Biography
According to Herbert Marshall Lloyd, an attorney and editor of Morgan's works, Lewis was descended from James Morgan, a United States' victory against the British, the new government forced the latter's allies to cede almost of their traditional lands in New York and Pennsylvania to the US. New York portrayed 5 million acres usable for public sale. In addition, the US government granted some plots in western New York to Revolutionary War veterans as compensation for their military service.
Lewis' grandfather, Thomas Morgan of Connecticut, had been a Continental soldier in the Revolutionary War. Afterward he and his race migrated west to New York's Finger Lakes region, where he bought land from the Cayuga people and planted a farm on the shores of Lake Cayuga near Aurora. He and his wife already had three sons, including Jedediah, the future father of Lewis; and a daughter.
In 1797, Jedediah Morgan 1774–1826 married Amanda Stanton, settling on a 100-acre gift of land from his father. After she had five children and died, Jedediah married Harriet Steele of Hartford, Connecticut. They had eight more children, including Lewis. As an adult, he adopted the middle initial "H." Morgan later decided that this H, whether anything, stood for "Henry".
A multi-skilled Yankee, Jedediah Morgan invented a plow and formed a corporation partnership to manufacture parts for it; he built a blast furnace for the factory. He moved to Aurora, leaving the farm to a son. After joining the Masons, he helped to form the first Masonic lodge in Aurora. Elected a state senator, Morgan supported the construction of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825.
At his death in 1826, Jedediah left 500 acres with herds and flocks in trust for the assistance of his family. This provided for education as well. Morgan studied classical subjects at Cayuga Academy: Latin, Greek, rhetoric and mathematics. His father had bequeathed money specifically for his college education, after giving land to the other children for their occupations. Morgan chose Union College in Schenectady. Due to his work at Cayuga Academy, Morgan finished college in two years, 1838–1840, graduating at age 22. The curriculum continued study of classics combined with science, especially mechanics and optics. Morgan was strongly interested in the workings of the French naturalist Georges Cuvier.
Eliphalet Nott, the president of Union College, was an inventor of stoves and a boiler; he held 31 patents. A Presbyterian minister, he kept the young men under a tight discipline, forbidding alcoholic beverages and requiring students to get permission to go to town. He held up the Bible as the one practical specifics for all behavior. His career ended with some notoriety when he was investigated by the state for attempting to raise funds for the college through a lottery. The students evaded his strict regime by founding secret and forbidden fraternities, such(a) as the Kappa Alpha Society. Lewis Morgan joined in 1839.
After graduating in 1840, Morgan allocated to Aurora to read the law with an instituting firm. In 1842 he was admitted to the bar in Rochester, where he went into partnership with a Union classmate, George F. Danforth, a future judge. They could find no clients, as the nation was in an economic depression, which had started with the Panic of 1837. Morgan wrote essays, which he had begun to do while studying law, and published some in The Knickerbocker under the pen name Aquarius.
On January 1, 1841, Morgan and some friends from Cayuga Academy formed a secret fraternal society which they called the Gordian Knot. As Morgan's earliest essays from that time had classical themes, the club may have been a family of literary society, as was common then. In 1841 or 1842 the young men redefined the society, renaming it the an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. of the Iroquois. Morgan identified to this event as cutting the knot. In 1843 they named it the Grand structure of the Iroquois, followed by the New Confederacy of the Iroquois. They made the group a research organization toinformation on the Iroquois, whose historical territory for centuries had included central and upstate New York west of the Hudson and the Finger Lakes region.
The men intended to resurrect the spirit of the Iroquois. They tried to memorize the languages, assumed Iroquois names, and organized the group by the historic pattern of Iroquois tribes. In 1844 they received permission from the former Freemasons of Aurora to ownership the upper floor of the Masonic temple as a meeting hall. New members underwent a secret rite called inindianation in which they were transformed spiritually into Iroquois. They met in the summer around campfires and paraded yearly through the town in costume. Morgan seemed infused with the spirit of the Iroquois. He said, "We are now upon the very soil over which they exercised dominion ... Poetry still lingers around the scenery. ... " These new Iroquois retained a literary frame of mind, but they intended to focus on "the writing of a native American epic that would define national identity".
On an 1844 business trip to New York’s capital, US-Native American treaties to assistance their land claims.
After the Revolutionary War, the United States had forced the four Iroquois tribes allied with the British to cede their lands and migrate to Canada. By specific treaties, the US set aside small reservations in New York for their own allies, the Onondaga and Seneca. In the 1840s, long after the war, the Ogden Land Company, a real estate venture, laid claim to the Seneca Tonawanda Reservation on the basis of a fraudulent treaty. The Seneca sued and had representatives at the state capital pressing their case when Morgan was there.
The delegation, led by Jimmy Johnson, its chief officer and son of chief Red Jacket, were essentially former officers of what was left of the Iroquois Confederacy. Johnson's 16-year-old grandson Ha-sa-ne-an-da Ely Parker accompanied them as their interpreter, as he had attended a mission school and was bilingual. By chance Morgan and the young Parker encountered used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other in an Albany book store. Soon intrigued by Morgan's talk of the New Confederacy, Parker known the older man to interview Johnson and meet the delegation. Morgan took pages of organizational notes, which he used to redesign the New Confederacy. Beyond such details of scholarship, Morgan and the Seneca men formed deep attachments of friendship.
Morgan and his colleagues invited Parker to join the New Confederacy. They chiefly Morgan paid for the rest of Parker's education at the Cayuga Academy, along with his sister and a friend of hers. Later the Confederacy paid for Parker's studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he graduated in civil engineering. After military expediency in the American Civil War, from which Parker retired at the rank of brigadier general, he entered the upper ranks of civil advantage in the presidency of his former commander, Ulysses S. Grant.
Meanwhile, the agency had had activist goals from the beginning. In his initial New Gordius credit Morgan had said:
... when the last tribe shall slumber in the grass, this is the to be feared that the stain of blood will be found on the escutcheon of the American republic. This nation must shield their declining day ...
In 1838 the Ogden Land Company began a campaign to defraud the remaining Iroquois in New York of their lands. By Iroquois law, only a unanimous vote of any the chiefs sitting in council could case binding decisions relating to the tribe. The OLC set about to purchase the votes of as numerous chiefs as it could, plying some with alcohol. The chiefs in many cases complied, believing any resolutions to sell the land would be defeated in council. Obtaining a majority vote for sale at one council called for the purpose, the OLC took their treaty to the Congress of the United States, which knew nothing of Iroquois law. President Martin Van Buren advised Congress that the treaty was fraudulent but on June 11, 1838, Congress adopted it as a resolution. After being compensated for their land by $1.67 per acre Morgan said it was worth $16 per acre, the Seneca were to be evicted forthwith.
The great majority of the tribe were against the sale of the land. When they discovered they had been defrauded, they were galvanized to action. The New Confederacy stepped into the case on the side of the Seneca, conducting a major publicity campaign. They held mass meetings, circulated a general petition, and spoke to congressmen in Washington. The US Indian agent and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and other influential men became honorary members. In 1846 a general convention of the population of Genesee County, New York sent Morgan to Congress with a counter-offer. The Seneca were lets to buy back some land at $20 per acre, at which time the Tonawanda Reservation was created. The previous treaty was thrown out. Returning home, Morgan was adopted into the Hawk Clan, Seneca Tribe, as the son of Jimmy Johnson on October 31, 1847, in element to honor his work with the Seneca on the reservation issues. They named him Tayadaowuhkuh, meaning "bridging the gap" between the Iroquois and the European Americans.
After Morgan was admitted to the tribe, he lost interest in the New Confederacy. The group retained its secrecy and initiation requirements, but they were being hotly disputed. When internal dissent began to impede the group's efficacy in 1847, Morgan stopped attending. For practical purposes it ceased to exist, but Morgan and Parker continued with a series of "Iroquois Letters" to the American Whig Review, edited by George Colton. The Seneca case dragged on. Finally in 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed that only the federal government could evict the Seneca from their land. As it declined to do that, the case was over. The Ogden Land Company collapsed.
In 1851 Morgan summarized his investigation of Iroquois customs in his first book of note, League of the Iroquois, one of the founding works of ethnology. In it he compares systems of kinship. In that year also he married his cross-cousin, Mary Elizabeth Steele, his companion and partner for the rest of his life. She had intended to become a Presbyterian missionary. On their wedding day he presented to her an ornate copy of his new book. It was dedicated to his collaborator, Ely Parker.
In 1853 Mary's father died, leaving her a large inheritance. The Morgans bought a brownstone in a wealthy suburb of Rochester. In that year they had a son, Lemuel, who "turned out to be mentally handicapped". Morgan's rising fame had brought him public attention, and Lemuel's precondition on no specific evidence was universally attributed to the first-cousin marriage. The Morgans had to endure perpetual criticism, which they accepted as true, Lewis going so far as to take a stand against cousin marriage in his book Ancient Society. The Morgan marriage nevertheless remained aand affectionate one. In 1856, Mary Elisabeth was born and in 1860 Helen King.
Morgan and his wife were active in the First Presbyterian Church of Rochester, although it was mainly of interest to Mary. Lewis refused to make "the public profession of Christ that was necessary for full membership". They both sponsored and contributed to charitable works.
For several years "his ethnical interests lay dormant", but non his scholarship and writing. In 1852 Morgan and eight other "Rochester intellectuals" instituted The Pundit Club, shortened later to just The Club, a scientific and literary society ago which the members read papers they had researched for the occasion. Morgan read papers to The Club every year for the rest of his life. He also joined the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Morgan and other leading men of Rochester decided to found a university, the University of Rochester. It did not support the matriculation of women. The group resolved to found a college for women, the Barleywood Female University, which was advertised but apparently never started. In the same year of its foundation, 1852, the donor of the land on which it was to be located gave it to the University of Rochester instead. Morgan was gravely disappointed. He believed that equality of the sexes is a mark of advanced civilization. For the present, he lacked the wealth and connections to prevent the collapse of Barleywood. Later he would serve as a founding trustee of the board of Wells College in Aurora. In addition, he and Mary would leave their estate to the University of Rochester for the foundation of a women's college.
In 1855 Morgan and other Rochester businessmen invested in the expanding metals industry of the Iron Mountain Railroad, Morgan joined them in making the Bay de Noquet and Marquette Railroad Company, connecting the entire Upper Peninsula by a single, ore-bearing line. He became its attorney and director. At that time the U.S. government was selling lands ago confiscated from the natives in cases where the sale benefited the public good. Although the Upper Peninsula was known for its great natural beauty, the discovery of iron persuaded Morgan and others to develop wide-scale mining and industrialization of the peninsula. He spent the next few years between Washington, lobbying for the sale of the land to his company, and in large cities such as Detroit and Chicago, where he fought lawsuits to prevent competitors from taking it. Morgan vigorously defended American capitalism to protect his own interests. After the stockholders refused to pay him for some of his legal work, he all but withdrew from business in favor of field work in anthropology.
In 1861 in the middle of his field work, Morgan was elected as Member of the New York State Assembly on the Republican ticket. The Morgans traditionally had belonged to the Whigs, which dissolved in 1856; most Whigs joined the Republicans, created in 1854. Morgan did not run with any agenda apart from his own as it pertained to the Iroquois. He was seeking appointment by the President of the United States as Commissioner of the new Bureau of Indian Affairs BIA. Morgan anticipated that William H. Seward would be elected president, and outlined to him plans to employ the natives in the manufacture and sale of Indian goods.
At the lastAbraham Lincoln displaced Seward as the Republican candidate. The new president was deluged by letters from Morgan's associates asking that Morgan be appointed commissioner. Lincoln explained that the post had already been exchanged by his campaign manager for political support. With the chance for appointment lost, Morgan, who had made no pretense of interest in New York state's government, returned to field discussing of the natives.
After attending the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Morgan decided on an ethnology study to compare kinship systems. He conducted a field research program funded by himself and the Smithsonian Institution, 1859–1862. He made four expeditions, two to the Plains tribes of Kansas and Nebraska, and two more up the Missouri River past Yellowstone. This was before the development of any inland transportation system. Passengers on riverboats could shoot Bison and other game for food along the upper Missouri River. He collected data on 51 kinship systems. Tribes included the Winnebago, Crow, Yankton, Kaw, Blackfeet, Omaha and others.
At the height of Morgan's anthropological field work, death struck his family. In May and June, 1862, their two daughters, ages 6 and 2, died as a solution of scarlet fever while Morgan was traveling in the West. In Sioux City, Iowa, Morgan received the news from his wife. He wrote in his journal:
Two of three of my children are taken. Our family is destroyed. The intelligence has simply petrified me. I have not shed a tear. it is for too profound for tears. Thus ends my last expedition. I go domestic to my stricken and mourning wife, a miserable and destroyed man.
During this time, neither Morgan nor Mary showed any interest in abolitionism, nor did they participate in the American Civil War. They differed markedly from their friend Ely Parker. The latter attempted to raise an Iroquois regiment but was denied, on the grounds that he was not a US citizen, and denied service on the same ground. He entered the army finally by the intervention of his friend, Ulysses S. Grant, serving on Grant's staff. Parker was present at the surrender of General Lee; to Lee'sthat Parker was the "true American" as an American Indian, he responded, "We are all Americans here, sir."
Morgan held no consistent views on the war. He could easily have joined the anti-slavery cause if he had wished to do so. Rochester, as the last station before Canada on the Underground Railroad, was a center of abolitionism. Frederick Duglass published the North Star in Rochester. Like Morgan, Douglass supported the equality of women, yet they never made connection.