Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis H. Morgan, an American anthropologist and social theorist who made his living as a railroad lawyer, is remembered for his studies of kinship, his theories on how societies evolve, and his detailed account of Iroquois life. He argued that the earliest form of human domestic organization was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family, a concept born from his interest in what holds societies together. His work on social structure and the role of technology in progress caught the attention of European thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were his contemporaries. Morgan is the only American social theorist whose work was cited by such a wide range of figures as Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880. Politically, he was a Republican, representing Monroe County’s 2nd District in the New York State Assembly in 1861 and later in the New York State Senate in 1868 and 1869.

Morgan’s ancestry traces back to James Morgan, a Welsh pioneer who, according to Herbert Marshall Lloyd, came to Boston in 1636 with his brothers Miles and John. James eventually settled in New London, Connecticut. Lewis was born to Jedediah Morgan and his second wife, Harriet Steele, in 1818. After Jedediah’s death in 1826, the family was supported by a trust of 500 acres, which also funded Lewis’s education. He studied Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and mathematics at Cayuga Academy, then completed his degree at Union College in just two years, from 1838 to 1840, graduating at age 22. There, he was drawn to the works of French naturalist Georges Cuvier. Union’s president, Eliphalet Nott, a strict Presbyterian minister and inventor, forbade alcohol and required permission to leave campus. Students circumvented his rules by forming secret fraternities; Morgan joined the Kappa Alpha Society in 1839.

After graduating, Morgan read law in Aurora and was admitted to the bar in Rochester in 1842, partnering with a classmate. The Panic of 1837 had left them with few clients, so Morgan wrote essays, publishing some under the pen name Aquarius in *The Knickerbocker*. In 1841, he and friends from Cayuga Academy founded a secret society called the Gordian Knot, which soon transformed into the Order of the Iroquois, then the Grand Order of the Iroquois, and finally the New Confederacy of the Iroquois. The group aimed to revive the Iroquois spirit, learning their languages, adopting Iroquois names, and organizing along historic tribal lines. They met in a Masonic temple, performed a secret initiation called *inindianation*, and held summer campfires and annual parades in costume. Morgan saw himself as walking the same ground the Iroquois once ruled, and the group focused on writing a native American epic to define national identity.

After the Revolutionary War, the United States forced four Iroquois tribes allied with the British to cede their lands and move to Canada, while setting aside small reservations in New York for the Onondaga and Seneca. In the 1840s, the Ogden Land Company claimed the Seneca Tonawanda Reservation based on a fraudulent treaty. The Seneca sued, and their delegation to the state capital included Jimmy Johnson, its chief officer and son of chief Red Jacket, along with his 16-year-old grandson Ha-sa-ne-an-da, better known as Ely Parker.