Gouverneur Morris. Theodore Roosevelt
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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 John Jay for furnishing me many valuable letters, hitherto unpublished, of both Jay and Morris; and for giving me additional information about Morris's private life, and other matters.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.
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