Booknotes: The Creation of a Crusader

New Arrival:

• The Creation of a Crusader: Senator Thomas Morris and the Birth of the Antislavery Movement by David C. Crago (Kent St UP, 2023).

From the description: "More than 175 years after his death, Senator Thomas Morris has remained one of the few early national champions of political and constitutional antislavery without a biography devoted to him. In this first expansive study of Morris’s life and contributions, David C. Crago persuasively argues that historians have wrongly marginalized Morris’s role in the early antislavery movement."

The Pennsylvania-born Ohio senator's name instantly made me think of West Point-trained Indiana militia general Thomas A. Morris (1811-1904), who was associated with Kentucky (the state of his birth) and Indiana, but I couldn't readily discover if there was any familial relation between the two men.

More from the description: According to Crago, Thomas Morris (1776-1844) "was the first member of the US Senate to defend abolitionist positions in that body. Confronted with Southern demands for Congressional action to silence abolitionists and endorse slavery, he asserted that a proslavery interpretation of the Constitution was a distortion of the text. Instead, he argued, the Constitution neither identified people as property nor granted Congress the power to establish slavery in the territories or the District of Columbia. Although far outside the 1830s political consensus, Morris’s ideas were quickly adopted by the nascent antislavery movement and became the cornerstone of antislavery political beliefs."

Ahead of his time, Morris did not, in the end, fare well in party politics. "Ultimately expelled from the Ohio Democratic Party and denied reelection to the Senate, within a decade his ideas would shape the core principles of both the Free-Soil and Republican Parties’ platforms." The Creation of a Crusader "fills an important gap in understanding the early American antislavery movement and sheds light on Morris’s overlooked yet significant influence."