Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), public official and diplomat, was born at his family’s Morrisania estate in what is now the Bronx, New York City, educated at King’s College (later Columbia University), 1764–68, and admitted to the bar three years after graduation. During the American Revolution he helped frame New York’s constitution and represented that state in the Continental Congress, 1778–79. After leaving office Morris remained in Philadelphia, resumed his legal practice and, later, worked as an assistant to Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris (no relation), 1781–84. In 1787 Morris was an influential Pennsylvania delegate to the Federal Convention, where he favored a strong executive, centralized government, and a free-market economy. He is credited with editing the resulting United States Constitution into its final form and supplying the preamble. In 1788 Morris departed for Europe, where he pursued business interests in Paris, labored as an unofficial American emissary to Great Britain in 1790, and served as United States minister plenipotentiary to France, 1792–94. Morris returned to the United States in 1798, settled at Morrisania, which he had purchased from his family in 1787, and represented New York as a Federalist member of the United States Senate, 1800–03. Although he supported the Louisiana Purchase, he opposed most of the Republican platform, including the War of 1812. Late in life Morris promoted the construction of the Erie Canal (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life [2003]; Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, 2 vols., ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport [1939]; Melanie Randolph Miller, ed., The Diaries of Gouverneur Morris: European Travels, 1794–1798 [2011]; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 39 vols. description ends , 15:79; JEP description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States description ends , 1:92, 96, 157 [22 Dec. 1791, 12 Jan. 1792, 27 May 1794]; New-York Evening Post, 6 Nov. 1816).

In 1809 Morris married Ann Cary Randolph, a sister of TJ’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph. No letter of mrs morris’s to TJ from this period has been found, and none is recorded in SJL. She may have written instead to her brother or his wife. belle saison: “beautiful season; summer.”