Morris, who afterward resided in Vermont and during the Revolution was an aide-decamp to General Sullivan and after the war a member of the House of Representatives; Robert Morris, who finally settled on the family estate at Fordham ; and Mary, who married Major William Popham, of Scarsdale, who served as brigade-major during the Revolution and was for many years clerk of the Court of Exchequer of this State. The fourth son of Lewis Morris the third was Gouverneur, son of Mr. Morris' second wife, Miss Gouverneur.

Gouverneur Morris was born in 1752, graduated at Columbia College, in May, 1768, and commenced the study of the law, under the direction of William Smith, one of the most eminent lawyers and after- 'wards chief justice of the colony of New York. He

was admitted to the bar in 1771, and joined with the liberal or anti-governmental party almost on the occasion of his becoming a member of the profession. We find from Sparks' life and letters of Gouverneur Morris, that, though only a lad of twenty-three years of age, he was elected from Westchester County a member of the Provincial Congress of the colony of New York in 1775. At that early age he possessed the ability to advocate the issuing of a Continental currency, and the eloquence and knowledge of his subject to convince his hearers to such a point that it was recommended to the Continental Congress for adoption. He did not at that time give up the hope of harmonizing the diff"erences between the mother country and the colonies, for he had a mother who deeply sympathized with the royalists and relatives who were in the employ of the government, but he never forgot the rights of the people of the colony. He was one of the committee who, on behalf of the colony, received General Washington when he passed on his way through New York to assume the command of the Continental troops at Boston, already standing in an hostile attitude before Gage and Howe at that city, but at the same time he counselled that all due respect should be paid to Tryon, the Colonial Governor, at New York until the reconciliatory overtures of the New York Congress had been acted on by the home government.