28. A Founding Father’s Nutty Demise After He Stuck a Whalebone in His Manhood
Gouverneur Morris (1752 – 1816) wrote the Preamble to the US Constitution, and became known as the “Penman of the Constitution”. He was also a passionate opponent of slavery, and described it in the Constitutional Convention as “the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed“. He particularly loathed the constitution’s Three-Fifths Clause, which boosted the representation of slave states. As he put it: “The inhabitant of Georgia and S.C. who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice“. Morris was also a randy goat, who couldn’t keep it in his pants.
Morris had numerous lovers, including mistresses of Prussian and French royalty, Italian noblewomen, and German bankers’ wives. He lost a leg when he fled from a cuckolded husband, either because he jumped straight off the wife’s bed and out a second floor window, or because he was struck by a carriage in his flight. A lost leg did not slow down Morris’ fornication, which prompted John Jay to say: “I almost wish he had lost something else“. Fast forward three decades, and Morris’ affairs had left him with a severe urethral obstruction: his urethra was clogged up. In his desperation for something to clear up the clog, he hit upon a nutty treatment. He broke off a bit of whalebone baleen from his wife’s corset, stuck it up his urethra, and twirled it around. The baleen barbs shredded his manhood from the inside, and he passed from the resultant infection.
