The always excellent Ian Frazier (who has been contributing to the New Yorker for half a century now) has an essay about the Bronx (archived) that includes the following paragraph:
As much as any of America’s so-called Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris remade his country and sent ripple effects out into the world. He was born in 1752 in the family’s manor house, which stood at the end of a lane leading inland from its dock, at the mouth of the Bronx Kill. The house had been in the family already for three generations. Morris was a close friend of George Washington and wrote the Preamble to the Constitution. It would not begin “We the People of the United States” or say “in order to form a more perfect union” (those phrases echoing forever) if not for him. Morris served as Ambassador to France during its Revolution, proposed the idea for the Erie Canal, and worked for the canal’s creation. Of a rational and orderly mind, he led the committee that created the street grid for New York City. He suggested a decimal-based system of coinage when the new country was developing its monetary system, and he invented the word “cent,” for penny. Dozens of things all over the Bronx are named for Gouverneur Morris or his family. There’s Morris Heights, Morris Avenue, Gouverneur Place, Gouverneur Playground, Gouverneur Morris Square, and Gouverneur Morris Triangle. The Bronx’s Gouverneur Morris Houses are among the biggest New York City Housing Authority projects in the borough. Morris High School (now Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies), which commemorates him, was the Bronx’s first major public secondary school. His name is everywhere, and yet almost nobody knows who he was.
Of course what struck me was the part about his inventing the word “cent” in the ‘penny’ sense. Checking the OED (entry revised 2016), I found sense 3.a.i. “A monetary unit of the United States, introduced in 1792, equivalent to one-hundredth of a dollar; a coin of this value,” with the first citation
1782 One hundred [units] would be the lowest Silver Coin, and might be called a Cent.
R. Morris & G. Morris, Letter 15 January in R. Morris, Papers (1978) vol. IV. 36
“G. Morris” is of course Gouverneur, and R. is Robert Morris (no relation); the OnlEtyDic says “The word cent first had been suggested by Robert Morris in 1782 under his original plan for a U.S. currency,” and I’m wondering if Frazier simply made a mistake or whether authorship of the word is disputed.
I have always heard the coinage of cent attributed to Robert Morris, who in 1782 was serving as the United States’ first finance minister.* However, at the time Gouverneur Morris was Robert’s deputy, so it’s possible that the name actually arose during private discussions between the two of them.
* The title in the 1780s was “superintendent of finance,” although it only existed through 1784; the position was dropped after the national financing of the Revolutionary War was no longer a pressing concern. Robert Morris later turned down the equivalent role in Washington’s cabinet and was one of the people who suggested Hamilton instead.
Regarding the cited letter of 15 Jan 1782, The Life of Gouverneur Morris (1832) vol. 1 p.273
Aha, so that’s where G. Morris gets the glory.
What interests me most is his given name. Was ‘Gouverneur’ acceptable French at the time? did his parents have any known interests or connections with France? or does it have a completely different origin? and I also wonder how 18th-century English speakers pronounced it…
I would suppose “Gouverneur” to be a Latinisation of a Frankish (or Norse) name like Walter or Waldemar.
His grandfather was Lewis Morris, Governor of New Jersey. His father was also Lewis Morris, as was his eldest brother. Perhaps Lewis 3 was named after Lewis 2, and Gouverneur after Lewis 1?
Wp: Morris’s first name derived from his mother’s surname; she was from a Huguenot family that had first moved to Holland and then to New Amsterdam.[4] In both Dutch and French, Gouverneur means “Governor”.
Abigail Adams, who spelled phonetically, wrote him down as “Governeer” (linked from his Wikipedia article, which translates that to /ɡʌvərnɪər/).
If I might nitpick the Wikipedia snippet quoted by @mollymooly, “derived from” suggests an origin and a variation. There was none of the latter. The Wiki text includes: “ Morris was born on January 31, 1752, the son of Lewis Morris Jr. (1698–1762) and his second wife, Sarah Gouverneur (1714–1786). Morris’s first name derived from his mother’s surname;”
Emphasis added.
The practice of bestowing given names derived from family names by zero alteration goes back to colonial times in the United States.
110 men bearing the given name Gouverneur are listed here:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/search?firstname=Gouverneur&middlename=&lastname=&birthyear=&birthyearfilter=&deathyear=&deathyearfilter=&location=&locationId=&memorialid=&mcid=&linkedToName=&datefilter=&orderby=r&plot=&page=1#sr-66732740
The question is therefore not how the given name arose but how the French family name did:
“occupational [family] name for various sorts of minor administrative officials” (Hanks and Hodges, A Dictionary of Surnames).
Query: at some point in the French revolutionary enthusiasm for all things decimal*, they introduced the centime as one-hundredth of the franc. Was this before or after G or R Morris’ innovation?
*Like so much of the Revolution, taken far too far. The proposed 10-hour day was never taken seriously, what with all those clocks and watches to replace. The 10-day week was: always unpopular since there are more working days in a year of ten-day weeks, and Napoleon abolished it. The grad, one hundredth of a formerly ninety- degree right angle, was till recently and for all I know still is used by the French artillery.
“Was this before or after G or R Morris’ innovation?”
After. G. Morris made his suggestion in January 1782 or earlier, seven years before the French Revolution. The centime was introduced in France in 1795.
Stephen D. The grad, one hundredth of a formerly ninety- degree right angle, was till recently and for all I know still is used by the French artillery.
Still used in geodecy. Angles are measured clockwise with zero to the north.
The town of Gouverneur, NY (near the state’s northern border) is named for Mr. Morris.
And according to Wikipedia the town is pronounced like “governor”.
The grad, also called the gon, is used in European geodesy. The Anglo-American community stuck to the degrees-minutes-seconds system of the Babylonian astronomers, though decimalizing it at both ends instead of being consistently sexagesimal. And then there is the mil, of which (I just learned) there is a NATO version and (formerly) a Warsaw Pact version.
My own family tree is full of last names that moved forward. I’d always wondered about Morris’ name, glad to finally know.
Rick Brookhiser, who has written a series of bios of other more prominent “Founding Father” types, ended up doing a whole book about Morris both because he was underappreciated and because his life made for an engaging and entertaining narrative. I read it some years ago and don’t recall if he says anything interesting or non-obvious about onomastics … https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Gentleman-Revolutionary/Richard-Brookhiser/9780743256025
ETA (for those who don’t click through): I had forgotten that the cover of the book includes a hilarious quote from a positive (I assume?) review from the N.Y. Times, viz. “Brookhiser’s Morris is the Revolution’s Falstaff.”
The review, by Carol Berkin, is guardedly positive, but she likes Morris better than the book:
I was always disappointed there wasn’t a more romantic story about how Morris lost his leg.
Sounds like Brookhiser would be deeply disturbed by Kamala Harris…
The grad is taught in schools over here. What it’s used for (other than fun conversion exercises between °, rad and grad) is not taught, but for mathematics that’s unfortunately normal.
@David M.: I just checked his Twitter feed (@RBrookhiser) and there are no opinions regarding Ms. Harris whatsoever included in the last hundred or so posts. Which doesn’t suggest he has a positive opinion of her, only that he doesn’t feel constrained to spout off about whatever the Internet Politburo has decreed that people should be spouting off about at the moment. There was mention of one former Vice-President (Richard Johnson, who served with Pres. Van Buren) and one ultimately unsuccessful presidential candidate (Stephen Douglas, in the context of his mysterious respelling of his surname).