Jedidiah Morse a STATION of PECULIAR EXPOSURE
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The Life of Jedidiah Morse A STATION OF PECULIAR EXPOSURE • • • • • • • • • • • • • RichardJ. Moss "Richard Moss locates Jedidiah Morse as a man torn between a republican past and a liberal future, a paradigm certainly familiar to scholars in this field. But Moss also seeks to understand Morse as a human actor through the provocative and perhaps controversial application of psychological evidence and interpretation."-John Andrew, Franklin & Marshall College Jedidiah Morse-clergyman, geographer, and father of the painter and inventor Samuel Morse-was a significant figure in post Revolutionary New England. Through his popular geography texts, he described the new nation to Americans. As a prominent Congregationalist minister, he involved himself deeply in the heated religious controversies of his day. As a polemicist, he voiced the anxieties Americans felt about such turbulent events as the French Revolu tion and the political and religious changes their own country was undergoing. As Richard Moss reveals in this compelling biography, Morse was caught in a personal : dilemma that reflected the larger tensions within his society. On the one hand, he played the role of self-sacrificing minister-a role drawn from the expectations of his father and the Connecticut traditions in which he was reared. In this capacity, he adopted the language of Christian Republi canism and sought to defend the virtues of communitarian village life, austerity, and deference to the Federalist leadership. On the other hand, Morse recognized the opportuni ties offered by the emerging liberal, capitalist culture. As an author and speculator, he amassed a small fortune and became en meshed in a web of financial gambles that ultimately ruined him. Drawing on psychological theory, Moss argues that, far from remaining separate, the two sides of Jedidiah Morse were dependent upon each other. Because Morse lacked a sense of wholeness, Moss contends, he The Life of Jedidiah Morse ·..... The Life of J edidiah Morse A STATION OF PECULIAR EXPOSURE Richard]. Moss The University of Tennessee Press • Knoxville Copyright© 1995 by The University of Tennessee Press I Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. First Edition. The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard fo r Permanence of Paper fo r Printed Library Materials. €9 The binding materials have been chosen fo r strength and durability. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Moss, Richard J. The life ofJ edidiah Morse: a station ofpeculiar exposure I Richard J. Moss- 1st ed. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87049-868-1 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Morse, Jedidiah, 1761-1826. 2. Congregational churches-Massachusetts-Clergy-Biography. I. Title. BX7260.M57M57 1995 92-28143 285.8'32'092-dc20 CIP [B} Contents Acknowledgments Vll Introduction lX 1. Woodstock and Deacon Morse 1 2. To Yale and the World 13 3. A Place in the World: Settlement 35 4. A Period of Singular Revolutions 54 5. The Two-Layered Life 81 6. Family 116 7. The End 131 Epilogue 143 Notes 15 1 Bibliography 166 ·Index 173 Illustrations 1. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Morse Family Group, c. 1809 144 2. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Reverend]edidiah Morse, 1809 145 3. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Reverend]edidiah Morse, 1816-17 146 4. Samuel F. B. Morse, The Reverend]edidiah Morse, 1823 147 5. Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822-23 148 Acknowledgments A number of people have made the writing of this book easier and more enjoyable. I owe a huge debt to countless librarians and archivists who cheerfully provided the manuscripts and arcane pamphlets and sermons on which this book is based. The talented staffs of the Manuscript and Archives sections of the Yale University Library and the New York Pub lic Library deservespecial mention. I have benefited from the support and advice of close friends and dis tant scholars. Pearl Rose, Robert Weisbrot, Greg Pfitzer,James Roberti, and Patricia Walls have all, in different ways, helped me finish this book. A number of my students at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, provided invaluable aid. Laura Carlson was especially important. To a great degree, this volume was written in scholarly isolation. At crucial moments, how ever, I received support and critical readings from Harry S. Stout and Wil liam K. Breitenbach fo r which I am deeply grateful. Colby College has provided much-needed support over the years. The Colby College Librarystaff has been unfailinglypatient and helpful. Patricia Kick and Grace Von Tobel have translated my low-tech, pen-and-paper manuscripts into wonders of the word processor's art. By design, my wife Jane and son David know little about Jedidiah Morse. Their contribution to this book has been the hardest to define, yet the most important. Finally, I should like this volume to serve as a small payment on the considerable debt I owe to Douglas T. Miller and the late Russel B. Nye of Michigan State University. Introduction From 1789 to 1819, the Reverend J edidiah Morse was a prominent figure on the streets of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Charlestown citizens often encoun tered this tall, slender man making his way through the streets on some er rand. His dress singled him out as a gentleman of the old school. His pow dered hair, knee-breeches, silver-buckled shoes with a high shine, and the odd gloves with the fingers cut offcontrasted sharply with the dress of the day he must have seemed like an apparition, a time traveler from an earlier age. One day, early in the nineteenth century, Lucy Osgood, a teenager in his par ish, approached this fo rmidable figureand revealed her religious troubles. She was falling away from the orthodox fa ith that Morse preached and was at tracted by the liberal doctrines popular in the Boston area. Lucy recalled that Morse's response was unequivocal; he assured Lucy that "the first step of de viation from the old orthodox faith was the beginning of a descent down an inclined plane towards the bottomless pit."1 This episodecaptured the essence of Morse's public persona; he was a tireless defender of the ancient arrange ments, religious, political, and social, that postrevolutionary Americans had inherited from the New England past. This rigid, unlovable man, who was willing to terrify a young girl with visions of hell, was an important figure in American life between the Revolution and 1825. Americans by the thousands learned about their new nation from his geographies, which, fo r thirty years, were dominant in the nation's schools and a staple on fa mily bookshelves. His name was so inextricably linked to geography that his son, Samuel, while at Yale, was known as "Geography" Morse. Americans also read his printed ser mons with their warnings of subversive conspiracies against the American way and their deeply ingrained conservative message, and many were con vinced. He was a pioneer journalist; he helped fo und and nurtured the Pano plist, one of the most important conservative religious periodicals of the era. Profoundly shaken by what he saw as threatening innovation, Morse helped establish educational institutions designed to inculcate what he called the fa ith and ideas of the New England fathers. Frightened by the religious fe rment of his age, he sought to reestablish the religious ho mogeneity he believed characterized the New England past. Ironically, in the end, his attempts to put out the fires ofreligi ous conflict only made them roar on all the hotter. His distinctive vision, a religious, conservative republicanism, had a discernible impact on the course of American life. Morse must be placed THE LIFE oF ]EDIDIAH MoRsE X in a long-standing ideological tradition still influential in American life. The religious right, or evangelical conservatives, of the 1970s and 1980s share a great deal with Jedidiah Morse. They see in secular humanists, socialists, Washington bureaucrats, and liberals, conspirators against the virtues they believe existed in a purer and simpler American past. Simply put, Jedidiah Morse is an important example of an American type. It is easy to forget that such types ever existed. In a nation that has come to celebrate change and progress, those like Morse who defended the past and feared change seem very much like history's losers. They ex ist in our memory, unfortunately, only as representatives of that which was overtaken and rejected as America marched inexorably toward the Promised Land. It is more accurate to see Jedidiah Morse as someone who, more than most, embodied the conflicting impulses present in American life; impulses that were violently at odds between 1780 and 1820? Exactly what were these conflicting impulses? The years between the Revolution and 1820 are the subject of a great deal of debate, and in this debate, the shorthand abstractions "republicanism" and "liberalism" have played a prominent part. Certainly many Americans reflected the repub licanism of the times by emphasizing the need for virtue, obedience, self sacrifice, and simplicity. Very much a secularized version of Puritanism, these republican values featured a generalized anxiety about the nature of the people. Many Americans, like Morse, made frequent pleas for their fellow citizens to reject luxury, individualism, and self-seeking. They also called for deference and obedience to an elite; these calls were tinged by patriarchal and familial language. Their ideal republic was composed of wise, benevolent fathers and obedient children. The Revolution, in their view, should not erode the central role of the family metaphor in struc turing society and political life. Morse articulated a Christian-New En gland version of this republicanism; he put special emphasis on the neces sity of maintaining the particular values of New England culture and New England religion.3 In his sermons and geographies, Morse became an important spokes man for a widely shared set of attitudes and concerns that has been called a "dialect of republicanism." This dialect was common among New En gland clerics and others with deep connections to New England's past.