Thomas Morris

British Captain Thomas Morris was born in 1732 in Carlisle. He was educated at Winchester College and joined the British army in 1749. As a lieutenant, Morris was sent with the 17th Regiment to America in 1758 to take part in the French and Indian War. He participated in the 1762 siege of Havana and then traveled to the Great Lakes region to lead peacemaking missions.

His experiences among Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region inform much of Morris’s later creative work. He was captured by the Miami Indians during Pontiac’s War in 1764, and escaped to Detroit after being freed by a young chief. In his journal, Morris notes that this chief gave him a volume of Shakespeare, which he read throughout his time in America.

Morris returned to England in 1767 and resigned from the army. He married and published four volumes of poetry and a novel, as well as two accounts of his life in America: a daily journal he kept during his time there, and an expanded autobiography. His most well-known work, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1791), contains many of his observations on Native American culture, including his imitation of Horace’s Odes 2.16, “Sapphics: At the Mohawk-Castle, Canada. To Lieutenant Montgomery.”