The 18th century gave the Western world revolutions of every sort—scientific, political, linguistic—and in America, it gave rise to the most consequential style debate in the nation’s history. The argument was not about punctuation but about the very texture of statehood: what it meant to commit a nation’s founding to paper.

When the U.S. Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia in 1787, the framers knew that the prose must do more than describe a government; it had to embody it. They understood, in a way few lawmakers since have, that language could govern thought, that form could shape destiny. The United States would not be defined by birthright or crown but by clauses and commas.

Into this heady experiment came the curiously named but formidable Gouverneur Morris of Philadelphia, chair of the so‑called Committee of Style. By this point, the delegates had wrangled through a sweltering summer of ideological combat, producing drafts thick with redundancy and riddled with competing assumptions. What they needed now was someone to give the thing its final polish—a literary architect who could turn a jumble of resolutions into an enduring charter.

Creating order and balance from a pile of handwritten notes

Morris undertook the task with relish. His committee—the last formed by the Convention—was composed of five notables: William Samuel Johnson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King and Morris himself. They were chosen by ballot of the entire assembly, not by state delegation, suggesting that rhetorical skill and intellectual standing, not geography, guided the vote. Between Sept. 8 and 12, 1787, the group worked at blistering speed; within four days, it produced the final draft of the Constitution, printed the next morning for delegates to review. The astonishing pace masked the magnitude of their accomplishment. They had taken a chaotic pile of handwritten notes and resolutions and fashioned from them a text of order, balance and authority.

Though rarely counted among the “celebrity” founders, Morris became, in Madison’s later phrase, the man who gave the Constitution its “finish.” As Morris himself later boasted to Timothy Pickering, the document “was written by the fingers which wrote this letter.” It was not empty bragging. He was, in every sense, the Constitution’s stylist‑in‑chief.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Committee of Style is that it existed at all. The framers intuited what later generations of editors would come to know: that precision and grace aren’t cosmetic luxuries but matters of substance. The Committee’s mandate was not simply to correct grammar or trim verbosity; it was to consolidate and harmonize—to make a single coherent whole of many minds. The choice elevated form to the rank of constitutional principle.

We have no surviving “style sheet” from the Committee, no record of its editorial rules. Maybe the notion of a house style hadn’t yet crossed the Atlantic. Morris and his colleagues likely carried their stylistic conventions in their heads. Yet their fingerprints are everywhere in the final text. Gone is the prolix sprawl of earlier drafts; in its place stands the seven‑article structure familiar today. The transformation was structural as well as textual. The Committee of Detail’s Aug. 6 draft had consisted of 23 articles modeled vaguely on state constitutions. Morris reorganized this draft into seven lucid divisions, each devoted to a major function of government.

Morris also introduced the Vesting Clauses, which gave “all legislative powers herein granted” to Congress, “the executive power” to the president, and “the judicial power” to the courts. This tripartite distinction, now a classroom commonplace, amounted to a bold innovation. Where earlier drafts began, “The Government shall consist of … ,” Morris framed something more decisive and abstract: authority itself was vested, and it emanated from the people.

‘We, the people of the United States’

His stylistic audacity reached its zenith in the preamble. The earlier version, a plodding legal formula, lumbered through the 13 state names—some of which might not even ratify the document—and concluded with “do ordain, declare and establish.” Morris swept all that away. He left only, “We, the people of the United States,” a phrase simple as thunder.

In one stroke he erased the corporate states and crowned the national people. He amplified the opening with six infinitive aims—“to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility … ”—each one stately, almost musical. The revision elevated the Constitution from a contract among states to a covenant among citizens. The antifederalists protested that “the people” had no business ordaining anything. But Morris’ phrasing prevailed, and its rhythm has since become the republic’s secular scripture.

Morris’ editorial touch extended deep into the document’s legal machinery. The “Law of the Land” clause, unremarkable in draft form, gained a new resonance under his pen. Where the Committee of Detail had written that the Constitution would be “the supreme law of the several states,” Morris revised it to “the supreme Law of the Land”—a subtle but momentous shift. The phrase implied that federal authority ran not through the states but over them, laying the conceptual groundwork for judicial review decades before Marbury v. Madison (1803). The Style Committee also cleaned up the impeachment provisions, dropping “against the United States” so that officers could be tried for “high crimes and misdemeanors” of any stripe. And it quietly inserted the idea of presidential removal into the succession clause, a nod to the possibility—thought to be remote yet real—that executives might misbehave.

Not all of Morris’ interventions were unerring. His taste for legalistic grandiloquence occasionally muddled as much as it clarified. The clause on presidential succession—“In case of the removal of the president … the same shall devolve on the vice president”—has puzzled scholars ever since. When William Henry Harrison died in 1841, some insisted that John Tyler was merely acting president. Had Morris written it (the office of president) or they (the powers and duties of the office) instead of same, the argument would never have arisen. Likewise, the Constitution’s fondness for shall, the bane of legal drafters ever since, perpetuated a semantic fog. In negative constructions—“no state shall,”—shall behaves not as compulsion but as prohibition, effectively meaning “no state is allowed to [may].” There is no real negation of an imperative (shall).

A few other infelicities slipped through—the piled-up negatives and the lumbering syntax (“no person shall be a representative who shall not”). A modern editor would have altered many sentences with alarmed pencil marks. But given the materials—the overlapping manuscripts, inconsistent drafts and near‑total absence of a central copy—the wonder is it turned out so well.

Morris’ contemporaries underestimated the scope of what he had done. The Convention’s proceedings were secret, and by the time of ratification the authorship of the language was obscure. Only later did Madison confirm in a letter to Jared Sparks that “the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.” That was both acknowledgment and eulogy.

Style, wielded properly, is power

The 18th century was littered with documents of governance; most have yellowed into history’s footnotes. The American Constitution still persuades. Its rhythm still lends gravity to the most routine acts of governance. That resonance was Morris’ doing. With his feathered quill and uncompromising ear, he turned a committee report into civic scripture. In doing so, he demonstrated a lesson every editor knows and seemingly every legislator forgets: that style, wielded properly, is power.

Bryan A. Garner is the author of The Winning Brief, Garner’s Modern English Usage and Legal Writing in Plain English.