The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Gouverneur Morris spoke more than any other delegate to the Constitutional Convention (173 times19) and actually penned much of the final wording of the Constitution, including the poetic preamble. He also had sex with a married woman…in a convent, hardly respecting the nunnery as a believer would. The peg-legged bon vivant was the US minister plenipotentiary to France in the early 1790s. While there, he carried on a tryst with Adélaïde-Emilie Filleul, Marquise de Souza-Botelho (later Madame de Flahaut). Morris and Adele, as he called her, “had each other whenever they could,” notes one biographer, including “in his carriage; and in the visitors’ waiting room of a convent in Chaillot where Adele’s old governess lived as a nun.”20 On another occasion, Morris visited the married woman and, as he put it, “we perform[ed] the first Commandment given to Adam, or at least we use the means.”21 That is, they didn’t actually bear fruit and multiply, but they went through the motions. He got to know her in the biblical sense while violating biblical principles. Another biographer captured Morris’s sexual escapades nicely. Flahaut “and Morris were eventually so ‘wanton and flagrant’ that they engaged in intercourse ‘in the passage…at the harpsichord…down stairs…the doors all open,’ and in a coach with the coachman staring straight ahead.”22