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Tim Morris, aka Joseph Griffin
(1834-1880)
Emerging out of antebellum Virginia in the mid-1830s, Joseph Griffin rose to fame as “Tim Morris,” one of the nation’s leading minstrel performers of the 1860s and 70s. He arose from nowhere, and his pauper’s grave was unmarked, but in the years between, his fame as a “delineator” spread across the continent.
By the mid-1850s, Morris was performing in comic roles in minstrel shows. He appeared at various times as a member of Old Joe Sweeney’s Opera Troupe, the Olio Minstrels, the Iron Clads, and many more. During the Civil War, Morris ran afoul of Confederate authorities for evading conscription. Facing jail time in April 1864 Morris argued that he was 46 years old and therefore “illegally detained in custody by the military authorities.” When court reconvened the next day, Morris had disappeared. For a time he was presumed to have fled to the Union side, in blackface.
In fact, Morris remained in Richmond, in hiding, but was eventually discovered. Morris appears to have escaped further penalty for his defiance, and soon was back on stage. A December theater review noted that the Olio Minstrels had greatly improved thanks to the addition of Tim Morris, who helped to make this troupe of “Ethiopians” the most popular act in the city at the close of 1864.
Morris continued to perform in Richmond after the war, but by the 1870s he was performing in other cities, including Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, where he died at the age of 46.
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Erik Christiansen, PhD, Rhode Island College
Gallery
Tim Morris, aka Joseph Griffin (1834-1880)
Emerging out of antebellum Virginia in the mid-1830s, Joseph Griffin rose to fame as “Tim Morris,” one of the nation’s leading minstrel performers of the 1860s and 70s. He arose from nowhere, and his pauper’s grave was unmarked, but in the years between, his fame as a “delineator” spread across the continent.
It appears that Griffin served time in prison as a youth. At the time of the 1850 federal census he resided in the Richmond City Jail, serving a sentence for larceny. He was sixteen years old then. Over the course of the next decade, the name Tim Morris began to appear on playbills at many theaters. He performed with Old Joe Sweeney’s Opera Troupe at Washington, DC’s Melodeon Hall in 1859, playing several parts and entertaining the audience with “life-like representations of the Negro Character.” During the Civil War, under the name of Tim Morris, he performed in Richmond as a member of the Iron-clad Minstrels. The other members were John D. Redford, who performed as a woman, Charley White, R. Jean Buckley, and R.G. Allen. Buckley (Alexander W. Moody) had also been a player in Joe Sweeney’s troupe, and he and Morris remained close associates for more than two decades.
In 1864 Morris ran afoul of Confederate authorities. Apparently he either evaded conscription or he failed to report for duty after being drafted. At any rate, by April of 1864 Morris faced jail time and he filed a habeas corpus suit. Granted a hearing, he argued that he was 46 years old and therefore “illegally detained in custody by the military authorities.” A woman presented to the court as his mother testified that he was born on March 11, 1818, and was consequently too old for conscription. The state requested an adjournment in order to collect its own witnesses to contradict this claim, and when court reconvened the next day, Morris had disappeared. For a time he was presumed to have fled to the Union side. One wry newspaper report noted that while he was 46 years old in Richmond, he would be no older than 35 when he reached Baltimore. The following report of his flight was made in the Richmond papers:
Tim Morris, nee Joseph Griffin, the irrepressible “Iron Clad,” apprehended as a conscript, has run the blockade by the way of Suffolk, paying fifteen hundred passage money. Him has gone. We will never more see his renditions of “John Morgan’s got your mule,” “Wood up,” and the “Grocery store.” Tim will make some fat contract with a Yankee manager, rattle his bones, and we shall read of the old songs we used to hear. Tim went through, we understand, blacked up as an original African, and as he plays the character so well, we don’t wonder at his success.
In fact, Morris remained in Richmond, in hiding, but was eventually discovered and captured by Confederate detectives. They found him rolled up in bedding, stashed away in the attic of a house belonging to John Keigan, in Butchertown. He was taken immediately to Castle Thunder.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his renown, Morris appears to have escaped further penalty for his defiance, and was back on stage by the end of the summer, at the latest. A December theatre review noted that the Olio Minstrels had greatly improved thanks to the addition of Tim Morris, who helped to make this troupe of “Ethiopians” the most popular act in the city at the close of 1864.
Morris continued to perform in Richmond after the war, but by the 1870s he was performing in other cities, including Philadelphia, New York, and Providence, where he performed at the Theatre Comique. One of the later claims made about Morris was that he was a member of the first Ethiopian minstrel troupe to go on the road. That seems unlikely, but certainly he must have travelled extensively enough that audiences across the country were familiar with his act. When he died (ironically, when he really was 46 years old) while in Providence to perform, his obituary appeared in newspapers as far away as California. His pallbearers on March 9, 1880 included fellow performers William (Billy) Chace (buried in the Elk's section of the North Burial Ground), Charles H. Yale, Clarence Boyd, and James Wilkinson.
Even after his death, and his burial in a pauper’s grave (number 1100) in the North Burial Ground, Morris’s name continued to appear in the headlines. While he apparently died penniless, several people came forward to claim they had recently seen him in possession of several thousand dollars, and to charge his partner with theft of the same. Accusations flew back and forth in several columns and published letters, but it seems that if there was any money, Morris’s widow and child never saw any of it.
The peripatetic Morris moved one last time, many years after his burial. When Interstate 95 was built along the western boundary of the North Burial Ground in the 1960s, Morris’s was among the paupers’ graves that were disturbed. A monument was erected in the cemetery to remember the interred en masse, but no memorial remains for this unique character.
Erik Christiansen, PhD, Rhode Island College
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Further Reading
Johnson, Stephen, Editor. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (1993).
