale. Biographer Howard Swiggett's book is an attempt, and a largely successful one, to give Morris his due. Though the book is rabbled up with minor characters, and its leading figure sometimes drops from sight in a sea of upturned petticoats, The Extraordinary Mr. Morris is an engaging profile of an American statesman who could be serious without being solemn.

As a bright young lawyer just out of King's College (afterwards Columbia), Morris spent the Revolution in mufti, as a member of the Continental Congress. Why he never took a commission is, Author Swiggett admits, something of a mystery, though possibly it was because of an arm injury as a boy. In any case, young Gouverneur backed his friend George Washington in the slack-spined, clique-ridden councils of the Congress. He wangled food for the army in the black winter at Valley Forge, served ably on half a dozen committees concerned with finance and recruiting, and did some morale-boosting with his eloquent pen.

But for Bachelor Morris, the cause of freedom was no reason to neglect the cause of love. His colleague John Jay, afterwards first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, noted that "Gouverneur is daily employed in making oblations to Venus." One of these oblations may have cost him his leg. Actually, says Author Swiggett, Morris was thrown from a phaeton while grappling with runaway horses, and had his left leg crushed in a wheel; a choicer version had the leg broken "in consequence of jumping from a window in an affair of gallantry."

Preambles & Pinks. Though his friends gibed at him for his affairs, they were glad enough to have him on hand at the Constitutional Convention. In the first undistinguished draft, the Preamble to the Constitution read: "We the people of New Hampshire, etc., etc., etc. do ordain, declare and establish the following Constitution." Stylist Morris changed it to the memorable: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union ..." And so on, for more than 4,000 well-chosen words.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Morris settled in Paris as a partner in an American trading firm, and two years later President Washington named him

U.S. Minister. It was not a popular choice. Morris spoke with a sharp tongue, and nearly every prominent man of his day was pinked by it. Typical Morrisisms: "It is possible that I am unjust to Mr. Monroe, but really I consider him as a person of mediocrity in every respect . . . Jefferson believes in the perfectibility of man, the wisdom of mobs and the moderation of Jacobins." On Madison: "I am told he never goes sober to bed." But after 18 days of Senate debate, during which he was compared by Roger Sherman to Benedict Arnold, Morris was confirmed, 16 to ii. In his reports to Washington he charted the progressive fury of the French Revolution, in his diaries the inner tempest of his own love life.

"What a People! . . ." Soon after he reached France, Morris had met the Countess Adele de Flahaut, a 28-year-old beauty married to a nobleman of 63. Between trictrac (backgammon) and chitchat, she let him know that she was deceiving her husband with a French bishop. The bishop was the formidable Talleyrand himself, scapegrace Bishop of Autun and counselor to the King of France. With a fine disregard for diplomacy, Morris took Adele for himself. In duty hours, he drew up reform measures for Louis XVI which the timid monarch never put into effect, and transferred the King's cash to England for safekeeping.

As the tumbrils rolled, Morris stayed on, the only foreign diplomat in Paris, and a monstrously shocked one: "Gracious God, what a people! ... I was never till now fully apprized of the mildness of American character." In succeeding waves, the Terror lapped up friends of the Revolution as well as foes. Historians censure Morris for being rather casual about one of them, Thomas (The Rights of Man) Paine. "Lest I forget it," Morris wrote Jefferson, "Paine is in prison publishing a pamphlet against Jesus Christ." Lafayette was clapped into jail; Morris lent his wife $20,000 and later got about half of it grudgingly back. It confirmed his poor view of Lafayette: "There is no drawing the sound of a trumpet from a whistle." The Countess Adele escaped to England, and though Morris met her briefly later, the grand passion was over.

Rediscovering America. So was Morris' mission. The U.S. ousted the French Ambassador, "Citizen" Genet, for meddling in U.S. politics, and Morris' own recall followed automatically. But he was in no hurry to leave Europe. He spent four years more on the Continent, seeing the sights and having a succession of adventures with pretty women.

At 46, wealthy and possibly wiser, he went home to rediscover America. He found plenty to occupy him: shooting the St. Lawrence rapids in a canoe, advising New York City on the layout of new streets, rebuilding Morrisania, the family estate in The Bronx. At 57 he married a bizarre, 35-year-old Cinderella from Virginia. Nancy Randolph (cousin to Virginia's John of Roanoke) had been accused of bearing a child by her sister's husband and murdering it. Acquitted, but badgered and penniless, she married Morris in a gown patched at the elbows. In due time, she made Morris very happy and his relations very sad by presenting him with a son and heir. Having circled expectantly round the aging Morris' will, the relatives resentfully dubbed the newcomer "Cutusoff."*

For what was left of his life, Gouverneur Morris savored the "conjugal pleasures" which he had only sampled before. A month before he died, at 65, he wrote to a friend that he still felt "the enthusiasms of inexperience and the gaiety of youth."

* Among Morris' direct descendants is great-grandson Gouverneur Morris, novelist and short-story writer. Newbold Morris, recently fired as Harry Truman's special corruption hunter, is a great-great-great-nephew, as is his brother, George L. K. Morris, "concretionist" painter and a onetime editor and angel of the Partisan Review.

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