Mr. President (50 page)

  5
. Wills,
“Negro President,”
6–8; Richards,
Slave Power
, 9; Douglas Southall Freeman,
George Washington: Patriot and President
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), 6:343–48.

  6
. Adams to John Taylor, April 15, 1814, in Adams,
Works
, 6:456–57.

  7
. Ames to Christopher Gore, March 5, 1800, cited in Edward J. Larson,
A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800
(New York: Free Press, 2007), 84.

  1
. Even when specifically focusing on Morris’s views and impact, scholars studying the presidency at the Constitutional Convention who do not take a narrative approach have missed Morris’s maneuverings. See, for example, Donald L. Robinson, “Gouverneur Morris and the Design of the American Presidency,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
17, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 319–28. (This bicentennial issue, titled
The Origins and Invention of the American Presidency
, also featured separate articles on the influence of Madison, Wilson, Hamilton, Washington, and Adams.)
     Although most studies eschew the narrative form, not all do. One of the classics in this field, Charles Thach’s 1923
The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789
(repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), was based loosely on a narrative construction, and this led Thach to observe that Morris was “the real floor leader of those attached to the idea of the independent executive” (99). Even so, Thach’s focus on Morris’s intellectual positions led him to overlook the actual dynamics of Morris’s floor leadership. After analyzing at some length Morris’s impressive speech on July 19, he failed to mention that those words caused the convention to reverse its earlier preference for a single term, seven-year president chosen by Congress, only to return to that default mode a few days later. Similarly, because he focused on positions to the exclusion of procedures, Thach missed Morris’s maneuverings of August 24 and 31 that sent the selection of the president back into committee. Subsequent studies, following Thach, have declared Morris a “floor leader” without demonstrating what that entailed. His speeches are quoted but his actions overlooked. One such work, William B. Michaelsen,
Creating the American Presidency, 1775–1789
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), agrees with Thatch’s “real floor leader” assessment and notes in particular that Morris “took things into his own hands” by bringing up presidential selection in the Committee of Eleven (Michaelsen, with other modern commentators, calls it the Committee on Remaining Matters). By organizing his brief work around twelve subject heads (“presidential selection,” “Impeachment,” “Veto Power,” etc.), however, he misses the narrative thread that would reveal Morris’s machinations.
     One recent study that does treat the debate on selection of the president as a dynamic process and therefore takes note of Morris’s “omnipresence” is William H. Riker, “The Heresthetics of Constitution Making: The Presidency in 1787, with Comments on Determinism and Rational Choice,”
American Political Science Review
78, no. 1 (March 1984): 1–16. As the title suggests, Riker’s narrative supports his “heresthetic” analysis (a term Riker coined), which is intended to reveal how political actors reframe debates to break apparent deadlocks and achieve their preconceived ends. Riker’s protagonist in this case is Gouverneur Morris—“ever the opportunist and an exceptionally adroit parliament man”—but as Gerry Mackie observes in
Democracy Defended
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Riker’s argument is essentially reductionist, forcing the narrative into the narrow confines of his structural model. While Riker gives credence to Morris’s strategic maneuvering, he does so mechanistically, failing to allow for the organic evolution of Morris’s own thoughts or give much credence to the meaningful philosophic argumentation at the convention. Further, because both Riker’s presentation and Mackie’s rebuttal are framed in such technical terms, their debate has done little to advertise Morris’s role in shaping presidential selection. A more accessible treatment, which highlights the small-state/large-state theme discussed by both Riker and Mackie, is Shlomo Slonim, “The Electoral College at Philadelphia: The Evolution of an Ad Hoc Congress for the Selection of a President,”
Journal of American History
73, no. 1 (June 1986): 35–58. While Slonim’s narrative approach allows him to uncover the basic outline of the elector compromise, he does not dig deeply into the strategies and political maneuvering that breathe life into the tale, and he therefore underplays Morris’s role.

  2
. Morris’s recent biographers, none of whom give Morris sufficient credit for his dynamic role in restructuring the presidency, include William Howard Adams,
Gouverneur
Morris: An Independent Life
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); Richard Brookhiser,
Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution
(New York: Free Press, 2003); James J. Kirschke,
Gouverneur Morris: Author, Statesman, and Man of the World
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005); Melanie Randolph Miller,
An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris
(Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2008). Of these writers, only Miller takes any note of Morris’s participation in the Committee of Eleven’s restructuring of the presidency, and even she does not disclose Morris’s maneuverings on July 19 and August 24 and 31, or in fashioning the committee’s reversals of the working draft. While Kirschke, following Thach, states that Morris “was the floor leader of the drive for a strong and independent chief executive” (187), he does not provide a narrative of what that floor leadership entailed.

  3
. Notable general narratives of the Constitutional Convention include, in reverse chronological order, Richard Beeman,
Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
(New York: Random House, 2009); David O. Stewart,
The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); Carol Berkin,
A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution
(New York: Harcourt, 2002); Thornton Anderson,
Creating the Constitution: The Convention of 1787 and the First Congress
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier,
Decision in Philadelphia: The Constitutional Convention of 1787
(New York: Reader’s Digest, 1986); Catherine Drinker Bowen,
Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Clinton Rossiter,
1787: The Grand Convention
(New York: Macmillan, 1966).

  4
. Rossiter,
1787
, 248; Jack Rakove,
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 76; Beeman,
Plain, Honest Men
, 252.