The life of Jedidiah Morse

by Richard J. Moss

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 Revolution 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 Republicanism and sought to defend the virtues of communitarian village life, austerity, a