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Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris & the French Revolution. By Melanie Randolph Miller. (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2005. xiv, 284 pp. $30.00, ISBN 1-57488-786-6.)
Melanie Randolph Miller concentrates on an eighteenth-century American whom historians, until recently, have either largely ignored or dismissed as a closet monarchist, though he was an active participant in the American founding generation. Her work contributes to the recent rehabilitation of Gouverneur Morris first undertaken by the journalist Richard Brookhiser in his 2003 brief and breezy popular biography, followed several months later by William Howard Adams's longer, scholarly effort (the first large-scale Morris biography since Theodore Roosevelt's 1888 work).
With the exception of these three writers, most eighteenth-century historians and commentators have found Morris to be among the oddest and most eccentric of the framers of the Constitution. A colorful and outspoken...