The Forsaken Founder
Scott S. Greenberger
When George Washington and the Continental Army faced starvation, he turned to Gouverneur Morris to help devise a plan to provision the troops. When the fledgling nation needed a financial system to sustain the Revolution, Morris again was called upon to help design its first national bank and currency.
When the compromises between North and South, large states and small, had to be stitched into a single governing document, the task of shaping the Constitution’s final language fell largely to him. At the Constitutional Convention, Morris spoke more often than any delegate save James Madison—and more forcefully against slavery. When Alexander Hamilton died in a tragic duel, his widow insisted that Hamilton’s closest friend, Gouverneur Morris, deliver the eulogy.
Morris continued to serve the republic after its founding as envoy to France during the Revolution and Reign of Terror, and as an early visionary who grasped that New York, not Philadelphia, could become the nation’s economic capital if a canal opened the interior to the sea.
In this deeply researched biography, The Forsaken Founder, Scott Greenberger restores this indispensable figure to history and asks why one of the most prescient and principled founders faded from memory. Was it his uncompromising opposition to slavery? His unapologetic aristocratic style? His belief that liberty required structure as well as passion?
Scott S. Greenberger is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis and author of The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur. Currently the executive editor of Stateline, he has been a newspaper reporter at the Austin American-Statesman and the Boston Globe. Greenberger has a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University and a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University.
Tickets are required for this event. Athenaeum members can attend with up to three guests at no cost. Visitor tickets are $20.
The Lost Founder
Jesse Wegman
As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.
Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the President and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.
Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.
Jesse Wegman is a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee. From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times editorial board. His work was part of a package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.
Tickets are required for this event. Athenaeum members can attend with up to three guests at no cost. Visitor tickets are $20.
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