Timothy D. Morris

Morris was the Racine County sheriff who treated the 1854 seizure of Joshua Glover as a kidnapping and helped set in motion the jailbreak that sent the escaped enslaved man to Canada. Born in De Peyster, New York, on July 4, 1818, he came west in the fall of 1838, staked a claim in the town of Caledonia with his brother, and cleared what local memory calls the first farm in that corner of Racine County. He married Ellen Emerson, whose Vermont family had paused in New York, in 1843. They raised at least eight children. He farmed the western Caledonia land until lung inflammation killed him in that house on April 26, 1876; he is buried in Racine’s Mound Cemetery.

The night that made him famous began when Glover, living freely in Racine, was seized by his former captor and a U.S. marshal and locked in the Milwaukee jail under the Fugitive Slave Act. Morris, then sheriff on a Whig ticket, tried to arrest Benammi Garland and the federal men, then loaded about a hundred Racinians onto a boat for Milwaukee. Abolitionists took the jail with pickaxes. Morris arrested Garland on the spot. Glover was already on a boat to Canada before federal court could remand him south. Garland later sued; in United States ex rel. Garland v. Morris the district court ordered Garland released—after the rescue had already succeeded.

Morris declined a 1854 re-election run after that year, then won the sheriff’s office again in 1856 as a Republican and the state Senate in 1862 over Philo Belden, serving 1863–65 before Jerome Case took the seat. Caledonia’s claim is the pioneer farm and the death at home; Racine County’s is the badge and the Glover night.