◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

We the People I am Gouverneur Morris. Of Morrisania, in New York. Born 1752, died 1816. I had one leg — the other was taken off below the knee after a carriage accident when I was twenty-eight, and I wore an oak peg for the rest of my life and never once let it slow me down, in politics or in bedrooms, and I will say no more about the second than that my diaries survive and you may read them. You do not know my name. You know my sentence. We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union. That is mine. Every word. At the end of that long summer in Philadelphia they gave the draft to five men and the five men gave it to me, and I sat with it for four days and made it speak. And when I came to the opening, the draft said this: We the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island — and on down the coast, a list, a receipt, thirteen sovereign shopkeepers signing a contract. I struck it. I wrote the United States. Understand what I did there, because nobody voted on it. Nobody debated it. The Convention was tired and going home, and the committee on style was thought to be a committee about commas. In four days I made this a nation founded by a people rather than a treaty among governments — and I did it in the passive quiet of a man tidying prose. I spoke more often in that room than any other delegate there. A hundred and seventy-three times. And of everything I said, one speech I would keep. I stood and called slavery a nefarious institution, the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed, and I said it plainly to men who owned people and were sitting six feet away. I was born into a family that owned them too. I did not persuade anyone. They wrote it into the document under my hand, and I wrote the sentence that contains it. Now here is the part your schoolbooks leave out, and it is the reason I am worth your five minutes. I did not believe in you. I argued in that room for a President who would serve for life. For a Senate appointed by that President. For a rule that a man must own property before he may vote. I thought the many were credulous and would be flattered into ruin by whoever told them the sweetest lie. I trusted a gentleman's judgment over a mechanic's. I was, in the plainest sense, an aristocrat, and I made no secret of it then and will make none now. And I wrote We the People. I gave your country the most democratic sentence in your language, and I did not mean it the way you have come to mean it. The words got away from me. They were better than I was. That is the whole of what I have to tell you. You are watching a man argue that the President's will is the nation's will — and if you think that notion is foreign to your founding, you have not been listening. It was in the room. It was in me. We did not hand you a finished country. We handed you a document with our worst instincts still inside it, papered over in good prose. Mine was the good prose. So do not ask what we intended. Some of us intended things you would not care for. Ask what the sentence says. We the People. Not we the President. Not we the states. Not we the men of property, of whom I was one. I wrote better than I believed. Now hold me to it.