#1604 Ten Things about Gouverneur Morris

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with regular guest Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about the penman of the U.S. Constitution, Gouverneur Morris of New York. Morris and Thomas Jefferson knew each other in France but couldn’t really get along. Morris was Alexander Hamilton’s best friend and after the 1804 duel that ended Hamilton’s life, Morris agreed to look after his widow and young children, and he gave a superb eulogy for Hamilton, whom he admitted was a monarchist. We are also joined by novelist Rebecca Flynt, who is finishing up a book about Nancy Randolph, who was involved first in the most notorious sex scandal of the era at a plantation aptly named Bizarre, but later, destitute in New York, drew Gouverneur Morris’ attention first as his housekeeper and then his wife. It’s all intriguing, scandalous, and well, bizarre.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week on listening to America, here's your podcast introduction, I'm Clay Jenkins, just got off.
0:06.1	The Zoom meeting with Rebecca Flint and of course Lindsay Trevinsky, the subject was ten things
0:12.1	about Gouverneur Morris.
0:13.4	Gouverne-Morinne-Vign.
0:18.0	One leg, peg leg, apparently in a sexual escapade.
0:21.8	His leg was crushed, either jumping out of a window or it had
0:25.2	something to do with the carriage and this became a kind of a badge of honor
0:30.6	for him if you can imagine and it didn't slow him down. He was in
0:34.5	Europe for about a decade. In fact he followed Jefferson as the minister to
0:39.7	France. He still was wildly successful with women of all classes and he writes in his voluminous diaries
0:49.0	as if he were James Boswell, and if you've never read Boswell's journals there amongst the most, I don't know,
0:56.7	sext up escapades that we have from anyone's journals except the work of Kaza Nova.
1:02.4	So, Governor Morris also the penman of the
1:05.8	Constitution, he wrote the famous preamble to the Constitution. He was a friend
1:09.5	to Alexander Hamilton and gave the eulogy after Hamilton's unfortunate death in 184 on the
1:14.9	dueling grounds of New Jersey, a founding father that deserves to be much
1:20.3	better known and so this is a program about that.
1:23.9	And a few weeks ago, Lindsay got an email
1:27.0	from a listener by the name of Rebecca Flint,
1:30.0	and she said that she had been listening
1:31.8	to a Hamilton program
1:32.9	and had some thoughts about the famous
	...

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