Jeremiah Morton

Jeremiah Morton (September 3, 1799 – November 28, 1878) was a nineteenth-century politician, lawyer, physician, architect, and planter from Virginia. A member of the Whig Party, he represented Virginia for one term in the United States House of Representatives during a pivotal period in American history. He was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to wealthy landowner Jeremiah Morton and his wife, the former Mildred Garnett Jackson, and was a younger brother of Jackson Morton, who later served as a United States senator from Florida.

Morton spent his childhood and youth in the Virginia Piedmont. He attended a private school in Culpeper, Virginia, where he was a few years behind future Congressman John Strode Barbour; his brother George Morton also attended the same school. He pursued higher education at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, in 1814 and 1815, and then traveled to Williamsburg to study at the College of William and Mary, from which he graduated in 1819. After completing his formal education, he read law in the traditional manner of the period, preparing for admission to the bar.

Following his admission to the Virginia bar, Morton began his legal practice at Raccoon Ford on the Rapidan River, traveling regularly to nearby county seats to attend court. In addition to his work as an attorney, he was also trained and active as a physician and architect, reflecting the broad professional pursuits common among members of the antebellum Virginia gentry. Ill health eventually led him to curtail his peripatetic legal career, and he turned increasingly to managing agricultural enterprises and designing residences. Morton married Mary Eleanor Jane Smith (1801–1876), daughter of Reuben Smith and his wife Milly, whose brothers later moved to Texas before the Civil War. The couple’s only surviving child, Mildred, married lawyer J. J. Halsey of Orange County, Virginia.

By the 1830s and 1840s Morton had become a substantial planter, operating several prosperous plantations that relied on enslaved labor. He also designed and built mansions for other wealthy planters and sponsored artists who came into the region. Census records document the growth of his slaveholdings over time. In 1840, while residing in Richmond, he owned six enslaved people in Henrico County. According to the 1850 U.S. Federal Census, he owned twenty-one enslaved people in Culpeper County. By 1860, in Orange County, Virginia, he held sixty-six enslaved people, nineteen of them under the age of ten. His plantations were reported to yield an income of about $30,000 per year, a sum described at the time as “then-princely” (equivalent to roughly $820,131 in 2024).

Morton entered national politics as a member of the Whig Party. Running as a Whig, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1848, succeeding Democrat John S. Pendleton of Culpeper. He served one term in the Thirty-first Congress, from 1849 to 1851, participating in the legislative process during a period marked by sectional tensions and debates over slavery and territorial expansion. In 1850 he sought reelection but was defeated by James F. Strother, a Whig from neighboring Rappahannock County. After his single term in Congress, Morton returned to private life and concentrated on the management of his own and others’ plantations, while continuing his architectural work for prominent landowners in the region.

As the secession crisis deepened following Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, Morton emerged as a leading pro-secession voice in his part of Virginia, despite the generally Unionist stance of many former Whigs. He spoke at a mass meeting at the Culpeper Court House, chaired by Judge Henry Shackelford, where his pro-secession resolutions were seconded by Colonel Alexander Taliaferro and Waller T. Patton. In 1861, voters in Orange and Greene Counties elected him to represent them at the Virginia Secession Convention. There he aligned himself with the secessionist faction, advocating withdrawal from the Union. During the Civil War, his home region along the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers became a contested zone because of the strategic importance of the fords. The Battle of Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862, brought a Confederate victory, but skirmishing continued for weeks. On June 9, 1863, the nearby Battle of Brandy Station became the largest cavalry engagement of the war and marked the end of undisputed Confederate dominance in cavalry operations. The Battle of Culpeper Court House in September 1863 returned the area to Union control, and heavy fighting continued into 1864. Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant wintered at Culpeper, while Lieutenant General Judson Kilpatrick’s troops encamped at Stevensburg. The village of Raccoon Ford was burned on February 6, 1864, during an abortive attack on entrenchments on the Orange side of Morton’s Road, and a nearby field was later nicknamed for the cannonballs found there. General Robert E. Lee climbed nearby Clark’s Mountain on May 4, 1864, to survey the devastated landscape for the last time. Reflecting on the destruction, Morton lamented, “The scourge of war has swept all from me, and . . . I stand a blasted stump in the wilderness.”

In the difficult postwar years, Morton remained deeply conservative and resistant to changes in Southern society and institutions. In 1866 he opposed even the reunion of the churches, fearing, as he wrote, “that we may reap infidelity and the flood of ‘isms’ from the north. If they destroy our social institutions & desolate our homes and confiscate our property, I pray God, our southern Zyon [sic], may not be submerged.” The war had left many local religious structures in ruins. Although the colonial-era brick Little Fork Church (completed in 1776) survived, Great Fork Church, built in 1732, had been dismantled for firewood, and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Raccoon Ford was in a hopelessly dilapidated condition. Morton had long been active in Episcopal church affairs and became a trustee of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, perhaps as early as 1855, a role he appears to have continued into the postwar period.

Morton survived his wife by two years. He died at his estate, Lessland, in Orange County, Virginia, on November 28, 1878. He was interred at his old home, “Morton Hall,” also in Orange County. Several of the houses he designed remain standing and have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including Greenville at Raccoon Ford, Mountain View, Struan, and Summerduck along the Rapidan River; he may also have designed the residence known as Horse Shoe. His life and career reflected the trajectory of the Virginia planter class from antebellum prosperity through the upheavals of civil war and the profound social and economic dislocations of Reconstruction.