Gouverneur Morris's French
Connections

ENE SIRVET

The Rare Book and JVlanuscript Library has recently
acquired a series of eight letters, written in 1805-1806, all
from New York City's leading commercial house, LeRoy
Bayard & IVlcEvers, to Gouverneur Morris at his estate in the
Bronx. They deal with land transactions that Morris helped arrange
when he was in Europe between 1788 and 1798. The letters focus
on American lands owned by the celebrated writer and intellectual
Madame de Stael, her late father, the Swiss-born French finance
minister and reformer Jacques Necker, as well as the French aristo¬
crat LeRay de Chaumont.

Morris (1752-1816), a member of one of New York's great
patroon families and a 1768 graduate of King's College, was one of
the small group of men who created the American republic between
1774and 1809. His distinctive first name was his mother's maiden
name, chosen to honor her Huguenot ancestry. The precocious
Gouverneur entered King's College at the age of thirteen. At his
graduation he gave an oration on wit and beauty, and, along with
his B.A. degree, was awarded a silver medal by the College's literary
society. After the usual three-year apprenticeship, Morris was
admitted to the bar in 1771. Like most colleges in the colonial and
Revolutionary periods. King's College conferred M.A. degrees on
alumni who became lawyers; in 1771, Morris accepted his degree
with an oration on love. (The manuscripts of these commencement
speeches are among the Gouverneur Morris Papers held by the
Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

Morris served in the New York and the American governments in
the 17 70s. Although the youngest delegate to the New York
Convention, he served—along with his friends and fellow King's
College alumni John Jay and Robert R. Livingston—on the com¬
mittee that drafted the pioneering New York State Constitution of
1777. As a New York member of the Continental Congress, he
signed the Articles of Confederation in 1777. Thereafter, he was