His mother's sister Agnes married Samuel Fuller, later the Pilgrim doctor, and her sister Alice married at Leyden Edward Southworth and later at Plymouth, Gov. William Bradford [q. v. ].
Nathaniel came to Plymouth with his father and family on the Anne in 1623 and when his father died in 1624 was taken into the family of Governor Bradford, who had just become his uncle by marriage with Alice Southworth.
He was educated at Plymouth by Bradford, Brewster, Standish, and Fuller, and well educated, for about 1634 he became his uncle's clerk and amanuensis and apparently his agent in many transactions.
He probably resided at Plymouth throughout his life, though he sold land at Duxbury in 1652 and may have lived there for a time (Mayflower Descendant, October 1899, p. 214).
In 1671 he became member and secretary of the council of war to conduct the campaigns against King Philip, and he remained one of its most active members throughout the war (E. W. Peirce, Peirce's Colonial Lists, 1881, p. 93).
Certainly he was one of the most important men at Plymouth from about 1640 until his death in 1685.
At the request of many, soon reinforced by the requests of the commissioners of the four New England colonies, he prepared New Englands Memoriall, printed at Cambridge in 1669.
He declared in his preface that it had been prepared from Bradford's papers and from those of Winslow.
Criticized at the time for the brevity of his account of the earlier years, Morton prepared a longer account which was completed in 1676; the manuscript was burned in that year, however, and he undertook to rewrite it, finishing the task in 1680.
He wrote also and included in the Memoriall many commemorative verses which deserve notice as some of the earliest verse written in America.
[J. K. Allen, George Morton of Plymouth Colony and Some of His Descendants (1908); J. A. Goodwin, The Pilgrim Republic (1888); Records of the Colony of New Plymouth (12 vols. , 1855 - 61), ed.
by N. B. Shurtleff; Records of the Town of Plymouth, vol.
I (1889); "Plymouth Church Records, " vol.
I, being Col. Soc.
Massachussets Pubs. , vol.
XXII (1920); the best edition of New Englands Memoriall is the facsimile edition (1903), with introduction by Arthur Lord; the sixth edition, New England's Memorial, by Nathaniel Morton (Congreg.
On the various editions and copies see Mayflower Descendant, Apr. 1922, Apr. 1924, and for the alleged London edition of 1669, see Albert Matthews, "A Ghost Book, " Col. Soc.
Massachussets Pubs. , vol.
XIV (1912). ]
This account, largely from Bradford's papers, was printed in the Congregational Board's edition of the Memoriall (post), together with a "Dialogue" of Bradford's edited by Morton.
His association with Bradford was extremely close until the Governor's death in 1657.
Most of the later Mortons, however, were descended from Nathaniel's brother, Ephraim.
