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[Transcriber's Note: *** represents inverse asterism. Inconsistencies
in spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Corrected obvious
printer errors:
page 51, "comparision" changed to "comparison." ("A comparison of the
men" ...)
page 270, "Tuilleries" changed to "Tuileries." ( ... "the poor king was
driven from the Tuileries.")
page 315, missing " added. ("... a casser les oeufs.""")
page 365, missing "." added. ("Dalrymple, General, 125.")
page 366, "De Lancys" changed to "De Lanceys." ("De Lanceys, 16, 21,
45.")
page 368, "salon" changed to "salon." ("literary life of the salon")]
American Statesmen
EDITED BY
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
American Statesmen
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1892
Copyright, 1888,
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
_All rights reserved_.
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
INTRODUCTION.
Two generations ago the average American biographer was certainly a
marvel of turgid and aimless verbosity; and the reputations of our early
statesmen have in no way proved their vitality more clearly than by
surviving their entombment in the pages of the authors who immediately
succeeded them. No one of the founders of the Constitution has suffered
more in this respect than has he who was perhaps the most brilliant,
although by no means the greatest, of the whole number,--Gouverneur
Morris.
Jared Sparks, hitherto Morris's sole biographer, wrote innumerable
volumes on American history, many of which are still very valuable, and
some of them almost indispensable, to the student. The value, however,
comes wholly from the matter; Mr. Sparks is not only a very voluminous
writer, but he is also a quite abnormally dull one. His "Life of
Gouverneur Morris" is typical of most of his work. He collected with
great industry facts about Mr. Morris, and edited a large number of his
letters and state papers, with numerous selections, not always well
chosen, from his Diary. Other merits the book has none, and it has one
or two marked faults. He failed to understand that a biographer's duties
are not necessarily identical with those of a professional eulogist; but
for this he is hardly to blame, as all our writers then seemed to think
it necessary to shower indiscriminate praise on every dead
American--whether author, soldier, politician, or what not--save only
Benedict Arnold. He was funnily unconscious of his own prolix dullness;
and actually makes profuse apologies for introducing extracts from
Morris's bright, interesting writings into his own drearily
platitudinous pages, hoping that "candor and justice" will make his
readers pardon the "negligence" and "defects of style," which the
extracts contain. He could not resist the temptation now and then to
improve Morris's English, and to soften down, or omit anything that he
deemed either improper or beneath the stilted "dignity" of history. For
example, Morris states that Marie Antoinette, when pursued by the
Parisian fishwives, fled from her bed "in her shift and petticoat, with
her stockings in her hand;" such particularity struck Mr. Sparks as
shockingly coarse, and with much refinement he replaced the whole phrase
by "in her undress." An oath he would not permit to sully his pages on
any terms; thus when Morris wrote that Pennsylvania would find Sir Henry
Clinton "a most damnable physician," Mr. Sparks simply left out the
offending sentence altogether. This kind of thing he did again and
again.
Still he gives almost all of Morris's writings that are of political
interest. It is, however, greatly to be desired that we should have a
much more complete edition of his letters and Diary, on account of the
extremely interesting descriptions they contain of the social life of
the period, both in America and in Europe. As regards his public career,
and his views and writings on public subjects, we already have ample
material, much of which has appeared since Sparks's biography was
written, and some of which is here presented for the first time.
Morris's speeches in the Constitutional Convention have been preserved,
in summarized form, by Madison in his "Debates:" of these, of course,
Sparks was necessarily ignorant. Miss Annie Carey Morris has written two
articles in "Scribner's Magazine" for January and February, 1887, on her
grandfather's life in Paris during the French Revolution, giving some
new and interesting details. A good article appeared in "Macmillan's
Magazine" for November, 1885, the writer evidently having been attracted
to the subject by the way in which Taine made Morris's writings a basis
for so much of his own great work on the Revolution. Decidedly the best
piece upon Morris that has yet been written, however, is the admirable
sketch by Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge in the "Atlantic Monthly" for April,
1886.
My thanks are especially due the Hon. John Jay for furnishing me many
valuable letters, hitherto unpublished, of both Jay and Morris; and for
giving me additional information about Morris's private life, and other
matters. All the letters here quoted that are not given by Sparks are to
be found either in the Jay MSS. or the Pickering MSS. Mr. Jay also
furnished me with the account of the way in which Louis Philippe was
finally persuaded to pay the debt he owed Morris.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
CHAPTER I.
HIS YOUTH: COLONIAL NEW YORK 1
CHAPTER II.
THE OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION: MORRIS IN
THE PROVINCIAL CONGRESS 28
CHAPTER III.
INDEPENDENCE: FORMING THE STATE CONSTITUTION 53
CHAPTER IV.
IN THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS 76
CHAPTER V.
FINANCES: THE TREATY OF PEACE 99
CHAPTER VI.
THE FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL CONSTITUTION 125
CHAPTER VII.
FIRST STAY IN FRANCE 169
CHAPTER VIII.
LIFE IN PARIS 197
CHAPTER IX.
MISSION TO ENGLAND: RETURN TO PARIS 227
CHAPTER X.
MINISTER TO FRANCE 252
CHAPTER XI.
STAY IN EUROPE 300
CHAPTER XII.
SERVICE IN THE UNITED STATES SENATE 320
CHAPTER XIII.
THE NORTHERN DISUNION MOVEMENT AMONG THE
FEDERALISTS 347
GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.
CHAPTER I.
HIS YOUTH: COLONIAL NEW YORK.
When, on January 31, 1752, Gouverneur Morris was born in the family
manor-house at Morrisania, on the lands where his forefathers had dwelt
for three generations, New York colony contained only some eighty
thousand inhabitants, of whom twelve thousand were blacks. New York city
was a thriving little trading town, whose people in summer suffered much
from the mosquitoes that came back with the cows when they were driven
home at nightfall for milking; while from among the locusts and
water-beeches that lined the pleasant, quiet streets, the tree frogs
sang so shrilly through the long, hot evenings that a man in speaking
could hardly make himself heard.
Gouverneur Morris belonged by birth to that powerful landed aristocracy
whose rule was known by New York alone among all the northern colonies.
His great-grandfather, who had served in the Cromwellian armies, came to
the seaport at the mouth of the Hudson, while it was still beneath the
sway of Holland, and settled outside of Haerlem, the estate being
invested with manorial privileges by the original grant of the governor.
In the next two generations the Morrises had played a prominent part in
colonial affairs, both the father and grandfather of Gouverneur having
been on the bench, and having also been members of the provincial
legislature, where they took the popular side, and stood up stoutly for
the rights of the Assembly in the wearisome and interminable conflicts
waged by the latter against the prerogatives of the crown and the powers
of the royal governors. The Morrises were restless, adventurous men, of
erratic temper and strong intellect; and, with far more than his share
of the family talent and brilliancy, young Gouverneur also inherited a
certain whimsical streak that ran through his character. His mother was
one of the Huguenot Gouverneurs, who had been settled in New York since
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; and it was perhaps the French
blood in his veins that gave him the alert vivacity and keen sense of
humor that distinguished him from most of the great Revolutionary
statesmen who were his contemporaries.
He was a bright, active boy, fond of shooting and out-door sports, and
was early put to school at the old Huguenot settlement of New Rochelle,
where the church service was still sometimes held in French; and he
there learned to speak and write this language almost as well as he
could English. Thence, after the usual preparatory instruction, he went
to King's College--now, with altered name and spirit, Columbia--in New
York.
The years of his childhood were stirring ones for the colonies; for
England was then waging the greatest and most successful of her colonial
contests with France and Spain for the possession of eastern North
America. Such contests, with their usual savage accompaniments in the
way of Indian warfare, always fell with especial weight on New York,
whose border lands were not only claimed, but even held by the French,
and within whose boundaries lay the great confederacy of the Six
Nations, the most crafty, warlike, and formidable of all the native
races, infinitely more to be dreaded than the Algonquin tribes with whom
the other colonies had to deal. Nor was this war any exception to the
rule; for battle after battle was fought on our soil, from the day when,
unassisted, the purely colonial troops of New York and New England at
Lake George destroyed Baron Dieskau's mixed host of French regulars,
Canadian militia, and Indian allies, to that still more bloody day when,
on the shores of Lake Champlain, Abercrombie's great army of British and
Americans recoiled before the fiery genius of Montcalm.
When once the war was ended by the complete and final overthrow of the
French power, and the definite establishment of English supremacy along
the whole Atlantic seaboard, the bickering which was always going on
between Great Britain and her American subjects, and which was but
partially suppressed even when they were forced to join in common
efforts to destroy a common foe, broke out far more fiercely than ever.
While the colonists were still reaping the aftermath of the contest in
the shape of desolating border warfare against those Indian tribes who
had joined in the famous conspiracy of Pontiac, the Royal Parliament
passed the Stamp Act, and thereby began the struggle that ended in the
Revolution.
England's treatment of her American subjects was thoroughly selfish; but
that her conduct towards them was a wonder of tyranny, will not now be
seriously asserted; on the contrary, she stood decidedly above the
general European standard in such matters, and certainly treated her
colonies far better than France and Spain did theirs; and she herself
had undoubted grounds for complaint in, for example, the readiness of
the Americans to claim military help in time of danger, together with
their frank reluctance to pay for it. It was impossible that she should
be so far in advance of the age as to treat her colonists as equals;
they themselves were sometimes quite as intolerant in their behavior
towards men of a different race, creed, or color. The New England
Puritans lacked only the power, but not the will, to behave almost as
badly towards the Pennsylvania Quakers as did the Episcopalian English
towards themselves. Yet granting all this, the fact remains, that in the
Revolutionary War the Americans stood towards the British as the
Protestant peoples stood towards the Catholic powers in the sixteenth
century, as the Parliamentarians stood towards the Stewarts in the
seventeenth, or as the upholders of the American Union stood towards the
confederate slave-holders in the nineteenth; that is, they warred
victoriously for the right in a struggle whose outcome vitally affected
the welfare of the whole human race. They settled, once for all, that
thereafter the people of English stock should spread at will over the
world's waste spaces, keeping all their old liberties and winning new
ones; and they took the first and longest step in establishing the great
principle that thenceforth those Europeans, who by their strength and
daring founded new states abroad, should be deemed to have done so for
their own profit as freemen, and not for the benefit of their more
timid, lazy, or contented brethren who stayed behind.
The rulers of Great Britain, and to a large extent its people, looked
upon the American colonies as existing primarily for the good of the
mother country: they put the harshest restrictions on American trade in
the interests of British merchants; they discouraged the spread of the
Americans westward; and they claimed the right to decide for both
parties the proportions in which they should pay their shares of the
common burdens. The English and Americans were not the subjects of a
common sovereign; for the English were themselves the sovereigns, the
Americans were the subjects. Whether their yoke bore heavily or bore
lightly, whether it galled or not, mattered little; it was enough that
it was a yoke to warrant a proud, free people in throwing it off. We
could not thankfully take as a boon part only of what we felt to be our
lawful due. "We do not claim liberty as a privilege, but challenge it as
a right," said the men of New York, through their legislature, in 1764;
and all Americans felt with them.
Yet, for all this, the feeling of loyalty was strong and hard to
overcome throughout the provinces, and especially in New York. The
Assembly wrangled with the royal governor; the merchants and shipmasters
combined to evade the intolerable harshness of the laws of trade that
tried to make them customers of England only; the householders bitterly
resented the attempts to quarter troops upon them; while the soldiers of
the garrison were from time to time involved in brawls with the lower
ranks of the people, especially the sailors, as the seafaring population
was large, and much given to forcibly releasing men taken by the
press-gang for the British war-ships; but in spite of everything there
was a genuine sentiment of affection and respect for the British crown
and kingdom. It is perfectly possible that if British statesmen had
shown less crass and brutal stupidity, if they had shown even the wise
negligence of Walpole, this feeling of loyalty would have been strong
enough to keep England and America united until they had learned how to
accommodate themselves to the rapidly changing conditions; but the
chance was lost when once a prince like George the Third came to the
throne. It has been the fashion to represent this king as a well
meaning, though dull person, whose good morals and excellent intentions
partially atoned for his mistakes of judgment; but such a view is
curiously false. His private life, it is true, showed the very admirable
but common-place virtues, as well as the appalling intellectual
littleness, barrenness, and stagnation, of the average British
green-grocer; but in his public career, instead of rising to the level
of harmless and unimportant mediocrity usually reached by the sovereigns
of the House of Hanover, he fairly rivaled the Stuarts in his perfidy,
wrongheadedness, political debauchery, and attempts to destroy free
government, and to replace it by a system of personal despotism. It
needed all the successive blunders both of himself and of his Tory
ministers to reduce the loyal party in New York to a minority, by
driving the moderate men into the patriotic or American camp; and even
then the loyalist minority remained large enough to be a formidable
power, and to plunge the embryonic state into a ferocious civil war,
carried on, as in the Carolinas and Georgia, with even more bitterness
than the contest against the British.
The nature of this loyalist party and the strength of the conflicting
elements can only be understood after a glance at the many
nationalities that in New York were being blended into one. The
descendants of the old Dutch inhabitants were still more numerous than
those of any other one race, while the French Huguenots, who, being of
the same Calvinistic faith, were closely mixed with them, and had been
in the land nearly as long, were also plentiful; the Scotch and Scotch-
or Anglo-Irish, mostly Presbyterians, came next in point of numbers; the
English, both of Old and New England, next; there were large bodies of
Germans; and there were also settlements of Gaelic Highlanders, and some
Welsh, Scandinavians, etc. Just prior to the Revolution there were in
New York city two Episcopalian churches, three Dutch Reformed, three
Presbyterian (Scotch and Irish), one French, two German (one Lutheran
and one Calvinistic, allied to the Dutch Reformed); as well as places of
worship for the then insignificant religious bodies of the Methodists,
Baptists (largely Welsh), Moravians (German), Quakers and Jews. There
was no Roman Catholic church until after the Revolution; in fact before
that date there were hardly any Roman Catholics in the colonies, except
in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and in New York they did not acquire any
strength until after the War of 1812.
This mixture of races is very clearly shown by the ancestry of the
half-dozen great men brought forth by New York during the Revolution. Of
these, one, Alexander Hamilton, stands in the very first class of
American statesmen; two more, John Jay and Gouverneur Morris, come close
behind him; the others, Philip Schuyler, Robert Livingston, and George
Clinton, were of lesser, but still of more than merely local, note. They
were all born and bred on this side of the Atlantic. Hamilton's father
was of Scotch, and his mother of French Huguenot, descent; Morris came
on one side of English, and on the other of French Huguenot, stock; Jay,
of French Huguenot blood, had a mother who was Dutch; Schuyler was
purely Dutch; Livingston was Scotch on his father's, and Dutch on his
mother's, side; the Clintons were of Anglo-Irish origin, but married
into the old Dutch families. In the same way, it was Herkomer, of German
parentage, who led the New York levies, and fell at their head in the
bloody fight against the Tories and Indians at Oriskany; it was the
Irishman Montgomery who died leading the New York troops against Quebec;
while yet another of the few generals allotted to New York by the
Continental Congress was MacDougall, of Gaelic Scotch descent. The
colony was already developing an ethnic type of its own, quite distinct
from that of England. No American state of the present day, not even
Wisconsin or Minnesota, shows so many and important "foreign," or
non-English elements, as New York, and for that matter Pennsylvania and
Delaware, did a century or so ago. In fact, in New York the English
element in the blood has grown greatly during the past century, owing to
the enormous New England immigration that took place during its first
half; and the only important addition to the race conglomerate has been
made by the Celtic Irish. The New England element in New York in 1775
was small and unimportant; on Long Island, where it was largest, it was
mainly tory or neutral; in the city itself, however, it was aggressively
patriotic.
Recent English writers, and some of our own as well, have foretold woe
to our nation, because the blood of the Cavalier and the Roundhead is
being diluted with that of "German boors and Irish cotters." The alarm
is needless. As a matter of fact the majority of the people of the
middle colonies at the time of the Revolution _were_ the descendants of
Dutch and German boors and Scotch and Irish cotters; and in a less
degree the same was true of Georgia and the Carolinas. Even in New
England, where the English stock was purest, there was plenty of other
admixture, and two of her most distinguished Revolutionary families
bore, one the Huguenot name of Bowdoin, and the other the Irish name of
Sullivan. Indeed, from the very outset, from the days of Cromwell, there
has been a large Irish admixture in New England. When our people began
their existence as a nation, they already differed in blood from their
ancestral relatives across the Atlantic much as the latter did from
their forebears beyond the German Ocean; and on the whole, the
immigration since has not materially changed the race strains in our
nationality; a century back we were even less homogeneous than we are
now. It is no doubt true that we are in the main an offshoot of the
English stem; and cousins to our kinsfolk of Britain we perhaps may be;
but brothers we certainly are not.
But the process of assimilating, or as we should now say, of
Americanizing, all foreign and non-English elements was going on almost
as rapidly a hundred years ago as it is at present. A young Dutchman or
Huguenot felt it necessary, then, to learn English, precisely as a young
Scandinavian or German does now; and the churches of the former at the
end of the last century were obliged to adopt English as the language
for their ritual exactly as the churches of the latter do at the end of
this. The most stirring, energetic, and progressive life of the colony
was English; and all the young fellows of push and ambition gradually
adopted this as their native language, and then refused to belong to
congregations where the service was carried on in a less familiar
speech. Accordingly the Dutch Reformed churches dwindled steadily, while
the Episcopalian and Presbyterian swelled in the same ratio, until in
1764 the former gained a new and lasting lease of life by reluctantly
adopting the prevailing tongue; though Dutch was also occasionally used
until forty years later.
In fact, during the century that elapsed between the final British
conquest of the colony and the Revolution, the New Yorkers--Dutch,
French, German, Irish, and English--had become in the main welded into
one people; they felt alike towards outsiders, having chronic quarrels
with the New England States as well as with Great Britain, and showing,
indeed, but little more jealous hostility towards the latter than they
did towards Connecticut and New Hampshire.
The religious differences no longer corresponded to the differences of
language. Half of the adherents of the Episcopalian Church were of Dutch
or Huguenot blood; the leading ministers of the Dutch Church were of
Scotch parentage; and the Presbyterians included some of every race. The
colonists were all growing to call themselves Englishmen; when Mayor
Cruger, and a board of aldermen with names equally Dutch, signed the
non-importation agreement, they prefaced it by stating that they claimed
"their rights as Englishmen." But though there were no rivalries of
race, there were many and bitter of class and religion, the different
Protestant sects hating one another with a virulence much surpassing
that with which they now regard even Catholics.
The colony was in government an aristocratic republic, its constitution
modeled on that of England and similar to it; the power lay in the hands
of certain old and wealthy families, Dutch and English, and there was a
limited freehold suffrage. The great landed families, the Livingstons,
Van Rennselaers, Schuylers, Van Cortlandts, Phillipses, Morrises, with
their huge manorial estates, their riches, their absolute social
preeminence and their unquestioned political headship, formed a proud,
polished, and powerful aristocracy, deep rooted in the soil; for over a
century their sway was unbroken, save by contests between themselves or
with the royal governor, and they furnished the colony with military,
political, and social leaders for generation after generation. They
owned numerous black slaves, and lived in state and comfort on their
broad acres, tenant-farmed, in the great, roomy manor-houses, with
wainscoted walls and huge fireplaces, and round about the quaint old
gardens, prim and formal with their box hedges and precise flower beds.
They answered closely to the whig lords of England, and indeed were
often connected with the ruling orders abroad by blood or marriage; as
an example, Staats Long Morris, Gouverneur's elder brother, who remained
a royalist, and rose to be a major-general in the British army, married
the Duchess of Gordon. Some of the manors were so large that they sent
representatives to the Albany legislature, to sit alongside of those
from the towns and counties.
Next in importance to the great manorial lords came the rich merchants
of New York; many families, like the Livingstons, the most prominent of
all, had representatives in both classes. The merchants were somewhat of
the type of Frobisher, Hawkins, Klaesoon, and other old English and
Dutch sea-worthies, who were equally keen as fighters and traders. They
were shrewd, daring, and prosperous; they were often their own
ship-masters, and during the incessant wars against the French and
Spaniards went into privateering ventures with even more zest and
spirit than into peaceful trading. Next came the smaller landed
proprietors, who also possessed considerable local influence; such was
the family of the Clintons. The law, too, was beginning to take high
rank as an honorable and influential profession.
Most of the gentry were Episcopalians, theirs being practically the
state church, and very influential and wealthy; some belonged to the
Calvinistic bodies,--notably the Livingstons, who were in large part
Presbyterians, while certain of their number were prominent members of
the Dutch congregations. It was from among the gentry that the little
group of New York revolutionary leaders came; men of singular purity,
courage, and ability, who, if they could not quite rank with the
brilliant Virginians of that date, nevertheless stood close behind,
alongside of the Massachusetts men and ahead of those from any other
colony; that, too, it must be kept in mind, at a time when New York was
inferior in wealth and population to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or
Virginia, and little, if at all, in advance of Maryland or Connecticut.
The great families also furnished the leaders of the loyalists during
the war; such were the De Lanceys, whose influence around the mouth of
the Hudson was second to that of none others; and the Johnsons, who, in
mansions that were also castles, held half-feudal, half-barbaric sway
over the valley of the upper Mohawk, where they were absolute rulers,
ready and willing to wage war on their own account, relying on their
numerous kinsmen, their armed negro slaves, their trained bands of
Gaelic retainers, and their hosts of savage allies, drawn from among the
dreaded Iroquois.
The bulk of the people were small farmers in the country, tradesmen and
mechanics in the towns. They were for the most part members of some of
the Calvinistic churches, the great majority of the whole population
belonging to the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations. The
farmers were thrifty, set in their ways, and obstinate; the townsmen
thrifty also, but restless and turbulent. Both farmers and townsmen were
thoroughly independent and self-respecting, and were gradually getting
more and more political power. They had always stood tenaciously by
their rights, from the days of the early Stuart governors, who had
complained loudly of the "Dutch Republicans." But they were narrow,
jealous of each other, as well as of outsiders, and slow to act
together.
The political struggles were very bitter. The great families, under
whose banners they were carried on, though all intermarried, were
divided by keen rivalries into opposing camps. Yet they joined in
dreading too great an extension of democracy; and in return were
suspected by the masses, who grumblingly followed their lead, of
hostility to the popular cause. The Episcopalians, though greatly in the
minority, possessed most power, and harassed in every way they dared the
dissenting sects, especially the Presbyterians--for the Dutch Reformed
and Huguenot churches had certain rights guaranteed them by treaty. The
Episcopalian clergy were royalists to a man, and it was in their
congregations that the main strength of the Tories lay, although these
also contained many who became the stanchest of patriots. King's College
was controlled by trustees of this faith. They were busy trying to turn
it into a diminutive imitation of Oxford, and did their best to make it,
in its own small way, almost as much a perverse miracle of backward and
invariable wrong-headedness as was its great model. Its president, when
the Revolution broke out, was a real old wine-bibbing Tory parson,
devoted to every worn-out theory that inculcated humble obedience to
church and crown; and he was most summarily expelled by the mob.
Some important political consequences arose from the fact that the mass
of the people belonged to some one or other of the branches of the
Calvinistic faith--of all faiths the most republican in its tendencies.
They were strongly inclined to put their republican principles into
practice as well in state as in church; they tended towards hostility to
the crown, and were strenuous in their opposition to the extension of
the Episcopal power, always threatened by some English statesmen; their
cry was against "the King and the Bishops." It is worth noting that the
Episcopalian churches were shut up when the Revolution broke out, and
were reopened when the British troops occupied the city. The Calvinistic
churches, on the contrary, which sided with the revolutionists, were
shut when the British came into New York, were plundered by the troops,
and were not reopened until after the evacuation.
Thus three parties developed, although the third, destined to overwhelm
the others, had not yet come to the front. The first consisted of the
royalists, or monarchists, the men who believed that power came from
above, from the king and the bishops, and who were aristocratic in their
sympathies; who were Americans only secondarily, and who stood by their
order against their country. This party contained many of the great
manorial families and also of the merchants; and in certain places, as
in Staten Island, the east end of Long Island, the upper valley of the
Mohawk, and part of Westchester County, the influence of the upper
classes combined with the jealousy and ignorance of large sections of
the lower, to give it a clear majority of the whole population. The
second party was headed by the great families of Whig or liberal
sympathies, who, when the split came, stood by their country, although
only very moderate republicans; and it held also in its ranks the mass
of moderate men, who wished freedom, were resolute in defense of their
rights, and had republican leanings, but who also appreciated the good
in the system under which they were living. Finally came the extremists,
the men of strong republican tendencies, whose delight it was to toast
Pym, Hampden, and the regicides. These were led by the agitators in the
towns, and were energetic and active, but were unable to effect anything
until the blunders of the British ministers threw the moderate men over
to their side. They furnished none of the greater revolutionary leaders
in New York, though the Clintons came near the line that divided them
from the second party.
The last political contest carried on under the crown occurred in 1768,
the year in which Morris graduated from college, when the last colonial
legislature was elected. It reminds us of our own days when we read of
the fears entertained of the solid German vote, and of the hostility to
the Irish, who were hated and sneered at as "beggars" by the English
party and the rich Episcopalians. The Irish of those days, however, were
Presbyterians, and in blood more English than Gaelic. St. Patrick's Day
was celebrated then as now, by public processions, as well as otherwise;
but when, for instance, on March 17, 1766, the Irish residents of New
York celebrated the day by a dinner, they gave certain toasts that would
sound strangely in the ears of Milesian patriots of the present time,
for they included "The Protestant Interest," and "King William, of
glorious, pious, and immortal memory."
The royalist or conservative side in this contest in 1768 was led by the
De Lanceys, their main support being drawn from among the Episcopalians,
and most of the larger merchants helping them. The Whigs, including
those with republican leanings, followed the Livingstons, and were drawn
mainly from the Presbyterian and other Calvinistic congregations. The
moderate men on this occasion went with the De Lanceys, and gave them
the victory. In consequence the colonial legislature was conservative
and loyal in tone, and anti-republican, although not ultra-tory, as a
whole; and thus when the revolutionary outbreak began it went much
slower than was satisfactory to the patriot party, and its actions were
finally set aside by the people.
When Morris graduated from college, as mentioned above, he was not yet
seventeen years old. His college career was like that of any other
bright, quick boy, without over much industry or a passion for learning.
For mathematics he possessed a genuine taste; he was particularly fond
of Shakespeare; and even thus early he showed great skill in discussion
and much power of argument. He made the oration, or graduating address,
of his class, choosing for the subject "Wit and Beauty;" it was by no
means a noteworthy effort, and was couched in the dreadful Johnsonian
English of the period. A little later, when he took his master's degree,
he again delivered an oration,--this time on "Love." In point of style
this second speech was as bad as the first, disfigured by cumbrous
Latinisms and a hopeless use of the superlative; but there were one or
two good ideas in it.
As soon as he graduated, he set to work to study law, deciding on this
profession at once as being best suited for an active, hopeful,
ambitious young man of his social standing and small fortune, who was
perfectly self-confident and conscious of his own powers. He soon
became interested in his studies, and followed them with great patience,
working hard and mastering both principles and details with ease. He was
licensed to practice as an attorney in 1771, just three years after
another young man, destined to stand as his equal in the list of New
York's four or five noted statesmen, John Jay, had likewise been
admitted to the bar; and among the very few cases in which Morris was
engaged of which the record has been kept is one concerning a contested
election, in which he was pitted against Jay, and bore himself well.
Before this, and while not yet of age, he had already begun to play a
part in public affairs. The colony had been run in debt during the
French and Indian wars, and a bill was brought forward in the New York
Assembly to provide for this by raising money through the issue of
interest-bearing bills of credit. The people, individually, were largely
in debt, and hailed the proposal with much satisfaction, on the theory
that it would "make money more plenty;" our revolutionary forefathers
being unfortunately not much wiser or more honest in their ways of
looking at the public finances than we ourselves, in spite of our state
repudiators, national greenbackers, and dishonest silver men.
Morris attacked the bill very forcibly, and with good effect, opposing
any issue of paper money, which could bring no absolute relief, but
merely a worse catastrophe of bankruptcy in the end; he pointed out that
it was nothing but a mischievous pretense for putting off the date of a
payment that would have to be met anyhow, and that ought rather to be
met at once with honest money gathered from the resources of the
province. He showed the bad effects such a system of artificial credit
would have on private individuals, the farmers and tradesmen, by
encouraging them to speculate and go deeper into debt; and he criticised
unsparingly the attitude of the majority of his fellow-citizens in
wishing such a measure of relief, not only for their short-sighted
folly, but also for their criminal and selfish dishonesty in trying to
procure a temporary benefit for themselves at the lasting expense of the
community; finally he strongly advised them to bear with patience small
evils in the present rather than to remedy them by inflicting infinitely
greater ones on themselves and their descendants in the future.
At the law he did very well, having the advantages of his family name,
and of his own fine personal appearance. He was utterly devoid of
embarrassment, and his perfect self-assurance and freedom from any
timidity or sense of inferiority left his manner without the least
tinge of awkwardness, and gave clear ground for his talents and ambition
to make their mark.
However, hardworking and devoted to his profession though he was, he had
the true family restlessness and craving for excitement, and soon after
he was admitted to the bar, he began to long for foreign travel, as was
natural enough in a young provincial gentleman of his breeding and
education. In a letter to an old friend (William Smith, a man of
learning, the historian of the colony, and afterwards its chief
justice), in whose office he had studied law, he asks advice in the
matter, and gives as his reasons for wishing to make the trip the desire
"to form my manners and address by the example of the truly polite, to
rub off in the gay circle a few of the many barbarisms which
characterize a provincial education, and to curb the vain
self-sufficiency which arises from comparing ourselves with companions
who are inferior to us." He then anticipates the objections that may be
made on the score of the temptations to which he will be exposed by
saying: "If it be allowed that I have a _taste_ for pleasure, it may
naturally follow that I shall avoid those low pleasures which abound on
this as well as on the other side of the Atlantic. As for these
poignant joys which are the lot of the affluent, like Tantalus I may
grasp at them, but they will certainly be out of my reach." In this last
sentence he touches on his narrow means; and it was on this point that
his old preceptor harped in making his reply, cunningly instilling into
his mind the danger of neglecting his business, and bringing up the
appalling example of an "Uncle Robin," who, having made three pleasure
trips to England, "began to figure with thirty thousand pounds, and did
not leave five thousand;" going on "What! '_Virtus post nummos_? Curse
on inglorious wealth?' Spare your indignation. I, too, detest the
ignorant miser; but both virtue and ambition abhor poverty, or they are
mad. Rather imitate your grandfather [who had stayed in America and
prospered] than your uncle."
The advice may have had its effect; at any rate Morris stayed at home,
and, with an occasional trip to Philadelphia, got all he could out of
the society of New York, which, little provincial seaport though it was,
was yet a gay place, gayer then than any other American city save
Charleston, the society consisting of the higher crown officials, the
rich merchants, and the great landed proprietors. Into this society
Morris, a handsome, high-bred young fellow, of easy manners and far
from puritanical morals, plunged with a will, his caustic wit and rather
brusque self-assertion making him both admired and feared. He enjoyed it
all to the full, and in his bright, chatty letters to his friends
pictures himself as working hard, but gay enough also: "up all
night--balls, concerts, assemblies--all of us mad in the pursuit of
pleasure."
But the Revolution was at hand; and both pleasure and office-work had to
give way to something more important.