Creation of a Crusader

David C. Crago worked for 14 years in the private practice of law and joined the faculty of the College of Law at Ohio Northern University in 1991. Crago has held a variety of leadership and administrative roles, and he is currently a visiting professor of law at Ohio Northern University.

"David Crago's splendid biography of Thomas Morris is truly a major contribution to the history of American politics. In his time, Morris, a stalwart antislavery pioneer, loomed so large that many thought his reputation would be immortal. With imagination, unstinting research, and analytical clarity, Crago has written a rare life study that illuminates the entire antislavery political tradition."—Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln "This impressive study seeks to return Ohio senator Thomas Morris, who for a brief time became a central figure in political abolitionism, to his rightful place in the history of American antislavery." —Jonathan Earle, author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854"With the determination of a detective and the craft of a historian, law professor David Crago restores antebellum Ohio senator Thomas Morris to the meteoric presence he had in his own time—a hard-money Jacksonian in 1836 who broke from his party, who became the first public figure to denominate and denounce the aggrandizing 'Slave Power,' who reversed himself to argue that the Constitution never sanctioned humans as property, and who by 1842, as the vice presidential candidate of the Liberty Party, declared that Congress had the power and the obligation to abolish slavery to achieve the Declaration's equal justice for all."—Sydney Nathans, author of To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker