Queer Places:
Earlham Cemetery
Richmond, Wayne County, Indiana, USA
Sidney H. Morse
(October 3, 1833 – February 19, 1903) was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to 1872, editor of The Radical. He visited
Walt Whitman in Camden many times
and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier bust by
Morse that it was "wretchedly bad."
Morse made busts of the following Rationalists and reformers: Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Theo. Parker, Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, Browning, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, Lucreta Mott etc.
Sidney H. Morse was born in Rochester, N. Y., Oct. 3, 1833. Early in life he went to Connecticut to enter the marble business with an uncle, and it was there that his artistic tendencies got their first encouragement. He learned to cut and carve in marble. He became a Unitarian minister, receiving his degrees from Antioch College.
In the latter 1860s Morse edited The Radical. What The Dial was to Transcendentalism, The Radical was to Free Religion. Some of the very men who helped make The Dial famous gave what they could with their pens and influence to make The Radical a success. Morse did not qualify his own faith. He contributed his goods and his labor, cent and blood. His faith outlasted his labor, his labor outlasted his money. When his money was gone, The Radical passed in its checks. But the five or six years of its formal life conferred an immortality.
Morse was born for a free lancer. He tried the liberal church for a while but the experiment was a failure. He succeeded Moncure D. Conway in a Cincinnati ministry which is now forgotten. Later on he occupied a pulpit in Haverhill. While there he started The Radical. While running The Radical he gave up the pulpit. After the disappearance of The Radical Morse went into sculpture, having studios first in Boston and then in Quincy. In the years that followed Morse produced a number of notable works, including a head of
Ralph Waldo Emerson which Emerson’s family and a very large proportion of his friends regard as the best Emerson in plaster. Morse went to Washington in 1886 or 1887 to make a statuette of Cleveland for a Boston house.
Morse’s literary faculty was always remarkable. He was the author of the famous Phillip letters printed at two different periods in The Irish World. He wrote the “Chips from my Studio” in Benjamin Tucker’s Radical Review, which lived only a year. Afterward he wrote for Liberty, for Unity, for The Conservator, and here and there miscellaneously in the daily papers.
Morse went about lecturing. He had lectures on Whitman, Carlyle, Emerson and others, which, while more or less reminiscent, were also in a high degree historic and abstract. He would lecture for money. He would lecture without money. He was also always busy with his clay. And as long as he was able to do so he gave away duplicates of his plasters lavishly. All over the country are households in which such gifts are treasured. Once, while in Chicago, he started a monthly for children. It only lived through two inimitable issues.
Toward the end of his life he lived in Buffalo, and his studio was on West
Seneca Street. About two months before his death, his health began to fail so
he went South.
Morse died at San Mateo, Florida, February 18, 1903. His body was buried at Richmond, Indiana.
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