With the exception of three months in a common-school he was educated by himself and by his abolitionist mother and father who had a library composed of three Bibles, four New Testaments, a work on elocution, and a few other books.
In 1795 he moved to Columbia, now part of Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied and worked as clerk in a store for the Rev. John Smith, one of the first two United States senators from Ohio.
He was the descendant of Thomas Morris who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637.
While leading the hard life of a frontier brick-maker he read Blackstone at night by the light of his log-cabin fireplace.
In 1828, with Samuel Medary [q. v. ], he established the Ohio Sun to support Andrew Jackson for president.
After his defeat for Congress in 1832 the Ohio legislature elected him United States senator to serve a full term, 1833-39.
He wielded great power over juries with speeches filled with Biblical quotations.
He believed slavery was a moral evil, a national calamity, the greatest national sin.
At a time when it was political suicide in Ohio to be an aggressive radical he incurred the condemnation of the South and lost the support of tactful politicians in his own state by his introduction of petitions in the United States Senate to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.
In 1840 he went home ostracized, contemned, and martyred to his cause.
The threats of mobs and riotous disturbances did not deter him in his anti-slavery crusade from 1841 to 1844.
His greatest contributions were made as chairman of judiciary committees on which he served for many years and as the abolitionist example and preceptor of the Ohio trio, Salmon P. Chase, Joshua R. Giddings, and Benjamin Wade.
[B. F. Morris, The Life of Thomas Morris (1856); C. B. Galbreath, Hist.
of Ohio (1925), vol.
II; The Biog.
Cyc.
and Portrait Gallery of the State of Ohio, vol.
I (1883); Henry Howe, Hist.
Colls.
of Ohio, centennial ed. , vol.
I (1889); J. B. Swing, "Thomas Morris, " Ohio Arch.
and Hist.
Soc.
Quart. , Jan. 1902; Ibid. , July 1922. ]
Morris, Thomas, , Pennsylvania 1776 1844 Male Senator senator from Ohio, was the fifth child in the family of twelve children of a Baptist preacher of Welsh descent, Isaac Morris, and of Ruth (Henton) Morris and his wife.
True Democracy meant to him the supremacy of the Bible in a society wherein men harmonized their lives with the laws of nature.
He was a stanch partisan but not of the pro-slavery wing of the Democracy.
As a Unionist he denounced nullification and secession as revolutionary and destructive of American liberty; as an expansionist and abolitionist he boldly opposed the extension of slavery.
Soon after his birth in Berks County, Pa. , his parents settled near Clarksburg, now in West Virginia.
He became the father of three daughters and eight sons, one of whom preached at his funeral in the Bethel cemetery and two of whom were elected later to Congress as Democrats.
