Robert Hunter Morris (11)

Robert Hunter Morris (1713–27 January 1764) was an aristocrat, judge, and colonial governor, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1744. He was born and educated in the New York manor of a prominent family. When his father Lewis Morris became Governor of New Jersey in 1738, Robert was appointed to the colony’s royal council and, a year later, was made Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. The younger Morris became deeply unpopular with the provincial assembly for his efforts to bolster royal and proprietary authority and for his efforts to dispossess settlers of lands in east New Jersey, which provoked riots beginning in 1745. He ventured to London in 1749 to petition the Board of Trade to station troops in the colony to suppress the riots; he also sought appointment as Governor of New Jersey or Lieutenant Governor of New York. Instead, he secured the patronage of the Penn family, returning to America in 1754 as Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania, the colony’s chief executive. He was also elected to the Royal Society in 1755. Morris’s tenure as deputy governor was spent wrangling with the Pennsylvania Assembly, led by Benjamin Franklin. Of particular issue were Morris’s refusal to publish his instructions from the Penns and his calls for legislation providing for the colony’s defense without taxing proprietary landholdings during the French and Indian War. He resigned in 1756 and resumed his post as Chief Justice of New Jersey. (PI, ANB, DNB, DAB)