Gentleman Revolutionary by Richard Brookhiser

Author:Richard Brookhiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN Radicals in Power

W ASHINGTON APPOINTED Morris, relying on their long friendship and on Morris’s firsthand knowledge of the country. But when the nomination went to the Senate, there was a sharp debate.

Some of the senators had all the old objections. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who knew Morris from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, credited him with a “sprightly mind” and a “ready apprehension,” but warned that he was “an irreligious and profane man…. I am against such characters.” 1 Sherman did not know about Mme de Flahaut, Mme de Staël, Mme de Nadaillac, and his other French friends, but he would have known of Morris’s Philadelphia socializing.

Equally important, the French Revolution had become an issue in the emerging American party system. Distance had not dimmed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s hopes for the Revolution, and by a happy coincidence, the American politicians who were most skeptical of its success were those who disagreed with him on other matters, or who stood in the way of his ambition. By praising the French Revolution, Jefferson and his friends could attack them. Jefferson had already used what we should now call a blurb that he wrote for the Philadelphia edition of Paine’s Rights of Man to pick a fight with Vice President John Adams ( Jefferson hailed Paine’s work as a corrective to “political heresies which have sprung up among us,” meaning the opinions of John Adams). 2When Paine learned in London of Morris’s nomination, he wrote Jefferson that the appointment was “most unfortunate.” 3 Jefferson didn’t need to be told; he thought Morris had been poisoning the president’s mind against the Revolution with his ironic letters. 4 During the debate in the Senate, Jefferson’s ally James Monroe of Virginia attacked Morris as a “monarchy man … not suitable to be employed by this country, nor in France.” 5 After more than two weeks of discussion, Morris was confirmed by a vote of 16 to 11.

The president sent a monitory letter to his successful nominee. Washington touched lightly on the political complexion of the vote—Morris would need no assistance divining that. He did feel it necessary, however, to read his no-longer-so-young friend a lecture (Washington was now almost sixty, Morris had just turned forty):

[Y]ou were charged … with levity and imprudence of conversation and conduct. It was urged that your habits of expression indicated a hauteur disgusting to those,who happen to differ from you in sentiment…. [T]he promptitude, with which your lively and brilliant imagination is displayed, allows too little time for deliberation and correction; and is the primary cause of those sallies, which too often offend, and of that ridicule of characters, which begets enmity not easy to be forgotten, but which might easily be avoided, if it was under the control of more caution and prudence. 6

Morris vowed to put away childish things. “I now promise you, “ he wrote back, “that circumspection of conduct which has hitherto I acknowledge formed no part of my character.” 7

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.