Morris, Isaac N.

Born: 1812-01-22 Clermont County, Ohio

Died: 1879-10-29 Quincy, Illinois

Flourished: 1838 to 1879 Adams County, Illinois

Isaac N. Morris, farmer, attorney, and public official, was born in Bethel, Ohio. The son of U.S. Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio, he attended Miami University in Ohio then read law in Cincinnati and gained admission to the bar in 1835. He moved to Illinois about 1836 and briefly practiced law in Warsaw, Illinois, then lived from about 1838 onwards in and around Quincy, where he continued in the legal profession. In 1839, he edited the Quincy Argus, and two years later, he was appointed president of the Illinois & Michigan Canal Company and served in the office about two years. A Democrat, Morris represented Adams County in the Illinois House of Representatives from 1846 to 1847, and later won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving two terms, from 1857 to 1861. Morris was one of only a few Democrats in the U.S. Congress who voted against the Lecompton Constitution, and he was a strong unionist during the Civil War, introducing a resolution in Congress in 1860 in support of union and denying that the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency justified dissolution of the Union. At the time of the 1860 census, Morris owned real estate valued at $100,000 and personal property worth $800. He married Mary A. Robbins in 1837 and he was survived by three sons from this marriage.

Biographical Directory of the American Congress 1774-1996 (Alexandria, VA: CQ Staff Directories, 1997), 1554; John Clayton, comp., The Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 1673-1968 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 214; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ellington, Adams County, IL, 80; Speech of Hon. I. N. Morris, of Illinois, Against the Admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. Delivered in the House of Representatives, February 23, 1858 ([Washington, DC]: Lemuel Towers, [1858]); Abraham Lincoln to Isaac N. Morris; Isaac N. Morris to Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Ward 6, Quincy, Adams County, IL, 322; Daily Quincy Herald (IL), 30 October 1879, 3:1-2.