We The People

Hey, if you had to shout out some of the founding fathers of the United States of America, chances are your go-to guys would be George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and now thanks very much to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton. But there was another architect of American independence, the guy who coined the phrase, we the people.

He was brilliant, colorful, and visionary. From the bedchambers of Versailles to the Continental Congress, to pledging his love to a woman involved in a murder, he lived large. Even the way he died was so shocking and bizarre, you'd think that alone would have made him a household name. And they got a small beam of light.

True weird stuff. Did you hate history when you were in school? Trying to memorize all those dates and battles, writing papers on the Monroe Doctrine and the Louisiana Purchase, only to have almost every single fact you'd ferreted out, leave your head immediately upon turning it in, like water draining out of a leaky bucket. The War of 1812, Charlemagne, the Bolshevik Revolution, Manifest Destiny, Oliver Cromwell, the overheated classrooms, that brick of school cafeteria pizza sitting in your gut, all conspiring to knock you out cold. Is that bell ever going to put you out of your misery and just ring? Oh, thank God. History should be the least boring thing in the world.

History is made up of stories, and stories are one of the greatest and coolest and most fun things that humans are capable of. Behind every dull factoid and every dry date are stories of courage and cowardice and balls-out craziness. The eminent and infamous figures of histories whose accomplishments or crimes we dutifully memorize were all once flesh and blood people, and people are the most fascinating flawed messes. People can be noble, of course, but people can also be awful, selfish, stupid, greedy, cruel, dishonest, hypocritical, and those are the good ones. When the only history we learn are the names and dates and duration of we can fall into the trap of thinking that the people of the past were somehow better people, better citizens, living in a better society. That kind of thinking leads us to wonder if maybe our society would be better if we turned back the clock and lived by the old rules.

Like right now, there are a goodly number of agitators on Twitter who think that women having the right to vote has led to all sorts of social problems. There are revolting numbers of people who love to bring segregation back. I'm not saying these folks are stupid, but I am saying they're ignorant, and ignorance of history lulls us into thinking that we missed out on the good old days, which distracts us from the work of making today the best of all possible days.

America is a young nation, so young that Max's dad, at age 101, has lived more than 40% of our country's history. That's mind-blowing, isn't it? And Americans take a lot of pride in that history, in our Declaration of Independence, in our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. So it might come as a shock to you that the person who wrote the Constitution, the man who dipped a quill in ink and sketched those now-immortal words, we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, that founding father has been forgotten.

And not recently. A little more than 100 years ago, a newspaper in his birthplace, New York, published an article about how overgrown and neglected his grave had become. And was there no one willing to clean it up and honor his memory? Washington has Mount Vernon. Jefferson has Monticello. Hamilton has a smash-hit Broadway musical.

But Governor Morris? All he has is us going, I'm sorry, who? Governor Morris. He was born on January 30, 1752, at the family mansion in the Bronx. Back then, the Bronx was rural, real farm country, and the Morris family was wealthy. They called their house Morrisania, which is a dead giveaway that old money was involved.

The baby boy was christened Governor, pronounced like the elected office, but spelled like a fancy French cheese. Again, your old money at work. Morris' grandfather served as the British Governor of New Jersey. His father was a prominent landowner and judge. His mother was a true loyalist. Morris had a half-brother named Staats who served as a major general in the British Army.

You can see that our man here was not born into a family wired for rebellion, and it was expected that little Governor would grow up to be every bit the loyal crown subject. What changed his political loyalties? Why did this son of privilege throw his light in with many considered a bunch of treasonous rebel rousers? We ourselves are living in a moment right now where we see families horribly divided by political ideology. Relationships broken, holidays, and milestone events like weddings and graduations turned into minefields. We all wring our hands about it and wish for the days when we could agree to disagree. But if you think about it, families being cleaved in two by political differences is an age-old American tradition. It started in the colonies when you were either a rebel or a loyalist. It continued through the Civil War when you were either blue or gray.

Pick a side. Pick a sometimes literal pill to die on. It was just lucky that when Governor on Independence, he had at least one family member on his side, his other half-brother Lewis, the signature you can find right now on the Declaration of Independence. In 1775, at age 23, Morris found himself elected to represent his family and the Morris household in the New York Provincial Congress. Now, I must pause here and say that I cannot get my head around this at all. Granted, my ancestors were illiterate farmers in the old country back then, and I think about half of them probably read the patterns of thrown chicken entrails to predict the future. So, yeah, having our very own rep in Congress to fight for our best interests? How rich people crazy is that? The trouble was, though, Morris found himself in agreement with his fellow elected reps who were determined to transform New York from a colony into an independent state. And you know who hated Morris's new enthusiasm for statehood and independence? Mom and Dad. They were like, this is not how we raised you. And then in 1776, here comes the Battle of Long Island. And that August, the British Army seized New York City.

The Morris family estate, Morrisania, just happened to be perched on some prime real estate on the Harlem River, right across from Manhattan. Morris's mother, loyal subject that she was, handed the property right over to the British military. Now it was clear that Governor Morris stood opposite his family, and there could be no making nice, no agreeing to disagree.

By January 1778, Morris was sworn into the Continental Congress, and he was soon assigned to a committee that was working on reforms and improvements for the military. That's where he met someone you are very familiar with. The big daddy of his own bad self, George Washington. Even as Morris championed independence for the colony of New York, he had real ambivalence about breaking from the crown. He was a wealthy man from a powerful family, and he saw that the rebellion in the colonies was a threat to his position and privilege. It was like he was hoping that some compromise might be reached, you know, independence light. In a letter to George Washington, Morris wrote, in this crisis, it is the duty of every man to stand by the government and bid noisy agitators to cease. Oh, and how we've been bidding noisy agitators to cease every waking minute since we kicked King George to the curb. But like families divided by politics, noisy agitators are another proud American tradition. So what changed? Why did Morris decide to be team noisy agitator? It's simple. When the British Army took New York City, they were in a position to confiscate everything Morris owned. Sure, his family had played the appeasement card by inviting the army to take over Morrisania. But anyone who thinks appeasement is an effective strategy hasn't been paying attention. History is freaking exhausted from showing us over and over again, that appeasement might buy a little time, but it never buys a lasting peace.

And Morris's change of heart looks like it came down to this. When he saw his own rights in jeopardy, he suddenly decided that no human rights should be violated. And that was the day Governor Morris joined the rebellion. Now, what I like about Morris is that he was one of the very first go big or go home dudes. He doesn't just join the rebellion, he becomes a spokesman for the Continental Army and Congress. He played a huge part in getting the funding for the army and in instituting the kinds of reforms and changes that were needed to turn a rough and tumble colonial militia into the kind of military force that can take down an empire. When the 13 original colonies got together and prepared the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, Morris was the youngest person to sign. And here's a fun fact about this document, which was ratified by all 13 states as they were now called. It was ratified in February 1779. That document gave our would-be nation its name, the United States of America. And now for another wacky historical echo.

You know how so much of the political debate in the U.S. today centers on the role of government in people's lives? Big government versus small government. A powerful federal government versus the rights of each individual state. Guess what? Another proud American tradition. Though he was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, Morris disagreed with one fundamental point. The Articles proposed a very weak centralized or federal government, but Morris favored a strong federal government. It cost him the election and also, in a roundabout way, it cost him a leg. Because he ended up moving to Philadelphia where he was able to work as a lawyer and as a merchant after he lost re-election. Now let's talk about Governor Morris the man.

They say he was tall and resembled George Washington to such a degree that he served as the model for the statue of Washington that was placed in the capital of Virginia. They said he was a beautiful man, intelligent, witty, and romantic. And he loved the ladies and was a very busy bachelor, not marrying until he was 57 years old. He was quite the diary keeper too. In fact, some of those diaries were published in 1888 and again in 1939. And my goodness did some tea get spilled and not in the Boston Harbor. So the story of how he lost his leg goes like this. Morris had a lady friend in Philadelphia, one who happened to be married. They were enjoying a little tryst at her place when the lady's husband arrived home unexpectedly. Morris gallantly flung himself out of a second story window in an attempt to preserve her honor and probably dodge a bullet from her furious husband. His leg was crushed in the fall, shattered so badly that amputation was the only medical recourse. You're glad you're alive today, right? Now the official story is that Morris's leg was severely injured in a carriage accident. You choose which story you like better.

Morris replaced his missing limb with the simplest wooden peg and didn't ease up on his amorous adventures even a little bit. There is a super fun letter to Morris from his friend and fellow founding father, John Jay, who was very concerned about his buddy. Jay wrote that he was sorry about the injury, but that he wished that Morris had lost something else, something far troublesome than his leg. Now, despite the lost leg, Morris thrived during his time in Philadelphia.

He was appointed the superintendent of finance for the United States and his impact on our financial system is huge. More on that after we bounce the Brits and commence to nation building. He was chosen as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. He was a in the necessity of a strong central government. And as we now know, it was his writing that shaped what ultimately became the U.S. Constitution. Now, Morris resented being called an aristocrat, although he certainly was an aristocrat. He may have turned his back on his family's Tory loyalties, but he never let go of certain cynical beliefs about how power ought best be distributed.

For example, he thought only landowners should be permitted to vote. He feared that the poor would be likely or at least tempted to sell their votes to the highest bidder. He doubted that the common person in quotes was even capable of the kind of self-governance that was the whole point of the war for independence. It's really contradictory to see him passionately take up the colonist cause while at the same time giving the side eye to the democratic principles driving that cause. Here's another example. He was opposed to granting full and equal statehood to any of the Western territories. Why? He did not believe that the frontier would offer up the kinds of enlightened statesmen capable of serving the administration. He said, quote, The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political talents. If the Western people get the power into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic interests. Oh, ouch, snobby much.

But wait, was it Morris showing his wealthy East Coast privilege or did he have a bigger agenda? What you don't know about Governor Morris is that he was one of the few founding fathers who was violently opposed to slavery. Some historians argue that Morris feared that the Western states, given the chance, would go all in on slavery. Morris wanted to limit the power that slaveholding states would have in the new union and was therefore convinced that the Western states must never, ever be allowed to gain equal footing with the Eastern states. For Morris, slavery was an abomination and one that harshly conflicted with what he considered the purpose of the U.S. Constitution to protect and uphold the rights of human beings. According to James Madison, Morris said, Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The houses in this city, Philadelphia, are worth more than all the slaves which cover the rice swamps of South Carolina. And he also said, The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this, that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina, who goes to the coast of Africa and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice. I'm telling you violently anti-slavery. And there's something else that Morris fervently believed in. And since he's about to head off to France to serve as Minister Plenipotentiary, now there's a job title, let's make sure we cover it. It was religious liberty.

Morris believed that every human should be permitted to practice their chosen religion without judgment or harassment. He campaigned hard to include language, protecting freedom of religion and the Constitution. Legend, icon, patriot. Explain to me how this guy got forgotten because I don't get it. Now, it's France, 1792. It's the French Revolution. And here comes that randy lover of a good time, Governor Morris, and brought his diary, which later proved to be an incredible resource, offering as it did a peak of life at the court of the beleaguered Louis XVI and his beautiful and much maligned wife, Marie Antoinette. These are the diaries I mentioned earlier, the ones published in 1888 and 1939. Morris, when he wasn't having risky sex with a married woman at the Louvre, true story, or visiting another noble woman as she bathed, also a true story, found himself much more sympathetic to poor Marie Antoinette than he was toward the rioting French citizens who had neither bread nor cake to eat. But first the Louvre, because of course I am telling that story. Back then, the Louvre was not an art museum open to the public. It was a palace. And living there was one of Morris's many lady friends. The man spared few details in his diaries, though he did occasionally use code words or euphemisms, like in this entry, where the word celebrating actually means fornicating. Dear diary, I go to the Louvre. Take the chance of interruption and celebrate in the passage while mademoiselle is at the harpsichord in the drawing room. The husband is below. Visitors are hourly expected. The doors are all open. What a filthy, naughty boy you are, Governor Morris. In another entry, he describes paying a visit to the countess, Adele Flout, who was feeling a little bit under weather that day and had her servants draw a bath. Once installed in the tub, she sent for Morris. And as the French people outside the palace clamored for basic human dignity and a little something to eat, Countess Flout had fresh milk poured into her bathwater. With the water now sufficiently cloudy, her modesty was preserved. So what if starving urchins were huddled just outside the walls? And must we talk about such things while relaxing in the bath?

In his diary, Morris described this most peculiar social call like this. She tells me that it is usual to receive visits in the bath, and I suppose it is, for otherwise I should have been the last person for whom it would have been permitted. Appearances are scrupulously observed between us. Something else Morris's diaries reveal is very unusual for the time. I've told you that Morris absolutely loved women. He was a tomcat, a rake, a bounder, all those old-fashioned words. But he was after so much more than physical gratification. He was interested in women's minds, and he gave them full credit for their thoughts and ideas and political savvy. He was a man who was a fan of the French Revolutionaries. Morris believed that monarchy was the most suitable form of government for the French temperament. I was seeing a little more of his East Coast privilege leaking out, maybe, but Morris never wavered from his responsibilities as minister despite being in France during the most fraught days of what we call the Terror. He was nearly lynched by an angry mob at one point. The only thing that saved him was his quick wit.

As the enraged crowd pressed forward, hollering for his death, Morris bent down, released the clasp on his wooden peg and hoisted it aloft, roaring, I am an American and I lost my limb fighting for liberty. The crowd went wild with enthusiasm. They had no idea that he'd lost his leg escaping his lover's husband or in a carriage accident, depending on which tail you believe.

Either way, in 1794, the French government basically told him to go ahead and hit the road. His replacement, James Monroe, arrived and instead of risking exhibitionist sex with married women at the Louvre, Monroe set about securing the freedom of political prisoner Thomas Paine. Back home in the United States, Morris once again served in the Senate and once again was defeated at re-election. And then he did the thing no one expected. He got married. It was 1809. He was 57 years old. His bride was 20 years younger and the sister-in-law of Thomas Jefferson. Her name was Anne Carey Randolph and she came with a truly scandalous past. Anne, better known by her nickname Nancy, was a very attractive, appealing, high-spirited young woman. After her mother's death, her father had remarried a woman the same age as Nancy, who was then 18. The two women did not get along and soon enough Nancy's new stepmother demanded she leave the house. So Nancy headed to Farmville, Virginia to live with her sister Judith and her brother-in-law Richard Randolph at their tobacco plantation. The plantation's name? Bizarre. No, that's literally its name. Bizarre.

Bizarre Plantation, which is a bizarre name for any plantation outside of a Jordan Peele film, but that's what they called it. Anywho, it didn't take long for ugly gossip and rumors to be whispered around town that the lovely Nancy was far too fond of her sister's husband and he of her. In the summer of 1792, there was pointed talk of Nancy's very noticeable weight gain and much speculation as to the cause. A few months later in October, Nancy, her sister, and her sister's husband made the 20-mile journey to visit the estate of a cousin. The second night they were there, Nancy's screams brought servants running to her bedchamber. Her brother-in-law and rumored candle to be lit. The next day, the bedding was taken from her room. Servants whispered of finding blood on the bed linens and on the stairs. The trio departed a few days later to make the return trip home to Bizarre and not long after that, in a pile of old shingles, the corpse of an infant was discovered. In April 1793, Richard Randolph was accused of murdering the baby born to Nancy.

It's not really clear whether or not her sister Judith testified. Some accounts say she did not and some say that she gave her husband an alibi for the terrible night of the crime. In any case, Richard was acquitted of murder though he soon became an object of ridicule and Nancy, though she was never tried, suffered greatly. She was cast as a Jezebel and scorned as a fallen woman and when Richard Randolph died just three years later under very mysterious circumstances, his brother accused Nancy of having poisoned her former lover, something she denied. He threw her out and she was forced to take shelter in another nearby abandoned plantation house.

After that, she scraped by, existing mostly on the kindness and charity of her brothers and with the support and goodwill of none other than Thomas Jefferson. Nancy was living in a boarding house in New York City when she was paid a visit by Governor Morris. The two had met many years earlier in Virginia and Morris was aware of the unfortunate events that had ruined Nancy's prospects. He offered her the position of housekeeper at his estate reclaimed from the defeat of British Army and still called Morrisania. Oh and before I forget, Morris had also redecorated the place with loads of furniture shipped home from France. Furniture that had belonged to the now beheaded Marie Antoinette. Imagine dusting those pieces, Marie Antoinette's furniture.

After some thought, Nancy accepted Morris' offer and nine months later on Christmas day 1809, the pair shocked Morris' guests by getting married in front of the fireplace. Nancy wore her plain housekeeper's frock in lieu of a wedding dress and accounts of the day say that Morris wore a rascally grin, so delighted was he by the shock on every face in the room. Forget how unlikely the pairing, forget his reputation as a player and hers as a ruined woman, they found happiness together. They did. Four years after the Christmas wedding, Nancy gave birth to a son whom they named Gouverneur Morris Jr., but sadly their happiness was all too brief. On November 16, 1816, in Morrisania, the same home where he was born, Governor Morris died. He was 64 and how he died is one of the more bizarre and terrible things you'll hear today, so brace, especially if you're a dude, just brace for it. Morris had been having trouble with urination.

He treated it with the standard remedies of the day, laudanum, which won't make you pee, but you'll be unconscious, so who cares? Bloodletting, cupping, an apothecary shop worth of herbs. We don't know for certain what caused this affliction, might have been as simple as a UTI, but Morris was miserable and so desperate for relief that he removed a length of whalebone from his wife's corset, and I think you know where this is going. I mean, no one wants it to go there, but that's where it's going, ready or not. Morris thought there might be some sort of, you know, piece of whalebone into his penis, drove it down, basically a homemade catheter. It didn't work, and it had to hurt like the Dickens, like the original Dickens, like the worst of all possible Dickens, you know, it had to hurt, and Morris didn't survive it. It wasn't just the elegant phrasings and framing of the Constitution that Morris gave us. James Madison was unequivocal on that, writing, the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to Mr. Governor Morris. Morris also worked with Alexander Hamilton to put the newly formed nation on a solid financial footing. It was Morris's idea to base U.S. currency on the decimal system, the very same dollars and cents we use every day. In fact, Morris invented the word cent, and if you'd offered him one cent for his thoughts back then, I bet he figured he'd be remembered for at least that. Another thing about Governor Morris that I think you'll want to know is this.

He was a very good friend of Alexander Hamilton, his best friend, something that's weirdly missing from your average Hamilton biography. On that fateful day in July 1809, when Aaron Burr and Hamilton met in Weehawken, New Jersey to settle their differences with a duel, Hamilton fired into the branches of the tree above him. The Burr shot Hamilton in the gut.

Hamilton's wife, Eliza, sobbing and desperate, summoned Governor Morris to her husband's side. She called him the best friend Alexander had known and pleaded for his prayers. It was Governor Morris who delivered the eulogy for Alexander Hamilton, though he was devastated by grief and struggled to speak. His diary once again is an absolute treasure. In this instance, we get to see how he wrestled with what to say in that eulogy.

And as always, it's so raw and human that you want to laugh through your tears. Morris loved his friend Hamilton, but he knew how contradictory and frustrating Hamilton could be. One diary entry reads, He was in principle opposed to dueling, but has fallen in a duel. It was exasperating for Morris, but because Morris knew full well that Hamilton bore some responsibility for the terrible circumstances of his death, he refused to attack Aaron Burr.

Morris understood what unspeakable violence might come from that. Instead, he quietly gathered the needed to support Hamilton's family and pay off all of his debts. And this is super fun for fans of the musical Hamilton who already know that Hamilton wrote like he was running out of time. It was Governor Morris who took on the Herculean and heartbreaking task of reading and organizing the mountain of papers Hamilton left behind.

The last great things Morris did for the United States that no one seems to remember is, one, he helped design the street grid for the city of Manhattan. And two, he chaired the commission that gave us the Erie Canal, which was a staggering achievement in civil engineering that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The Erie Canal not only made it cheaper and easier to move people and goods over the Appalachians, it sped up the settlement of the American West and made the state of New York an economic force to be reckoned with.

Not too shabby for a final act. Governor Morris may have been born a British subject, but when you look at his life, all you see is a classic real American, the kind of American that we love to celebrate. Bold, brave, quick-witted, decent, compassionate, and always up for a good time. Here's to you, Governor Morris. We the people owe you one.

Filled with lumber, coal, and hay. You'll know every inch of the way we go. From Albany to Buffalo. Low bridges, everybody down. Low bridges for coming to town. Well, you always know your neighbor. You always know your power. You've never navigated on the Erie Canal. Next time on True Weird Stuff. When it comes to aliens, you probably think that either an invasion is imminent or that the government is running a massive disinformation campaign to conceal military technology. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer for the SETI Institute. SETI, as in search for extraterrestrial intelligence. No tinfoil hats, no wild theories, just the facts. Facts that are going to blow your mind. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by Sheri Lynch, along with my ethereal director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axelman.

True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.