William Howard Adams

An engrossing biography of one of the most colorful and least well-known of the founding fathers A plainspoken, racy patrician who distrusted democracy but opposed slavery and championed freedom for all minorities, an important player in the American Revolution, later an astute critic of the French Revolution, Gouverneur Morris remains an enigma among the founding generation. This comprehensive, engrossing biography tells his robust story, including his celebrated love affairs during his long stay in Europe. Morris’s public record is astonishing. One of the leading figures of the Constitutional Convention, he put the Constitution in its final version, including its opening Preamble. As Washington’s first minister to Paris, he became America’s most effective representative in France. A successful, international entrepreneur, he understood the dynamics of commerce in the modern world. Frankly cosmopolitan, he embraced city life as a creative center of civilization and had a central role in the building of the Erie Canal and in laying out the urban grid plan of Manhattan. William Howard Adams describes Morris’s many contributions, talents, sophistication, and wit, as well as his romantic liaisons, free habits, and free speech. He brings to life a fascinating man of great stature, a founding father who receives his due at last.

Diamond-encrusted, alligator-skin handbags. Eighteen-course feasts. Yachts the length of city blocks. In the twenty-first century, many point to such conspicuous consumption as reflecting the moral failings of a rampant capitalism that sacrifices community values on an altar of greed. Television shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians illustrate the folly of wealth without responsibility even as they elevate their subjects on pedestals of desire. Our discomfort with extravagance is not new. The ancient Greeks and Romans fretted over the ideal relationship between morality and luxury. Politics, religion, and economics influenced the debate, with the concept of luxury as a moral question becoming a core issue in Christian theology and even a cornerstone of the founding of America. People have long feared luxury’s evil influence. Society has publicly and privately extolled the virtues of moderation and restraint, and condemned luxury as a breeding ground for vice and sin. After capitalism and the consumer revolution removed its stigma, the concept of luxury underwent a radical transformation, from a vice to be feared to a marketing tool of the new capitalist era. In this lively and thought-provoking narrative, William Howard Adams shows how this simultaneous distrust and embrace of luxury has pervaded Western thought for three millennia, leading us to the question, what price the soul?

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson moved to the sophisticated and exhilarating city of Paris, where he spent the next five years as minister from the new United States of America. These were formative years for France, for the United States, and for Jefferson’s cultural and intellectual development. This engaging book recreates in word and illustration the atmosphere and personalities of prerevolutionary Paris, and it reveals the profound impact they had on one of America’s first transatlantic citizens. William Howard Adams discusses how the provincial Virginian became a cosmopolitan connoisseur in the rarefied intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic circles of the city. He describes Jefferson’s relationships with such luminaries as Lafayette, Condorcet, Lavoisier, Baron Grimm, La Rochefoucauld, John and Abigail Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and J.-L. David, as well as his involvement with the English painter Maria Cosway. His alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings is critically examined in the context of all available evidence.Adams’s principal focus is on Jefferson’s role as the preeminent American envoy in Europe after the departure of Franklin, his participation in the cultural and political life of the city, and his private intrigues to help his friends bring the Bourbon monarchy to heel. Finally, he places the author of the Declaration of Independence in the middle of his second revolution and chronicles the dramatic events leading up to the upheaval of 1788-1789. The book is richly illustrated with art of the period and with specially commissioned photographs of Parisian sites by Adelaide de Menil.