The Story of the Real"”and Mostly Unknown"”Author of the U.S. Constitution, Gouverneur Morris

At T-Mobile, our critical mission is providing unparalleled 5G coverage for when connectivity is mission critical. Introducing T-Priority, America's best 5G network experience for first responders, even in times of congestion. More capacity, faster speeds, better coverage. T-Priority from T-Mobile, built for tomorrow's emergencies, ready today. Discover more at T-Priority.com.

For qualifying organizations on eligible rate plans, coverage is not available in some areas that may be impacted by emergencies. Pro Savings Days are back at Lowe's with limited time savings on the supplies pros need. Get up to 40% off select major appliances, plus save an additional $100 on every $1,000 you spend on select major appliances. And don't miss your chance to activate and earn three times the points on select DeWalt and Klein tools. Lowe's, we help, you save. Valor the 328 selection varies by location while supplies last.

See associate or Lowe's.com for more details on qualifying items. I've never felt like this before. It's like you just get me. I feel like my true self with you. Does that sound crazy? And it doesn't hurt that you're gorgeous.

Okay, that's it. I'm taking you home with me. I mean, you can't find shoes this good, just anywhere.

Find a shoe for every you from brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas and more at your DSW store or dsw.com. Today's podcast is brought to you by Ferguson home. Whether you're a homeowner working on a remodel or a pro managing multiple projects, Ferguson home is where great ideas become stunning spaces. My wife and I know firsthand because Ferguson home was by our side when we built our beautiful house, all of our indoor and outdoor kitchen appliances. Most of our kitchen and bathroom hardware came from Ferguson home. They have the best selection of kitchen, bath and lighting products, all of which you can find online or you can visit a local Ferguson home showroom like we did and get one on one support from their amazing consultants who are there for us with their expert advice and support.

They'll be there for you to go to Ferguson home.com to shop the latest styles from top brands like Kohler or find a showroom location near you. eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Evglis. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks, about four in 10 people taking Evglis achieved its relief and clear or almost clear skin and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Evglis, Librachizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Evglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Evglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Evglis. Before starting Evglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief?

Ask your doctor about Evglis and visit evglis.lily.com or call 1-800-Lily-Rx or 1-800-545-5979. And we continue with our American stories. Our next story is about a founding father who wrote the most famous seven words in American history. We the people of the United States.

Those words of course appearing in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. Dennis C. Rasmussen is a professor of political science at Syracuse University. He's also a Jack Miller Center fellow. Dennis is also the author of the Constitution's penman, Governor Morris and the creation of America's basic charter.

Let's take a listen to the story. Governor Morris is relatively little known today but he is one of the most important and fascinating figures of the American founding era. One scholar declared recently that Morris may have been the most colorful individual in all of North America at the time of the founding and frankly that sounds about right. Morris was a peg-legged ladies man with a really wicked sardonic sense of humor.

He was without question one of the funniest of the founders although granted that's perhaps not a super high bar. Morris also led an immensely full life. He was originally from New York. He came from a wealthy family that owned most of the southwest part of what's now the Bronx. As a young man he helped to push New York to belatedly join the independence movement and he's one of the principal architects of the first New York State Constitution. I mentioned that Morris had a wooden leg. He had his leg amputated when he was 28 years old as a result of a bad carriage accident.

Although there were always rumors throughout his life that he'd in fact shattered the leg jumping out a bedroom window in order to escape the wrath of an ill-timed husband. In 1778 Morris became a delegate to the Continental Congress and spent that terrible winter at Valley Forge with George Washington and his troops where he was sent to oversee the army's needs. He was also a signer of the articles of confederation the nation's first stab at a national constitution although he deemed the confederation government to be woefully inadequate from the get-go. Morris served as the confederation's deputy superintendent of finance for several years and in that role he drew up a plan for a new national currency in which he proposed to use the word dollar after the widely used Spanish dollar and he invented the word cent to denote one of the smaller coins.

So Americans use words chosen by Morris pretty much every day is thanks to him that we have dollars and cents for our currency. Morris was destined to be an important player and not just one but two of the great revolutions of the modern age because in 1789 he went to Paris and eventually followed in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson by becoming the American minister to France. He was there at the convening of the Estates General and he was the only foreign diplomat from any nation to remaining country all the way through the bloody terror. After Morris's ministry ended he traveled around Europe for a few more years and then came back to the U.S. and served the second half of a senatorial term during a critical period when Jefferson and the Republicans came into power and the capital moved to Washington D.C.

This was from 1800 to 1803. In 1804 after the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Morris was the one who sat by Hamilton's side at his deathbed and then gave his official eulogy at the request of Hamilton's widow Eliza who told Morris that he was the best friend that Hamilton had in the world. Not that that would be enough to earn Morris even a bit role in the musical which is a real shame and a real missed opportunity if you ask me.

In any case late in life Morris undertook two more great projects one helping to lead a commission that planned the grid layout for the streets of Manhattan and another that planned the Erie Canal. On the more personal side of things at age 57 Morris finally became the last of the founders to marry. He married a woman named Nancy Randolph who was a sort of fallen aristocrat who was then serving as his housekeeper and who had earlier been accused of conspiring to murder her own newborn baby fathered by her brother-in-law.

That's a long story in itself as you may imagine. They had a son together although Morris died before he even turned four. Even Morris's death was colorful if rather grisly. He seems to have frequently suffered from painful blockages in his urinary tract perhaps the result of venereal disease and when he was 64 he tried using a whale bone to remove the blockage and he died from the resulting lacerations.

My sincere apologies for getting bat image stuck in your mind. In the summer of 1787 Morris played an absolutely pivotal role at the Philadelphia convention that formulated the U.S. Constitution. Morris spoke more often at the convention than any other delegate. He proposed more motions than any other delegate and he had more of his motions accepted than any other delegate. His interventions were often extremely blunt and provocative so they all but jump off the page at you when you read through James Madison's notes of the debates. He also served on a number of the committees that did so much of the hard work in actually crafting the constitution that summer and most importantly of all Morris was the one who wrote the constitution itself. At the end of the summer the delegates formed what was called a committee of style to compose the final draft of the constitution and the committee in turn simply handed the task to Morris. It is absolutely remarkable that so few people know this. Everyone knows most American school children can tell you that Thomas Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence and yet very few people know that Morris wrote the constitution.

Even among folks with PhDs in political science is probably a pretty small fraction who could tell you that. I haven't done any kind of formal poll but I've asked many many people this question over the past couple years and most assume that it must have been James Madison the so-called father of the constitution who wrote it or that it was just a collective effort. Now in some senses of course the constitution was a collective effort. His provisions had been laboriously debated and voted on over the course of the summer before Morris took up his pen and so his leeway in choosing the structure and powers of the proposed government was minimal. But Morris single-handedly and rather radically reorganized the draft constitution that had been produced by the committee of detail midway through the summer.

He consolidated 23 sprawling articles down to a neat seven and he changed or chose a great deal of the wording on his own initiative oftentimes in consequential ways. So when constitutional lawyers and scholars pore over the fine details of the constitution looking for clues regarding its meaning they have Morris to thank or to blame for many of those details and Morris wrote the famous preamble the constitution's ringing statement of purpose basically from scratch. All the stuff about forming a more perfect union establishing justice ensuring domestic tranquility and the like that was all Morris.

The preamble has become one of the most celebrated sentences in the annals of democracy so something of an irony that it was written by a man of somewhat elitist inclinations who's all but forgotten today. But perhaps Morris's finest hour at the convention from today's perspective came in the debates over slavery. No one spoke more passionately or eloquently or at greater length about the evils of slavery than Morris did.

He described it as a nefarious institution and the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed. A long speech that Morris delivered on August 8th has been called the first abolitionist speech in American public life which may be a bit of an exaggeration but does have at least a grain of truth to it and it's all the more remarkable when you remember the audience that probably a couple dozen people sitting there in the room listening to him were themselves slaveholders. So Morris gave this speech in opposition to the notorious three-fifths clause that is to counting three-fifths of the enslaved population toward representation in the house of representatives and hence also at least eventually the electoral college that would choose the president. And his basic point was that there was no good reason why enslaved people should count at all according to any ratio. After all, he suggested if enslaved people were human beings then they should be made citizens and allowed to vote but if they were mere property as some of the southern delegates contended then they shouldn't have been included in the population counts at all given that no other property was included.

The three-fifths clause was just a way of augmenting the political power of the slave holding south and moreover one that would encourage them to import still more enslaved people so that their political clout would be still further increased. Let me read the climax of Morris's speech in opposition to this clause. The admission of slaves into the representation when fairly explained comes to this that the inhabitant of Georgia or 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 dams them to the most cruel bondage shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with laudable horror so nefarious a practice. Morris goes on to say that giving the south extra representation on behalf of the people whom they'd enslaved would require a sacrifice of every principle of right of every impulse of humanity. This was as courageous and farsighted as any speech that was delivered that summer. Of course for all of his moral clarity and passion and eloquence Morris failed to make much headway against slavery. The three-fifths clause as well as the clause protecting the overseas slave trade until 1808 and the fugitive slave clause were all included in the constitution over his fierce objections. On that note there's a sense of which Morris's speech against slavery not only makes him look pretty good but also makes many of the other founders look worse by comparison.

After all Morris was one of them and he knew better and he told them so. And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Dennis C Rasmussen who's a professor of political science at Syracuse University and the author of The Constitution's Penman Governor Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter. Dennis is also a Jack Miller Center fellow and the Jack Miller Center is a nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history. To learn more visit jackmillerscenter.org. It's a terrific organization worthy of your support and my goodness what a story he told here. We all know that Thomas Jefferson was given the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence but I didn't know until recently most people don't know who Governor Morris is, the role he played in the framing and formation of the Constitution and the fact that he and he alone wrote the document to preamble and indeed all of it and his arguments against slavery a man ahead of his time.

The story of Governor Morris one of the most important founding fathers and one of the least well known here on our American stories. Okay so we all need to get away from the world sometimes. Well in the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano you don't even have to go anywhere. The Murano is the getaway. Just picture it the Bose premium sound system plays your favorite music as the Murano's massaging leather appointed seats melt away your stress. Yeah that's a real getaway. Drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today.

Bose and massaging leather appointed seats are optional features. Famous smoke has been dominating the cigar game since 1939 with the best prices on the best cigars. Need a smoke for the big game or a big win? Famous has you covered. Head to Famosmoke.com with promo code NITECAP to score $20 off your order of $99 or more. Million of cigars are in stock and ready to ship all stored in the massive humidor and guaranteed fresh.

Trust the name that's been in the game for 85 years. Go to Famosmoke.com use code NITECAP underage self-prohibited website restricted to age 21 plus tobacco consumers. Eczema isn't always obvious but it's real and so is the relief from Evglis. After an initial dosing phase of 16 weeks about four and ten people taking Evglis achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

Evglis Lebrikizumab LBKZ a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Evglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Evglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Evglis. Before starting Evglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief?

Ask your doctor about Evglis and visit evglis.lily.com or call 1-800-Lily-Rx or 1-800-545-5979. Good news! Your favorite Caribbean beaches are on sale at cheapcaribbean.com. Cheapcaribbean.com is your go-to website for finding the best deals on all-inclusive vacation packages. They're all about getting you more sand for your dollar. Check out their beach favorite sale to score $175 instant savings on bookings of four nights or more to the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Aruba and the Bahamas. Offer ends April 1st.

Go to cheapcaribbean.com to start saving. The Unshakeables podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh-oh moments Jamie has overcome.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Copyright 2025. JPMorgan Chase & Company.