“Gouverneur Morris’s diaries are very frank about things that one wouldn’t want to put into the public,” she said and laughed. He writes a lot about bodily functions and sexuality, including descriptions of his, uh, concern for the pleasure of his various romantic partners.
What they didn’t appear to include, at first, were mentions of disabilities. “I’m not an amputee, but I was having major musculoskeletal problems at the time,” she said, “and I was thinking, ‘I’m in constant pain, how can he not be commenting on his?’”
There were a lot of mentions of gout, a form of arthritis common among wealthy men at the time that causes swollen joints. Most historians have taken this “at face value,” Reiss said, but upon closer inspection, she realized the symptoms he described were more consistent with the physical issues common among amputees than they were of gout, like musculoskeletal pain and ulcers on his “stump,” as he called it.
Reiss is clear that she doesn’t want to diagnose Morris. “He may have had gout, or it may be that he felt it more socially acceptable to describe his musculoskeletal pain as gout.”
In other entries, Morris describes trying to get more comfortable prosthetics to relieve the pain from his ulcers, so he had at least some awareness of pain caused by his disability, but, Reiss said, “whether he had this physio-therapeutic sense that possibly pain in his good leg was related to the amputation, I don’t know.”
He also describes how others interacted with him, and how his disability set him apart from the other privileged White men in his social sphere. In a 1790 entry, he says that everyone from aristocrats to the enslaved “don’t know what to make of me.”
Reiss is now exploring how his “difference” may have expanded his worldview.
“He had a different lived experience than [other Founding Fathers] because of his embodiment,” she said, “and I think we should be able to read some of the things he’s done with that in mind.”
Take his opposition to the Three-Fifth Clause, which most northern constitutional delegates supported as a compromise with southern states. More than other Founders, Morris empathized with enslaved people, recognized their capacity to be part of a self-governing society, and confronted the enslaver, who, he said, “goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages.”