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by Joseph Siffred Duplessis

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An earlier version of this story contained numerous errors, including misspelling the last name of Jennifer W. Reiss. Additionally, Reiss learned of Gouverneur Morris’s disabilities after a talk by the scholar Thomas A. Foster, not during it. Morris was admitted to the bar but did not have a law degree. He served as a finance minister under the Articles of Confederation, not in the Washington administration. This story also originally stated that Ann Cary Randolph’s brother-in-law was never charged with a crime; he was charged and acquitted. This version has been corrected. 

Even if you don’t know Gouverneur Morris’s name, you probably know his words. You may even have been forced to memorize a string of them in school, which start: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …”

While James Madison gets most of the credit for writing the Constitution, it was Morris who wrote the Preamble and who, in a last-minute flourish, <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/forgotten-founders-gouverneur-morris" target=_blank>added the word “United”</a> to “States.” A congressman, senator, diplomat, attorney and vocal opponent of slavery, Morris looms large in the nation’s founding.

He was also disabled. Two major accidents in his life left him with a severely impaired right arm and an amputated left leg.

While his disabilities have never been a secret to historians, they are also not common knowledge and came as a surprise to Jennifer W. Reiss, an attorney in London, when she learned about it after a talk by scholar <a href="https://amzn.to/3rMQvei" target=_blank>Thomas A. Foster</a>.

“I’ve always been interested in early American history, and I’d never heard of any disabled early Americans before,” Reiss, who has a form of cerebral palsy, told The Washington Post. She eventually left her job to get a PhD in history and during the pandemic read all of Morris’s diaries, which had recently been digitized, “from a disability perspective.” She surmises that his physical struggles influenced his empathy for women, enslaved people and the poor.

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Morris was born into a life of privilege on a family estate in New York now occupied by the Bronx, the son of a judge and grandson of a colonial governor. College students tended to be younger back then, but Morris was really young when, at only 12 years old, he started studying at Kings College, now Columbia University. By 22, he had undergraduate and graduate degrees and had been admitted to the bar. (Scholars today generally pronounce his first name like the word “governor.”)

It was during a visit home from college at 14 when he acquired his first disability, after a large kettle of boiling water fell on him. His right side was severely burned, and his right arm had “all the flesh taken off,” as one colleague wrote years later.

“We don’t know exactly what that means, but clearly having a significant amount of flesh removed from your arm is going to create mobility issues in that limb,” Reiss said. Morris often concealed his right arm in portraits.

The second injury, a carriage accident, happened in 1780, while he was in his late twenties and serving in the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. His left foot was crushed, and soon his leg was amputated below the knee. He wore a series of wooden prosthetic legs, one of which a <a href="https://emuseum.nyhistory.org/objects/27877/wooden-leg-of-gouverneur-morris-17521816;jsessionid=8F5931679D8941E95A91C97A0EB94E56?ctx=516f991fbb4560ee83f9954f4046800c26de10a4&idx=1" target=_blank>museum</a> still preserves. These were large, probably uncomfortable and would have given him the gait of someone with an above-the-knee amputation now, according to historian <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Eighteenth-Century-Published-Omohundro-Institute-University/dp/1469652196/" target=_blank>Jennifer Van Horn</a>.

Morris later served at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where he famously railed against the three-fifths clause, which counted enslaved people as only three-fifths of a person, challenging his fellow delegates: “Are they men? Then make them citizens and let them vote.”

In the early republic, Morris served as a finance minister and a diplomat to France, where he earned a reputation as a ladies’ man, carrying on love affairs with a number of women, including the French writer Adélaïde Filleul. He later became a U.S. senator for New York and was one of three men who drew Manhattan’s street grid. Morris married late in life, at 57, to a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson; they had a son before he died, in 1816, at age 64.

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A lot of the Founding Fathers, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, kept letters and diaries knowing they would someday be read by scholars, and that awareness affected what and how they wrote about their lives. Their accounts can be stuffy, guarded, self-flattering. But that is not the case with Morris, Reiss said.

“Gouverneur Morris’s diaries are very frank about things that one wouldn’t want to put into the public,” she said and laughed. He writes a lot about bodily functions and sexuality, including descriptions of his, uh, concern for the pleasure of his various romantic partners.

What they didn’t appear to include, at first, were mentions of disabilities. “I’m not an amputee, but I was having major musculoskeletal problems at the time,” she said, “and I was thinking, ‘I’m in constant pain, how can he not be commenting on his?’”

There were a lot of mentions of gout, a form of arthritis common among wealthy men at the time that causes swollen joints. Most historians have taken this “at face value,” Reiss said, but upon closer inspection, she realized the symptoms he described were more consistent with the physical issues common among amputees than they were of gout, like musculoskeletal pain and ulcers on his “stump,” as he called it.

Reiss is clear that she doesn’t want to diagnose Morris. “He may have had gout, or it may be that he felt it more socially acceptable to describe his musculoskeletal pain as gout.”

In other entries, Morris describes trying to get more comfortable prosthetics to relieve the pain from his ulcers, so he had at least some awareness of pain caused by his disability, but, Reiss said, “whether he had this physio-therapeutic sense that possibly pain in his good leg was related to the amputation, I don’t know.”

He also describes how others interacted with him, and how his disability set him apart from the other privileged White men in his social sphere. In a 1790 entry, he says that everyone from aristocrats to servants “don’t know what to make of me.”

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Reiss is now exploring how his “difference” may have expanded his worldview.

“He had a different lived experience than [other Founding Fathers] because of his embodiment,” she said, “and I think we should be able to read some of the things he’s done with that in mind.”

Take his opposition to the three-fifths clause, which most northern constitutional delegates supported as a compromise with southern states. More than other Founders, Morris empathized with enslaved people, recognized their capacity to be part of a self-governing society, and confronted the enslaver, who, he said, “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.”

Morris’s choice of spouse may provide another example of his acceptance of difference. Ann Cary “Nancy” Randolph was raised wealthy on a Virginia plantation before her life was turned upside down by scandal. In 1792, when she was 18, she became pregnant by her brother-in-law, and, according to court testimony, took herbs to induce a second-trimester <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a>. Randolph was never charged with a crime, but her reputation, and marriage prospects, were ruined. She lived for a decade as an outcast before moving to Connecticut for housekeeping work. While at a boardinghouse in New York in 1808, she met Morris. They married the next year when she was 35, Morris being fully aware of the scandal and not appearing to mind.

Her “difference” was fine with him, their marriage by all accounts a loving one.

“I don’t want to essentialize Morris as only a disabled person, because he was so much more than that. He was amazing,” Reiss said. “But in how we think about how he came to be that kind of person, we need to think about his embodiment.”

NABJ Salute to Excellence Award for digital commentary, 2018

Emmy nomination for new approaches: documentary, 2017

Northwestern University, MS in journalism 

University of Texas at Austin, BA in history and English

Gillian Brockell is a staff writer for The Washington Post’s history blog, Retropolis. She has been at The Post since 2013 and previously worked as a video editor. 