Samuel’s father, Jedidiah Morse, was a country boy from Woodstock, Connecticut, who attended Yale during the American Revolution. In the middle of his college career, a spiritual awakening came to Yale. Jedidiah fell under conviction of sin, and, in the spring of 1781, gave his life to Christ.

Coming to Christ seems to have energized him in all parts of his life, and the volume and variety of his activity thereafter is astonishing. To his friend Yale President Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) he seemed “as full of resources as an egg is of meat.” Daniel Webster said Jedidiah was “always thinking, always writing, always talking, always acting.” Though his body was weak, Jedidiah’s motto, Samuel later remembered, was “better wear out than rust out.”

After his graduation in 1783, Jedidiah stayed in New Haven to prepare for the ministry, studying with the help of Jonathan Edwards, Jr. He also taught a school for girls, and, recognizing the inadequacy of the textbooks available in America at the time, compiled and published the first American geography. He and his sons produced many editions of this and other texts, and his works were the standard geographies for schools and colleges in the United States until about 1850.

Because they met a need for reliable information about the physical conditions of the United States, Morse’s books sparked a wave of immigration to America and made their author world famous. Jedidiah’s tombstone in Grove Street Cemetery is topped with a stone globe, and he is still remembered for his work as a geographer.

Most of Jedidiah’s buoyant energy, though, went into pioneering new ways to extend the reach of the gospel. Many of his initiatives gave birth to evangelistic institutions that Americans take for granted today. For instance, tract societies in America are a direct product of a missionary tour Morse took to the developing settlements in Maine. Everywhere he went he found few Bibles and little knowledge of Christ.

Recognizing the spiritual destitution of the frontier, Jedidiah went home and bought fifty-five reams of paper, with which he printed over 32,000 tracts for distribution in Maine, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The stable behind his parsonage in Charlestown, Massachusetts, became the first tract depot in the United States, and the New England Tract Society that formed because of his efforts was a direct precursor to the enduring American Tract Society.

Jedidiah and his sons started the first Sunday school in New England. (The family continued this kind of work when they moved to Connecticut; Samuel F. B. Morse became the first Sunday school superintendent in New Haven.) Jedidiah also helped found the American Bible Society, and he was a key member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in an age when even some Christians regarded missions as dubious and extravagant.

When in 1812 America’s first band for foreign missionaries found their entry into India blocked by British suspicion that they were part of a political plot, Morse refused to despair of the mission and wrote to his friend William Wilberforce for help. Though the great English abolitionist expressed little hope for change in the situation, his intercession was successful, and the ban on American mission work was lifted. Morse’s simple letter had helped tip the spiritual balance.

All his life, Jedidiah loved Yale and made a point of attending every commencement. Probably because he himself had been saved at Yale, his concern for the spiritual welfare of the college was strong. In 1802 he heard that revival had come to Yale and wrote to President Timothy Dwight for confirmation. Dwight’s response is preserved in Sterling Library’s manuscript collection. It details God’s work among the students, stating that in the period from March to July 1802, no fewer than sixty-seven had come to Christ. By September when Jedidiah attended commencement, he could write home to his wife that the number had risen to eighty. (The entire student body then was about 160.)

As pastor of the First Congregational Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Jedidiah was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Not long after the Yale revival he found himself in a losing battle to keep Harvard operating upon solidly Biblical foundations. In 1805, a majority of the Harvard Board elected Henry Ware, a Unitarian, to the Hollis professorate of Divinity. Seeing the need for a spiritually sound institution of higher learning to take Harvard’s place, Jedidiah brought all the separate strands of the Christian community in New England together to found Andover Theological Seminary. He also started a monthly journal called The Panoplist, whose mission was to assert and uphold Biblical truth.

Out of Andover’s first graduating class came America’s first foreign missionaries, and the school became known as a missionary training ground. The Panoplist later became The Missionary Herald, which recorded the progress of American missionary activity around the world. Morse paid the price for his opposition to Unitarianism, though: it was probably the decisive factor in his 1819 loss of the pastorate in Charlestown.

Though there isn’t space here to fairly represent the amazing fruitfulness of Jedidiah Morse’s life, it should be noted that he was an abolitionist and friend of the black community in Boston when abolitionists were few. Also, a significant portion of his life was spent looking for ways to benefit Native Americans and preparing the way for missions among them.

As U.S. Commissioner to the Indian Tribes (1820-1822), the then feeble old man undertook a 3,000-mile trip to survey the state of the Northern tribes. While in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he uncovered the attempt of an Indian agent to concoct a false treaty, which would have defrauded the Menominee tribe of a valuable part of their lands. Because of Morse’s information, the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and the agent’s ploy failed.