Morrison was wounded at the Battle of Fort Donelson while serving with the Union Army during the American Civil War, and his wife nursed him back to health.

[1] In 1861, Morrison helped organize and was appointed colonel of the 49th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.

Shortly after it was as mustered into service on December 31, 1861, the regiment was attached to Ulysses S. Grant's army at Cairo, Illinois.

Morrison also participated in the Battle of Fort Donelson where his division commander, John A. McClernand, decided to seize a Confederate battery early in the engagement.

The opposition was led by Congressman Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania on the Democratic side, and there had been bad blood between the two men for almost a decade.

In 1883, when Randall sought re-election to the Speakership, Morrison organized the forces that elected John G. Carlisle of Kentucky instead.

But their personal dislike was rooted in sharply different views of how protective the tariff ought to be, and Randall's ability, as Appropriations Committee chairman, to wield the influence among members against any reduction in rates was still considerable through 1886.

One high-tariff Democrat described Morrison as "afflicted with economic flatulence and fiscal hydrophobia," firing off "putrid tariff phosphorescence from one end and finance and currency froth from the other.

"Apparently there are many doctors attending the coming Tariff bill at the leader's bedside," the Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Manning wrote an old associate.

He has all the airs of one, and his ten years in Congress and as long a time in the Illinois Legislature, have failed to make anything else out of him as far as personal appearance goes.

He is slouchy in his dress, his black broadcloth coat being, as a rule, anything but new in appearance, and anything but a compliment to the tailor who was its author and finisher.

He delights in a soft black hat, a 'slouch,' not in the newest fashion either, though to a friend who was chaffing him on it the other day he remarked that he had a good silk one at home.

When he was defeated for reelection in 1886 to the 50th United States Congress Congress, it came as something of a shock to his party, but to knowledgeable Illinois observers, the real shock was that defeat had come so late: Republicans had kept fiddling with his congressional district's boundaries to make it more firmly Republican, and to their dismay found that however the voters went in presidential races, they still went for Morrison in the congressional race.

This article incorporates public domain material from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress