Constitution's Penman : Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic...

by Dennis C. Rasmussen

$72 · Offered by eBay · No longer available

Constitution's Penman : Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America's Basic Charter, Hardcover by Rasmussen, Dennis C., ISBN 0700634142, ISBN-13 9780700634149, Like New Used, Free shipping in the US Strikingly few Americans know who wrote the Constitution. Even fewer know that he was a peg-legged ladies’ man with a wicked sense of humor, a staunch opponent of slavery, and an unabashed elitist. Gouverneur Morris, who has been described as “the most colorful man in North America” at the time of the founding, was a dominant figure at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. In fact, he spoke more often, proposed more motions, and had more motions adopted than any other delegate. He also put the Constitution into its final form, choosing the arrangement and much of the wording of its provisions, not to mention composing the famous preamble (“We the people of the United States . . .”) nearly from scratch. The Constitution’s Penman is the first book to explore the constitutional vision of this fascinating, neglected, and influential American. As Dennis Rasmussen deftly shows, some aspects of Morris’s political thought were intriguingly idiosyncratic, such as his argument that the Senate should be an aristocratic body whose members would serve life terms without pay. Other aspects of his vision for America’s constitutional order, however, were astoundingly prescient. Morris saw as clearly as any of the framers the need for a powerful executive with a popular mandate, the central role

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2023
• Binding: Hardcover
• ISBN: 9780700634149
• Condition: Fine

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