11 Facts About Jeremiah Morton

Jeremiah Morton was a nineteenth-century politician, lawyer, physician and architect from Virginia.

Jeremiah Morton was a younger brother of Florida senator Jackson Morton.

Jeremiah Morton married Mary Eleanor Jane Smith, daughter of Reuben Smith and his wife Milly, whose brothers moved to Texas before the Civil War.

Jeremiah Morton ultimately left his peripatetic legal career due to illness and instead ran several prosperous plantations using enslaved labor, as well as built mansions for other wealthy planters, as well as sponsored artists who came to the area.

Jeremiah Morton owned 6 slaves in Henrico County, Virginia in 1840, when he lived in Richmond.

Jeremiah Morton ran as a Whig and won election to the United States House of Representatives in 1848.

Jeremiah Morton succeeded John S Pendleton, a Democrat from Culpeper, but would only serve on term, from 1849 to 1851.

An owner of several prosperous plantations, Jeremiah Morton reputedly had an income of the "then-princely" $30,000 a year.

Orange and Greene County voters elected Jeremiah Morton to represent them at the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 in 1861 and he became a leading secessionist, although most Whigs at the Convention were Unionists.

Jeremiah Morton became a trustee of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, perhaps as early as 1855.

Jeremiah Morton died at Lessland in Orange County, Virginia, on November 28,1878, and was interred at his old home, "Morton Hall" in Orange County.