Gouverneur Morris

by Theodore Roosevelt

It was bold advice, and if need had arisen it would have been followed; for we were bound to have Louisiana, if not by bargain and sale then by fair shock of arms. But Napoleon yielded, and gave us the land for fifteen millions, of which, said Morris, "I am content to pay my share to deprive foreigners of all pretext for entering our interior country; if nothing else were gained by the treaty, that alone would satisfy me."

Morris's term as senator expired on March 4th, 1803, and he was not reëlected; for New York State had passed into the hands of the Democrats. But he still continued to play a prominent part in public affairs, for he was the leader in starting the project of the Erie canal. It was to him that we owe the original idea of this great water-way, for he thought of it and planned it out long before any one else. He had publicly proposed it during the revolutionary period; in 1803 he began the agitation in its favor that culminated in its realization, and he was chairman of the Canal Commissioners from the time of their appointment, in 1810, until within a few months of his death. The three first reports of the Commission were all from his pen. As Stephen Van Rensselaer, himself one of the commissioners from the beginning, said, "Gouverneur Morris was the father of our great canal." He hoped ultimately to make it a ship canal. While a member of the commission, he not only discharged his duties as such with characteristic energy and painstaking, but he also did most effective outside work in advancing the enterprise, while he mastered the subject more thoroughly in all its details than did any other man.

He spent most of his time at Morrisania, but traveled for two or three months every summer, sometimes going out to the then "far West," along the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and once descending the St. Lawrence. At home he spent his time tilling his farm, reading, receiving visits from his friends, and carrying on a wide correspondence on business and politics. Jay's home was within driving distance, and the two fine old fellows saw much of each other. On the 25th of December, 1809, Morris, then fifty-six years old, married Miss Anne Cary Randolph, a member of the famous Virginia family; he was very happy with her, and by her he had one son. Three weeks after the marriage he wrote Jay a pressing request to visit him: "I pray you will, with your daughters, embark immediately in your sleigh, after a very early breakfast, and push on so as to reach this house in the evening. My wife sends her love, and says she longs to receive her husband's friend; that his sickness must be no excuse, for she will nurse him. Come, then, and see your old friend perform his part in an old-fashioned scene of domestic enjoyment." Jay was very simple in his way of living; but Morris was rather formal. When he visited his friend he always came with his valet, was shown straight to his room without seeing any one, dressed himself with scrupulous nicety,—being very particular about his powdered hair,—and then came down to see his host.

Although his letters generally dealt with public matters, he sometimes went into home details. He thus wrote an amusing letter to a good friend of his, a lady, who was desirous, following the custom of the day, to send her boy to what was called a "college" at an absurdly early age; he closed by warning her that "these children of eleven, after a four years' course, in which they may learn to smatter a little of everything, become bachelors of arts before they know how to button their clothes, and are the most troublesome and useless, sometimes the most pernicious, little animals that ever infested a commonwealth."

At one time he received as his guest Moreau, the exiled French general, then seeking service in the United States. Writing in his diary an account of the visit, he says: "In the course of our conversation, touching very gently the idea of his serving (in case of necessity) against France, he declares frankly that, when the occasion arrives, he shall feel no reluctance; that France having cast him out, he is a citizen of the country where he lives, and has the same right to follow his trade here as any other man."

He took the keenest pleasure in his life, and always insisted that America was the pleasantest of all places in which to live. Writing to a friend abroad, and mentioning that he respected the people of Britain, but did not find them congenial, he added: "But were the manners of those countries as pleasant as the people are respectable, I should never be reconciled to their summers. Compare the uninterrupted warmth and splendor of America, from the first of May to the last of September, and her autumn, truly celestial, with your shivering June, your July and August sometimes warm but often wet, your uncertain September, your gloomy October, and your dismal November. Compare these things, and then say how a man who prizes the charm of Nature can think of making the exchange. If you were to pass one autumn with us, you would not give it for the best six months to be found in any other country.... There is a brilliance in our atmosphere of which you can have no idea."

He thoroughly appreciated the marvelous future that lay before the race on this continent. Writing in 1801, he says: "As yet we only crawl along the outer shell of our country. The interior excels the part we inhabit in soil, in climate, in everything. The proudest empire in Europe is but a bauble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries, perhaps of one!" And again, "With respect to this country, calculation outruns fancy, and fact outruns calculation."

Until his hasty, impulsive temper became so soured by partisanship as to warp his judgment, Morris remained as well satisfied with the people and the system of government as with the land itself. In one of his first letters after his return to America he wrote: "There is a fund of good sense and calmness of character here, which will, I think, avoid all dangerous excesses. We are free: we know it: and we know how to continue free." On another occasion, about the same time, he said: "Nil desperandum de republica is a sound principle." Again, in the middle of Jefferson's first term: "We have indeed a set of madmen in the administration, and they will do many foolish things; but there is a vigorous vegetative principle at the root which will make our tree flourish, let the winds blow as they may."

He at first took an equally just view of our political system, saying that in adopting a republican form of government he "not only took it, as a man does his wife, for better or worse, but, what few men do with their wives, knowing all its bad qualities." He observed that there was always a counter current in human affairs, which opposed alike good and evil. "Thus the good we hope is seldom attained, and the evil we fear is rarely realized. The leaders of faction must for their own sakes avoid errors of enormous magnitude; so that, while the republican form lasts, we shall be fairly well governed." He thought this form the one best suited for us, and remarked that "every kind of government was liable to evil; that the best was that which had fewest faults; that the excellence even of that best depended more on its fitness for the nation where it was established than on intrinsic perfection." He denounced, with a fierce scorn that they richly merit, the despicable demagogues and witless fools who teach that in all cases the voice of the majority must be implicitly obeyed, and that public men have only to carry out its will, and thus "acknowledge themselves the willing instruments of folly and vice. They declare that in order to please the people they will, regardless alike of what conscience may dictate or reason approve, make the profligate sacrifice of public right on the altar of private interest. What more can be asked by the sternest tyrant of the most despicable slave? Creatures of this sort are the tools which usurpers employ in building despotism."

Sounder and truer maxims never were uttered; but unfortunately the indignation naturally excited by the utter weakness and folly of Jefferson's second term, and the pitiable incompetence shown both by him, by his successor, and by their party associates in dealing with affairs, so inflamed and exasperated Morris as to make him completely lose his head, and hurried him into an opposition so violent that his follies surpassed the worst of the follies he condemned. He gradually lost faith in our republican system, and in the Union itself. His old jealousy of the West revived more strongly than ever; he actually proposed that our enormous masses of new territory, destined one day to hold the bulk of our population, "should be governed as provinces, and allowed no voice in our councils." So hopelessly futile a scheme is beneath comment; and it cannot possibly be reconciled with his previous utterances when he descanted on our future greatness as a people, and claimed the West as the heritage of our children. His conduct can only be unqualifiedly condemned; and he has but the poor palliation that, in our early history, many of the leading men in New York, and an even larger proportion in New England, felt the same narrow, illiberal jealousy of the West which had formerly been felt by the English statesmen for America as a whole.