If not quite a Founding Father, an authority on enjoying life

“GENTLEMAN Revolutionary” is an indulgent look at one of the men who played a secondary role in the creation of the United States. Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at the National Review and author of books on George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, among others, calls Gouverneur Morris a founding father. He was more like a founding cousin.

The giants of the era -- Washington, Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison -- “measured themselves,” as Brookhiser writes, “by their service to the country they were making.” Morris, too, Brookhiser says, “was moved by the same tidal pull of public good.”

But there was a profound difference between Morris and the others (if you grant Hamilton some leeway on the public-private seesaw). “Mr. Morris, alone among the founding fathers, thought that his private life was as his public life,” Brookhiser writes. “Being a gentleman mattered to him as much as being a great man.

“When public life was not going well, he could go home -- not to bide his time before the next opportunity, or to enjoy the retirement on the pedestal of a Cincinnatus, but because he enjoyed farming, reading, eating, fishing, making money and making love as much as founding a state.”

Morris’ frank enjoyment of life’s pleasures gives this biography its charm. His claim to greatness in the American pantheon lies chiefly in his work on the Constitution. He didn’t actually compose it, as the book’s subtitle implies. Most of that credit goes to the Constitutional Convention and its principal theorist and chronicler, James Madison. To take a phrase from newspapers, Morris was the Constitution’s rewrite man. That is no littlepraise. He took others’ words and stripped them to their essentials, imposing clarity and conciseness on this bold new charter of human government and liberty.

Years later, Madison told a historian that “the finish given to the style and the arrangement of the Constitution clearly belongs to Mr. Morris.” It was Morris who wrote the Preamble “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ....” Brookhiser argues plausibly that the introductory phrase established the people rather than the 13 states as the source of legitimacy and power. “Those three [opening] words may be his greatest legacy,” Brookhiser says.

That is no mean feat for a man noted more for his charm than his wisdom, more for his fluent but impulsive speech than for his gravity in counsel.

As a member of the manor-holding Morris family of New York, he was born to the status of gentleman and held on to it and its perquisites, not the least of them money. Accidents cost him much of the flesh of his right arm and his left leg. But neither infirmity seems to have inhibited his lifelong pursuit of women. He was tall and good-looking and confident of his love-making prowess. It served him well at home and abroad. In 1788, he sailed for Paris to assist in the business affairs he shared with his friend Robert Morris (no relation). He would remain six years, with a side stay in London, becoming President Washington’s minister to Paris in 1792. Like Franklin, who had been there before him, Morris took advantage of everything Paris had to offer. He observed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and the beginnings of the French Revolution; he advised the Marquis de Lafayette.

He also met Adele de Flahaut, wife of a count and mistress of the perennial French foreign minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. In his diary, Morris wrote in words reminiscent of poet Dante Alighieri, “and that day we read no more,” that he had sat down to help her with a translation: “We sat down with the best disposition imaginable but instead of a translation ... “ (The ellipses are Morris’.)

In December 1798, Morris returned home to New York, got married and stayed married. Enraged by the War of 1812, he supported a proposed secession of New England, a position that justly puzzles and disturbs his biographer.

Brookhiser makes much of the fact that Morris supported a canal between New York and Lake Erie, but does not mention that his idea was apparently for a free-flowing canal, overlooking the fact that the lake is 571 feet above sea level. In the end, the Erie Canal, with locks, was pushed through by New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton.

Despite his impulsiveness, Morris seems to have been a delightful, easygoing companion. Too easygoing, in an age that had ardent giants for statesmen, to be elevated to the august company of the Founding Fathers.

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Gentleman Revolutionary

Gouverneur Morris -- The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution

Richard Brookhiser

Free Press: 254 pp., $26