Gouverneur Morris

by Theodore Roosevelt

After a hard winter passage of forty days' length Morris reached France, and arrived in Paris on February 3, 1789. He remained there a year on his private business; but his prominence in America, and his intimate friendship with many distinguished Frenchmen, at once admitted him to the highest social and political circles, where his brilliant talents secured him immediate importance.

The next nine years of his life were spent in Europe, and it was during this time that he unknowingly rendered his especial and peculiar service to the public. As an American statesman he has many rivals, and not a few superiors; but as a penetrating observer and recorder of contemporary events, he stands alone among the men of his time. He kept a full diary during his stay abroad, and was a most voluminous correspondent; and his capacity for keen, shrewd observation, his truthfulness, his wonderful insight into character, his sense of humor, and his power of graphic description, all combine to make his comments on the chief men and events of the day a unique record of the inside history of Western Europe during the tremendous convulsions of the French Revolution. He is always an entertaining and in all matters of fact a trustworthy writer. His letters and diary together form a real mine of wealth for the student either of the social life of the upper classes in France just before the outbreak, or of the events of the Revolution itself.

In the first place, it must be premised that from the outset Morris was hostile to the spirit of the French Revolution, and his hostility grew in proportion to its excesses until at last it completely swallowed up his original antipathy to England, and made him regard France as normally our enemy, not our ally. This was perfectly natural, and indeed inevitable: in all really free countries, the best friends of freedom regarded the revolutionists, when they had fairly begun their bloody career, with horror and anger. It was only to oppressed, debased, and priest-ridden peoples that the French Revolution could come as the embodiment of liberty. Compared to the freedom already enjoyed by Americans, it was sheer tyranny of the most dreadful kind.

Morris saw clearly that the popular party in France, composed in part of amiable visionaries, theoretic philanthropists, and closet constitution-mongers, and in part of a brutal, sodden populace, maddened by the grinding wrongs of ages, knew not whither its own steps tended; and he also saw that the then existing generation of Frenchmen were not, and never would be, fitted to use liberty aright. It is small matter for wonder that he could not see as clearly the good which lay behind the movement; that he could not as readily foretell the real and great improvement it was finally to bring about, though only after a generation of hideous convulsions. Even as it was, he discerned what was happening, and what was about to happen, more distinctly than did any one else. The wild friends of the French Revolution, especially in America, supported it blindly, with but a very slight notion of what it really signified. Keen though Morris's intellectual vision was, it was impossible for him to see what future lay beyond the quarter of a century of impending tumult. It did not lie within his powers to applaud the fiendish atrocities of the Red Terror for the sake of the problematical good that would come to the next generation. To do so he would have needed the granite heart of a zealot, as well as the prophetic vision of a seer.

The French Revolution was in its essence a struggle for the abolition of privilege, and for equality in civil rights. This Morris perceived, almost alone among the statesmen of his day; and he also perceived that most Frenchmen were willing to submit to any kind of government that would secure them the things for which they strove. As he wrote to Jefferson, when the republic was well under weigh: "The great mass of the French nation is less solicitous to preserve the present order of things than to prevent the return of the ancient oppression, and of course would more readily submit to a pure despotism than to that kind of monarchy whose only limits were found in those noble, legal and clerical corps by which the people were alternately oppressed and insulted." To the down-trodden masses of continental Europe the gift of civil rights and the removal of the tyranny of the privileged classes, even though accompanied by the rule of a directory, a consul, or an emperor, represented an immense political advance; but to the free people of England, and to the freer people of America, the change would have been wholly for the worse.

Such being the case, Morris's attitude was natural and proper. There is no reason to question the sincerity of his statement in another letter, that "I do, from the bottom of my heart, wish well to this country [France]." Had the French people shown the least moderation or wisdom, he would have unhesitatingly sided with them against their oppressors. It must be kept in mind that he was not influenced in the least in his course by the views of the upper classes with whom he mingled. On the contrary, when he first came to Europe, he distinctly lost popularity in some of the social circles in which he moved, because he was so much more conservative than his aristocratic friends, among whom the closet republicanism of the philosophers was for the moment all the rage. He had no love for the French nobility, whose folly and ferocity caused the Revolution, and whose craven cowardice could not check it even before it had gathered headway. Long afterwards he wrote of some of the emigrés: "The conversation of these gentlemen, who have the virtue and good fortune of their grandfathers to recommend them, leads me almost to forget the crimes of the French Revolution; and often the unforgiving temper and sanguinary wishes which they exhibit make me almost believe that the assertion of their enemies is true, namely, that it is success alone which has determined on whose side should be the crimes, and on whose the miseries." The truth of the last sentence was strikingly verified by the White Terror, even meaner, if less bloody, than the Red. Bourbon princes and Bourbon nobles were alike, and Morris only erred in not seeing that their destruction was the condition precedent upon all progress.

There was never another great struggle, in the end productive of good to mankind, where the tools and methods by which that end was won were so wholly vile as in the French Revolution. Alone among movements of the kind, it brought forth no leaders entitled to our respect; none who were both great and good; none even who were very great, save, at its beginning, strange, strong, crooked Mirabeau, and at its close the towering world-genius who sprang to power by its means, wielded it for his own selfish purposes, and dazzled all nations over the wide earth by the glory of his strength and splendor.

We can hardly blame Morris for not appreciating a revolution whose immediate outcome was to be Napoleon's despotism, even though he failed to see all the good that would remotely spring therefrom. He considered, as he once wrote a friend, that "the true object of a great statesman is to give to any particular nation the kind of laws which is suitable to them, and the best constitution which they are capable of." There can be no sounder rule of statesmanship; and none was more flagrantly broken by the amiable but incompetent political doctrinaires of 1789. Thus the American, as a far-sighted statesman, despised the theorists who began the Revolution, and, as a humane and honorable man, abhorred the black-hearted wretches who carried it on. His view of the people among whom he found himself, as well as his statement of his own position, he himself has recorded: "To fit people for a republic, as for any other form of government, a previous education is necessary.... In despotic governments the people, habituated to beholding everything bending beneath the weight of power, never possess that power for a moment without abusing it. Slaves, driven to despair, take arms, execute vast vengeance, and then sink back to their former condition of slaves. In such societies the patriot, the melancholy patriot, sides with the despot, because anything is better than a wild and bloody confusion."

So much for an outline of his views. His writings preserve them for us in detail on almost every important question that came up during his stay in Europe; couched, moreover, in telling, piquant sentences that leave room for hardly a dull line in either letters or diary.

No sooner had he arrived in Paris than he sought out Jefferson, then the American minister, and Lafayette. They engaged him to dine on the two following nights. He presented his various letters of introduction, and in a very few weeks, by his wit, tact, and ability, had made himself completely at home in what was by far the most brilliant and attractive—although also the most hopelessly unsound—fashionable society of any European capital. He got on equally well with fine ladies, philosophers, and statesmen; was as much at his ease in the salons of the one as at the dinner-tables of the other; and all the time observed and noted down, with the same humorous zest, the social peculiarities of his new friends as well as the tremendous march of political events. Indeed, it is difficult to know whether to set the higher value on his penetrating observations concerning public affairs, or on his witty, light, half-satirical sketches of the men and women of the world with whom he was thrown in contact, told in his usual charming and effective style. No other American of note has left us writings half so humorous and amusing, filled, too, with information of the greatest value.