dramatist, was the author of Columbus, or a World Discovered (1792); Speed the Plough (1798); The School of Reform, or How to Rule a Husband (1805); A Roland for an Oliver (1819); and other pieces.
MORTON, LEVI PARSONS (1824– ), American banker and politician, was born at Shoreham, Vermont, on the 16th of May 1824.[1] He was in business at Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1843–1849 and in Boston in 1849–1854. He then became a partner in a New York dry-goods house. He established in 1863 the banking house of L. P. Morton & Company (dissolved 1899), with a London branch which had Sir John Rose (1820–1888) as its principal member. The American firm assisted in funding the national debt at the time of the resumption of specie payments, and the London house were fiscal agents of the United States government in 1873–1884, and as such received the $15,500,000 awarded by the Geneva Arbitration Court in settlement of the “Alabama Claims” against Great Britain. In 1899 Morton became president of the Morton Trust Company in New York City. He was a Republican representative in Congress in 1879–1881, United States minister to France in 1881–1885, vice-president of the United States during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison in 1889–1893, and in 1895–1896 was governor of New York, signing as such the “Greater New York” bill and the liquor-tax measure known as the “Raines law.” In 1896 he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in the Republican national convention.
MORTON, OLIVER PERRY (1823–1877), American political leader, “war governor” of Indiana, was born in Salisbury, Wayne county, Indiana, on the 4th of August 1823. After studying for two years (1843–1845) at Miami University, he practised law at Centerville, Indiana, and in 1852 was judge of the sixth judicial circuit of Indiana. In February 1856 he was a member of the Pittsburg convention which led to the organization of the national Republican party, and in the same year he was a candidate for governor of Indiana; he was defeated, but his campaign resulted in the effective organization of the new party in his state. He was elected lieutenant-governor in 1860, and when Henry S. Lane (1811–1881), the governor, resigned, on the 16th of January 1861, Morton became governor. In 1864 he was re-elected. In meeting all the extraordinary demands resulting from the Civil War he displayed great energy and resourcefulness, and was active in thwarting the schemes of the secessionists in the neighbouring state of Kentucky, and of the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, and the Sons of Liberty (secret societies of Southern sympathizers and other opponents of the war) in Indiana. In 1863 a hostile legislature sought to deprive him of all control over the militia, and failing in this, adjourned without making the appropriations necessary for carrying on the state government. In this predicament Morton appointed a bureau of finance, and appealed for financial aid to private individuals, bankers, the counties, and even the Federal government. The response was so prompt that he was able to conduct affairs practically single-handed until 1865, when a legislature more favourable to his policies assembled. In 1865, when Morton had a paralytic stroke and went to Europe for treatment, the president entrusted him with a confidential mission to Napoleon III. concerning the withdrawal of the French troops from Mexico. Morton resigned as governor in January 1867 to accept a seat in the United States Senate, in which he served during the rest of his life. He was recognized as one of the leaders of the Radical wing of his party, voting in favour of Johnson’s impeachment, and being especially active on behalf of negro suffrage. In 1870 Grant offered to appoint him minister to Great Britain, but he declined the honour on perceiving that a Democrat would succeed him in the Senate. He was a candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1876, and at the national convention of his party received 124 votes on the first ballot; the nomination, however, finally went to Rutherford B. Hayes. He died at Indianapolis on the 1st of November 1877.
See William D. Foulke, Life of Oliver P. Morton (2 vols., Indianapolis, 1899).
MORTON, THOMAS (1564–1659), English bishop, was born at York, and was educated at York and Halifax grammar-schools and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he became fellow on taking his degree. He was ordained in 1592, and held the office of university lecturer in logic till in 1598 he was presented to the living of Long Marston, Yorkshire. He gained a considerable reputation as a Protestant controversialist, and published numerous works against Roman Catholicism, chief among them being the Apologia catholica (1605) and A Catholicke Appeale (1609). He held successively the deaneries of Gloucester (1606), Winchester (1609), and a canonry at York (1610). In 1616 he became bishop of Chester, in 1618 bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and in 1632 bishop of Durham. On the abolition of the episcopate in 1646 he was assigned a pension, but it was never paid, and the remainder of his life was passed in retirement.
MORTON, THOMAS (c. 1590–1646), usually called Thomas Morton of Merrymount, English adventurer in America, was a lawyer of Clifford’s Inn, London, and seems to have practised in the west of England. He spent three months in America in 1622; returned in 1625, and settled at Mount Wollaston, in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts; and in 1626, when most of the settlers removed to Virginia, he assumed command of the settlement, and renamed it Merrymount.[2] Morton, a Royalist rake, soon became a thorn in the flesh of the sober colonists at Plymouth. On May-Day in 1627 his companions erected a May-pole, and, assisted by Indians, indulged in all the revelry and licence then customary in England. “The setting up of this May-pole was a lamentable spectacle to the precise Separatists that lived at New Plimmouth,” says Morton. “They termed it an Idoll; yea, they called it the Calf of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place, . . . threatening to make it a woefull mount and not a merry mount.” In disregard of a royal proclamation, Morton sold rum and fire-arms to the natives, not only injuring the trade of Plymouth, but also endangering the safety of the colonists. Morton was therefore arrested and sent to England; and when John Endecott, with a patent from the council for New England, arrived soon afterward he visited Merrymount, which lay within his jurisdiction, rebuked the inhabitants, cut down the May-pole, and renamed the place Mount Dagon. In 1629 Morton returned to America, but was arrested on trivial charges by the Massachusetts authorities, and was confined in the stocks. Later his house was burned and he was sent to England, where he spent a term in the Essex gaol. After his release he wrote his New English Canaan (1637), in which he describes the Indians and the natural features of the country, and heaps ridicule upon the New England colonists. In 1643 Morton returned to America. He was imprisoned in Boston in the following year, and was tried before the general court for complaining against the colony before the Privy Council; he was recommitted to gaol pending the gathering of further evidence, and after a year’s confinement was fined £100 and released. He retired to Agamenticus (now York), Maine, and in 1646 died poverty-stricken.
See the New English Canaan, edited by Charles Francis Adams (Publications of the Prince Society, vol. ix., Boston, 1883); C. F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston, 1896); and, for a more favourable view of Morton, A Few Observations on the Prince Society’s Edition of the New English Canaan, revised and reprinted from the Churchman (New York, 1883). Morton’s adventures have furnished material for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, The Maypole of Merrymount, and for John Lothrop Motley’s novels, Morton’s Hope (1839) and Merry Mount (1849).
MORTUARY (Med. Lat. mortuarium, from mortuus, dead), of or belonging to the dead, or, in particular, to the burial
- ↑ His earliest ancestor in America was George Mourt, or Morton (d. 1624), a merchant of York, England, who seems to have been in London in 1621–1622 as financial agent for the Plymouth colonists. He published Mourt’s Relation, or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation at Plimoth (1622), apparently written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow, and went to Plymouth, Mass., in the “Anne” in 1623.
- ↑ In his book Morton indulges his fondness for punning and display of Latinity by calling the place Mare-Mount (Hill by the sea).
