Word: gouverneur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although they were not supposed to change the substance of what the convention had so far decided, it was hardly accidental that all five were strong-government advocates, and that one of them was Madison. The actual writer was Gouverneur Morris, a one-legged but rather rakish Philadelphian who boasted what he liked to consider a muscular prose style. And prose styles do have an effect. The convention had given the committee a draft that began: "We the undersigned delegates of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay" and so on. Morris rewrote that so it began: "We, the People...
...territories that stretched from Maine to Georgia, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. Armed with their own quill pens, the 650 census takers of 1790 spent 18 months counting the American people. The total: 3,929,214. President George Washington, however suspected an undercount. In a letter to Gouverneur Morris, then U.S. Commissioner to Great Britain, Washington worried about the "indolence of the mass, and want of activity" by many census takers. Proof of this thesis: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was in charge of the tally, had to sign his own name to the list of citizens...