Gouverneur Morris — Penman of the Constitution's Preamble

**Gouverneur Morris** was the founding generation's most eloquent writer, sharpest wit, and most unapologetically aristocratic personality — the man who took the Committee of Detail's dry legal draft and transformed it into "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." Those 52 words of the Preamble are the most famous sentence in American constitutional law, and they were written by a one-legged, one-armed New York aristocrat who believed in liberty but not in democracy, who charmed every salon in Paris while representing American interests, and who spoke more than any other delegate at the Constitutional Convention — 173 times.