The Roots of John Morton in Finland: A Study in History and Genetic Genealogy

In The Roots of John Morton in Finland, historian Auvo Kostiainen updates and expands the 2021 study, coauthored with Pekka Haikkala, John Mortonin juuret ovat Suomessa. Historiaa ja DNA-tutkimusta. John Morton (1725–1777), one of the fifty-six signers of the US Declaration of Independence, was descended from the often-forgotten Forest Finnish component of the equally often-forgotten New Sweden colony. Founded in 1638 on Lenni Lenape lands, the New Sweden colony eventually became incorporated into the English colonies of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—four of the original thirteen states of the United States of America. Cooperating with descendants and relatives of John Morton on both sides of the Atlantic, Kostiainen and Haikkala endeavored in their joint study to provide an overview of the New Sweden colony and to demonstrate through both genealogical and genomic research the Finnish roots of John Morton. In this newly issued single-authored study, Kostiainen seeks to make the earlier book's findings known to an English-language audience, drawing on updated research in the fast-changing area of genomic research and contextualizing John Morton in colonial and early American history. Readable and well presented, the volume will be a welcome addition to the shelves of both American historians and Finnish Americans with interest in the history of Finns in North America.Whereas most human DNA undergoes continual alteration from generation to generation as the genetic matter (chromosomes) of mothers and fathers combine, mitochondrial DNA, held within cell mitochondria, are passed largely unaltered from mother to child. Similarly, the paternal Y chromosome is passed largely unchanged from father to son. These two genomic pools of information offer fascinating insights into the deep history of human populations and have been used in recent decades to explore questions of ancient migrations and cultural development thousands of years in the past. The second part of Kostiainen's study surveys Y-chromosome research with respect to ancient human in-migration into the region of northern Europe that we today know as Finland, and later out-migration of Finns across the Baltic Sea to areas of Sweden, from which some eventually joined other seventeenth-century Swedish colonists headed for North America.Ship records from the Örn from 1654 list a “Morten Mortenson” as a colonist headed for New Sweden (164). Genealogical research indicates that this man—Mårten Mårtensson, or in Finnish scholarship Martti Marttinen—was the great-grandfather of John Morton. Y-chromosome research indicates that he may have come from around the village of Salmenkylä, in the parish of Kangasniemi, in South Savo, southeast Finland. Like other Savo farmers, he was recruited or drawn to relocate to central Sweden (in particular, Värmland) as part of a royal program intended to propagate Finnish kaski (slash-and-burn, or “burn beat”) agriculture in remote forest areas of mainland Sweden. By the 1630s, as the population grew in these areas of Sweden, and as forests were needed for other purposes, slash-and-burn agricultural practices became frowned upon, and skogsfinnar, metsäsuomalaiset (“Forest Finns”) became viewed as a nuisance. Kostiainen writes: “In 1636 the Swedish government ordered that the vagrant and forest-destroying Finnish should be deported back to Finland” (47). Some, however, ended up joining in the New Sweden colonial venture instead, whether by choice or compulsion (73). These genealogical and historical findings largely square with earlier research, although previous studies had suggested the village of Rautalampi as Martti's place of origin. Martti Marttinen, who went by the Swedish name Mårten Mårtenson (Sr.), had a son, Mårten Mårtenson (Jr.), who in turn had a son, John Morton (Sr.), whose son John Morton (Jr.) was the famed Pennsylvanian statesman.In the first part of the volume—the portion written primarily by Kostiainen—the history of New Sweden and modern Finnish and Finnish American awareness of it are insightfully chronicled. Kostiainen summarizes the many complexities of the historical reconstruction, for example, the multiplicity of New Sweden colonists with the name Mårten Mårtenson (62–64). He recounts the development of the small colony of some five hundred colonists (70), making use of more recent research on the topic, such as Gunlög Fur's 2006 study Colonialism in the Margins: Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland (73). He also chronicles John Morton's life, education, and rise as a delegate of the Continental Congress, where, in 1776, he joined two of his Pennsylvanian colleagues, Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson, in voting in favor of independence, becoming the swing vote in a divided Pennsylvanian delegation (106). At the time of his death in 1777, Morton's plantation workforce included six enslaved people, illustrating the prominence of slavery in Northern states during the colonial era (109). Kostiainen recounts the fate of these people—a husband and wife with four children—as they were divided between Morton's heirs as inheritance (111).Kostiainen traces modern interest in the topic of New Sweden to Finland in the 1860s (22), in which the accounts of Lutheran priests who had been stationed in the New Sweden colony were consulted and published. Important anniversaries of the colony's founding were celebrated in the US and in Finland in 1888, 1938, and 1988. The New Sweden colony became a symbol of longevity and historical rootedness for Finnish Americans of the twentieth century, most of whom had roots not in the colonial era but rather in migrations that had occurred much later, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1930s, the New Sweden connection had become a point of pride for many Finnish Americans, with prominent monuments erected in places where the colony had existed (112). By the 1980s, in research published by Jordan and Kaups (1989), the Forest Finns of New Sweden were identified as the source of key American pioneer technology, such as log cabin construction (40). Recent scholarship (e.g., Andersson and Lahti 2022; see review in this volume) have called out the erasures and innocence of some of this line of Finnish American historical writing, and Kostiainen treats the reader to some of the overblown and dramatic wording employed by Finnish American pastor Salomon Ilmonen in his 1937 biography of Morton (115). But the main focus of the volume is not on this later historiography but rather on the eighteenth-century historical identity of John Morton and his now well-documented ties to Finland. Kostiainen's work provides lively and useful reading.