On January 5, 1799, a day that was “cold and like for Snow,” Gouverneur Morris left the city of New York after dinner and then, as he recorded in his diary, went “to my House at Morrisania, where I arrive at Dusk after an Absence of above ten Years.” Those ten years had been spent in the ferment of the French Revolution and traveling the roads of a Europe at war with France. Now, back in the United States, this Founding Father began what would be yet another extraordinary chapter in a remarkable life. From the turn of the century—which ended with the death of Washington—until his own death in November 1816, Morris saw the first stages of fulfillment of his youthful predictions about America’s rapid growth and advancement. He also experienced the transition from a national government dominated by the Federalists to one in which the Democratic-Republicans took power, consolidated it, and dictated the country’s course.
