“I am much depressed.  There is no light in the political skies.  Rabid abolitionism, with its intense, infernal hate, intensified by the same hate from secession quarters, is fast gaining the ascendancy.  Our country is dead.  God only can resuscitate it from its tomb.  I see no hope of union.  We are two countries, and, what is most deplorable, two hostile countries.  Oh! how the nations, with England at their head, crow over us.  It is the hour of her triumph; she has conquered by her arts that which she failed to do by her arms.  If there was a corner of the world where I could hide myself, and I could consult the welfare of my family, I would sacrifice all my interests here and go at once.  May God save us with his salvation.  I have no heart to write or to do anything.  Without a country!  Without a country!”

He went even further, in one respect, in a letter to Mr. Walker, of Utica, of October 27, but his ordinarily keen prophetic vision was at fault:  “Have you made up your mind to be under a future monarch, English or French, or some scion of a European stock of kings?  I shall not live to see it, I hope, but you may and your children will.  I leave you this prophecy in black and white.”

In spite of his occasional fits of pessimism he still strove with all his might, by letters and published pamphlets, to rescue his beloved country from what he believed were the machinations of foreign enemies.  At the same time he did not neglect his more immediate concerns, and his letter-books are filled with loving admonitions to his children, instructions to his farmer, answers to inventors seeking his advice, or to those asking for money for various causes, etc.

He and his two brothers had united in causing a monument to be erected to the memory of their father and mother in the cemetery at New Haven, and he insisted on bearing the lion’s share of the expense, as we learn from a letter written to his nephew, Sidney E. Morse, Jr., on October 10, 1862:—­

“Above you have my check on Broadway Bank, New York, for five hundred dollars towards Mr. Ritter’s bill.

“Tell your dear father and Uncle Sidney that this is the portion of the bill for the monument which I choose to assume.  Tell them I have still a good memory of past years, when I was poor and received from them the kind attentions of affectionate brothers.  I am now, through the loving kindness and bounty of our Heavenly Father, in such circumstances that I can afford this small testimonial to their former fraternal kindness, and I know no better occasion to manifest the long pent-up feelings of my heart towards them than by lightening, under the embarrassments of the times, the pecuniary burden of our united testimonial to the best of fathers and mothers.”

This monument, a tall column surmounted by a terrestrial globe, symbolical of the fact that the elder Morse was the first American geographer, is still to be seen in the New Haven cemetery.