W.L. Morton Biography

Born in Gladstone, Manitoba, William Lewis Morton was educated at the University of Manitoba and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He held various university teaching appointments in Manitoba until settling in the history department at the University of Manitoba in 1942, serving there until 1966 (from 1950 to 1964 as head). He then moved to Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, as Master of Champlain College and Vanier Professor of History. After formally retiring from Trent in 1975, he returned to the University of Manitoba and continued to teach there until his death. Morton received many honours, including a Governor General's Award for The Progressive Party in Canada and the Tyrell Medal of the Royal Society in 1958. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1969.

Although his earliest historical research was on imperial themes (including an Oxford thesis on the Newfoundland fishery), Morton first found his métier in the study of his native district. Collaborating with his sister Margaret Morton Fahrni, he published Third crossing: a history of the town and district of Gladstone in the Province of Manitoba (1946), which celebrated the ‘privileged settlers’—as L.H. Thomas called them—of British Protestant background who had established rural communities in the province. Gladstone's founders were devoted to family, to nation, and to Empire, loyalties Morton never questioned. In the late 1940s he published a number of articles that pointed to The Progressive Party in Canada (1950; rev. 1967), a book that was part of the working-out of the Morton family past: the author's father had been elected to the Manitoba legislature as a Progressive and the study is deeply sympathetic to both regional grievances and the positive reforms of the movement. By this time, however, Morton had broken with his family's traditional political allegiances and become an active supporter of the Conservative party; many of his later writings attempted to delineate a philosophy for Canadian Conservatism.

Beginning in the mid-1950s Morton entered upon a decade of prodigious output, which saw him publish most of his major works and gradually change from a regional to a national historian. In 1956 he published two vital studies on early Manitoba in the form of lengthy introductions to collections of documents. The introduction to The London correspondence inward from Eden Colvile 1849 – 1852 for the Hudson's Bay Record Society revealed Morton's prose style—graceful yet analytical—at its best; the work is a masterpiece of delineation of the problems facing Red River in the transitional period from fur trade to agriculture and commerce. His introduction to Alexander Begg's Red River journal and other papers relative to the Red River resistance of 1869 – 70 for the Champlain Society brilliantly synthesized the developments that led to the Riel uprising. Both these works have been unjustly neglected. Building upon his own research and that of others, Morton then produced what many regard as his finest book, Manitoba: a history (1957; rev. 1967), which has remained the model provincial history. Stronger on the Red River period than the post-1870 one, it illustrated again Morton's strong identification with the agrarian origins of the province, as well as his growing sense of Manitoba's cultural distinctiveness. (Morton later wrote another brilliant introduction to a related collection of documents: Manitoba: the birth of a province, 1965, for the Manitoba Record Society.) In 1957 he also published One university: a history of the University of Manitoba, 1877 – 1952, which—while inevitably institutional in approach—captured the flavour of the disparate educational and cultural traditions in Manitoba that Morton always celebrated.

After this outpouring of major writings on Manitoba, Morton turned to larger themes. An invitation to deliver a series of lectures in 1960 at the University of Wisconsin produced the bulk of The Canadian identity (1961; rev. 1972). In these lectures, and in his 1960 Canadian Historical Association presidential address, Morton sought to provide Canada with ‘a self-definition of greater clarity and more ringing tone’, emphasizing the nation's northern character, historical dependence, monarchical commitment, and special relationships with other states. These themes became the basis of his large-scale history The kingdom of Canada (1963), although they often tended to become lost in a morass of encyclopaedic and ill-digested detail. This work did not display Morton's abilities to best advantage, nor did The critical years: the union of British North America, 1857 – 1873 (1964), a volume in the Canadian Centenary Series, of which he was co-editor with Donald Creighton. More than other studies of the Confederation period, The critical years focused on the aspirations of the outlying regions, stressing the cultural (rather than political) duality of Canada, a major preoccupation of Morton's later works. When he came to deal with regions outside Manitoba, however, Morton self-confessedly had difficulty in achieving the same understanding he displayed about this native province. His study with Margaret MacLeod, Cuthbert Grant of Grantown: Warden of the Plains of Red River (1963; rev. 1973), marked a return to earlier interests, its great virtue being its sympathetic understanding of Métis aspirations. His most insightful analysis and most stylish—often lyrical—prose is to be found in his writings on the early history of Manitoba. Although Morton was far more than merely a regional historian, it was as a regional historian that he produced his most enduring and endearing work.

Morton was an essayist of considerable charm and ability. His shorter writings are accessible in A.B. McKillop, ed., Contexts of Canada's past: selected essays of W.L. Morton (1980).

Bibliography and More Information about W.L. Morton

• See Carl Berger, ‘William Morton: the delicate balance of region and nation’ in The West and the nation: essays in honour of W.L. Morton (1976), edited by Carl Berger and Ramsay Cook.

J.M. Bumsted