The University Press of Kansas has published The Constitution's Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter (2023), by Dennis C. Rasmussen (Syracuse University). A description from the Press:
Strikingly few Americans know who
wrote the Constitution. Even fewer know that he was a peg-legged ladies’
man with a wicked sense of humor, a staunch opponent of slavery, and an
unabashed elitist. Gouverneur Morris, who has been described as “the
most colorful man in North America” at the time of the founding, was a
dominant figure at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. In fact, he
spoke more often, proposed more motions, and had more motions adopted
than any other delegate. He also put the Constitution into its final
form, choosing the arrangement and much of the wording of its
provisions, not to mention composing the famous preamble (“We the People
of the United States . . .”) nearly from scratch. The Constitution’s Penman is the first book to explore the constitutional vision of this fascinating, neglected, and influential American.
As
Dennis Rasmussen deftly shows, some aspects of Morris’s political
thought were intriguingly idiosyncratic, such as his argument that the
Senate should be an aristocratic body whose members would serve life
terms without pay. Other aspects of his vision for America’s
constitutional order, however, were astoundingly prescient. Morris saw
as clearly as any of the framers the need for a powerful executive with a
popular mandate, the central role that parties would play in American
politics, and the unfathomable evils that slavery would visit on
American life. Rasmussen demonstrates that it is impossible to fully
understand the Constitution without appreciating the central role that
Morris played in shaping it.
More information is available
here. An interview with Professor Rasmussen is available
here, at New Books Network.
-- Karen Tani
