Charles Morton

(1627 - 1698)

Charles Morton, a Cambridge University–educated Nonconformist minister, ran a progressive academy for Protestant Dissenters (among his students was a young Daniel Defoe, who said his fellow students were “made masters of the English tongue”) until he was excommunicated and arrested by Royalists. He moved to Massachusetts in 1686 to serve as pastor of Charlestown’s first church and taught at Harvard for the remainder of his life.