The Language of Unity: Glenn Loury on Gouverneur Morris: His “We the People” expresses the work of fulfilling the American Idea. (Glenn Loury, Thursday, July 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)
Of all the figures gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, few would have seemed less likely to speak for “the American people” than Gouverneur Morris. Wealthy, cosmopolitan, and aristocratic in bearing, he was impatient with cant and openly skeptical of democratic enthusiasms. A striking figure who moved through the world on a wooden leg—the result of a gruesome carriage accident years earlier—he retained a caustic wit and an abundance of self-regard. Morris was no plaster saint for schoolbooks. He was vain, rakish, and at times contemptuous of the masses. Yet the delegates entrusted him with the final drafting of the Constitution. Much of its language bears his mark. The most enduring words in the Preamble are unmistakably his: “We the People of the United States . . . ”
Those are radical words, though their familiarity has blunted their radicalism. The Constitution might easily have opened as a compact among sovereign states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts—each jealous of its prerogatives. That phrasing would have ratified the dominant political reality of the day: most Americans at that time thought of themselves first as citizens of their states. Morris made a different choice. His preamble was not mere literary polish. It gave expression to a political idea that was still struggling to become a reality: that Americans were one people.
The ambition embodied in those words was extraordinary then and remains so today. America was never a tribe bound by blood, ancestry, or ancient custom. It gathered people of disparate regions, denominations, interests, and origins.