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According to its publisher, the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the new book series "Lives of the Founders" intends to introduce readers to unjustly neglected figures of the early American republic. The choice of Gouverneur Morris as one of its first subjects is odd, given that Morris has been celebrated in four admiring biographies within the last five years, including Melanie Randolph Miller's Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution. In her new book, Miller declares candidly her intention to rescue Morris (once more) from historical oblivion and to establish his rightful place in "the Founding Fathers Club, that little group of wise men we like to imagine perched on a heavenly cloud, watching and protecting our country" (xv). She ascribes Morris's low profile to his professed indifference to his historical legacy and to historians' hostility toward Federalist ideology. (The latter claim is harder to credit considering the recent beatifications of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.) The more likely reason for Morris's relative obscurity seems to me that he spent the most memorable period of his life outside the United States, in France from 1788 to 1794. His cosmopolitan career fits uncomfortably into a nationalist founding story. Paradoxically, Miller is so focused on Morris's importance to America and on extolling his life as "a gift to the nation" (xvi) that she neglects to explain the transatlantic context that is indispensable for understanding Morris's achievements.
Morris's years in France, which Miller researched extensively for her previous book, take up more than half of this brief volume. The early chapters on Morris's family background, his initially reluctant involvement in the American Revolution, and his service in the Continental Congress and as an assistant to Superintendent of...