Morse, Jedediah (1761–1826)

Father of Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, Jedediah Morse (1761–1826) is sometimes called the father of American geography. After studying divinity at Yale, starting at age 14 and graduating in 1783, Morse became a prominent evangelical Calvinist preacher and man of letters in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston, for 30 years. He was as involved in religious controversies as in geography: A staunch conservative, he wrote extensively in support of orthodox Calvinism and against the rising tide of liberal Unitarianism. In 1798, Morse famously warned of an Illuminati conspiracy, which earned him much ridicule. He was a strong Federalist and became disenchanted with the French Revolution. He was also a founder of the Andover Theological Seminary in 1808 and the American Bible Society in 1816.

As a teacher, he was dissatisfied with geography textbooks, all European in origin, which were inaccurate. During the years 1784 to 1804, Morse wrote numerous, highly popular geography textbooks. His most famous, immensely successful volume was titled Geography Made Easy: A Short but Comprehensive System, the first American geography text, first published in 1784 when Morse was just 23, which, with 23 editions, sold more than 400,000 copies by the 1830s. This bestseller about the emerging United States, which described Indians, New England Puritans, “uncultured Baptists,” and decadent slave holders, helped Americans understand their new country and formed an integral part of the project of constructing nationhood and the new geographical imaginaries (i.e., symbolic, rather than physical, places, such as a nation or a diaspora) that it entailed. He followed this volume with American Geography in 1789.

Morse also published The Elements of Geography: Adapted to the Capacities of Children and Youth, and Designed, From Its Cheapness for a Reading Book in Common Schools, as a Useful Winter Evening's Entertainment for Young People in Private Families, which first appeared in 1795 and went through four other editions, the last of which appeared in 1804. In 1789 and 1793 he published the two-volume American Universal Geography. In 1796, with the assistance of Noah Webster, he finished the first comprehensive geography of North America, titled The American Gazetteer, which included seven large foldout maps and 7,000 articles on various places, leaving a large legacy of colonial place names. His works helped greatly to popularize maps and cartographic literacy and made Morse the preeminent American geographer throughout the early 19th century.

His interests in geography included “civilizing” and Christianizing Native Americans. In 1820, he returned to Yale and accepted an appointment from the Secretary of War to do a major study of American Indians. He traveled for 2 years among Indian nations along the Canadian border and gained respect for their cultures; he attempted to rebut common racist stereotypes about them in an 1822 report.