To Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Selected Writings of Gouverneur Morris

15 • The Constitution of the United States (1787)

207 Reprinted from The Constitution of the United States, 18th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, 1992). The names of the signers have been omitted. 1. The standard documentary source on the Constitutional Convention is The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911–87). Farrand compiles the Convention’s resolutions at 2:565– 80; the August 6 draft presented by the Committee of Detail is at 2:177–89.The draft letter to Congress is in 2:583–84, and the final version at 2:666–67. The final version of the letter, reprinted here, differs only in capitalization and punctuation from Morris’s draft. It may also be found in the Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904–37), 33:502–3. 15 • The Constitution of the United States (1787) Morris was, by his own admission, a surprise choice to represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional Convention, but he proved to be one of its most active members. On September 10, 1787, the convention adjourned to allow the Committee of Style and Arrangement to put its handiwork in order. By eighteenth-century custom, the committee chair, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, would be expected to do the work; but by all accounts the work was done by Morris. He reduced the convention ’s twenty-three articles to seven, ordered the contents, and wrote the Preamble as well as the letter transmitting the document to Congress.1 Responding to Jared Sparks, Morris’s biographer, in 1831, James Madison recalled Morris’s role: The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris; the task having, probably, been handed over to him by the chairman of the Committee, himself a highly respectable member, and with the ready concurrence of the others. A better choice could not have been made, as the performance of the task proved. It is true, that the state of the materials, consisting of a reported draft in detail, and subsequent resolutions accurately penned, and falling easily into their proper places, was a good preparation for the symmetry and phraseology of the instrument, but there was suffi- 208 chaPtEr 15 2. Federal Convention of 1787, 3:499. 3. Speech in the House of Representatives, June 19, 1798 (Federal Convention of 1787, 3:379). 4. Letter to Andrew Stevenson, November 17, 1830 (Federal Convention of 1787, 3:492). The report of the Committee of Detail on August 6 also has a semicolon after “excises” but follows it with the commerce power.The semicolon may have been carried over inadvertently in copying. cient room for the talents and taste stamped by the author on the face of it. The alterations made by the Committee are not recollected. They were not such, as to impair the merit of the composition. Those, verbal and others made in the Convention, may be gathered from the Journal, and will be found also to leave that merit altogether unimpaired.2 A false story about Morris apparently gained currency from a speech of Albert Gallatin’s about a decade after the convention.3 Gallatin claimed that Morris had tried to enlarge the powers of Congress by inserting a semicolon after “lay and collect taxes, duties and excises” in Article I, section 8. The insertion, so the story goes, was designed to make the next clause—“to provide for the common defense and general welfare”—an independent power. According to Gallatin, one of the Connecticut delegates detected Morris’s “trick,” and the convention “restored” the original language. No such dialogue occurs in the records of the convention, however , and a letter from Madison in 1830 indicates that the semicolon did not appear in any other copy the convention had. Madison concludes that it was “an erratum of the pen or press,” not a trick of Morris’s.4 ThE ConStitution oF thE UnitEd StatES oF AMErica We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence , promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Constitution of the United States 209 * Changed by...