Who was Asa P. Morse?

10/7/2024 10:20 pm

You're invited to a special event. 

Join caregivers, educators, students, and members of the community to learn about the person for whom the Morse School was named in 1891, and to reflect and discuss how his legacy affects the mission and vision of the Morse School in 2024. History Cambridge will be leading the discussion

 

DETAILS

 

Morse School Auditorium

Thursday, Oct 24, 2024

6:15-7:45 pm 

Background 

When Asa P. Morse died in 1906, he was memorialized by several newspapers, including the Boston Globe. The obituaries emphasized three notable aspects of his long life. First, Morse was a well-known Cambridge banker and real-estate developer who earned his fortune before the Civil War “supplying parties in the West Indies with goods for their plantations.” Second, Morse was a successful politician, serving many years on the Cambridge school board and in the Massachusetts legislature. Third, Morse was involved in a “sensational” lawsuit in 1894 in which he argued that he should have the right to nullify his engagement to a woman who he claimed had hidden that she “had some negro blood in her veins.”

 

Morse the businessman. — Asa P. Morse was born on September 1, 1818, in Haverhill, N.H. He moved to Boston in 1840 and engaged in the “West India trade,” or trade with plantations on Caribbean islands. Slavery was then still legal in French and Spanish colonies like Martinique and Cuba. Although Great Britain abolished slavery in 1834, British colonies like Jamaica continued a system of “apprenticeship” that forced formerly enslaved people to work without pay for up to 45 hours per week. From his business in Boston, Morse supplied West Indian plantations with goods, manufactured parts, and wood for barrels. 

 

Morse was not the only Massachusetts businessperson before the Civil War who made his start profiting from slavery. The local shipping industry included many others who supplied plantations or who traded in slave-produced commodities, insured the merchant ships that carried those commodities, or provided mortgages on enslaved people themselves. This business was controversial; members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and other abolitionist organizations called on Massachusetts residents to boycott what Lucretia Mott called “this unrighteous participation” with slavery. The abolitionists argued that slavery in the West Indies and Southern states could only exist with Northern financial support.

 

Nevertheless, Morse was reportedly “very successful.” He used the proceeds from his business to finance the construction of real estate in Cambridgeport, where he later moved. From his new home on Magazine Street, he became a banker who specialized in the construction of apartment and commercial buildings around Central Square. After the Civil War he served on the boards of several local institutions, including the Cambridge Hospital (now Mount Auburn) and the Cambridge Mutual Fire Insurance Company. 

 

Morse the politician. — Morse also served in government. He sat on the Cambridge school board for fifteen years and was elected a city alderman in 1866, state representative in 1869 and 1873, and state senator in 1879 and 1880. His most notable legislative achievement was in 1879, when he drafted new regulations for state prisons and prison labor. Like other states, Massachusetts required prisoners to work for almost no compensation. Local labor unions complained that it was unfair they had to compete with unpaid prisoners. Morse chaired a special committee that rejected calls to abolish prison labor because “the welfare of the State and the prisoner both demand that the latter should be employed in productive labor.” But he agreed that it should be regulated to “interfere as little as possible with free labor.”  

 

When a new grammar school was constructed in Cambridgeport in 1891, it was named for Morse “in recognition of his long service on the school board.” Morse donated to the school some of its first books, a piano, pictures, and an American flag.

 

Morse the litigant. — In 1891, when Morse was a 73-year-old widower, he proposed to a 31-year-old divorced woman named Anna Van Houten. Morse broke off the engagement the following year, and Van Houten sued. Under state law at the time, an engagement to marry was a legal contract that could be lawfully broken only for a good reason, like fraud. At trial, Morse’s lawyers therefore argued that Van Houten had defrauded him.

 

Morse offered several explanations to justify breaking off his engagement to Van Houten: he claimed she was interested in his money, that she had been abusive in her previous relationship, and that his daughters opposed the marriage. But his most sensational claim was that Van Houten had “concealed important facts about her parentage and early life.” Specifically, Morse testified that Van Houten told him “that her father and mother were both of the best white families in Charleston, S.C.” and that after her father died her mother married a man named Smith. But he allegedly did research and discovered that Smith was really her father, that he was “a colored barber and an octoroon,” and that her mother also “had negro blood in her veins, and was about one-eighth negro.” Van Houten denied these allegations—and a jury awarded her $40,000 after the trial court concluded that even if Morse were right about her ancestry, no fraud occurred. But the state supreme court reversed the decision on appeal in 1894, writing that the “willful suppression of [facts about her ancestry] on her part, in view of what there was evidence that she told, would constitute, or might be found to constitute, a fraud upon the defendant.”

 

The case made headlines across the country; the 1890s were an era when states were experimenting with Jim Crow laws that discriminated against people because of their race. Concern about “race mixing” was a national preoccupation, as was determining whether someone was “scientifically” black with allegedly inferior ancestry. Two years after Morse’s case, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a different case involving a man, Homer Plessy, who had a black great grandparent but who called himself “white” on the census. The Court held that it was constitutional for Louisiana to make it a crime for Plessy to sit in a train car with white passengers, ratifying the spread of racial segregation. 

 

Bibliography. — 

• New England Merchantile Union Business Directory for 1849 (Boston: L.C. & H.L. Pratt, 1849). 
• Report of the Joint Special Committee on Contract Convict Labor (Boston: Rand, Avery & Co., 1880).
• John C. Rand, One of a Thousand: A Series of Biographical Sketches of One Thousand Representative Men Resident in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: First National Publishing Co., 1890).
• Woman Wins, Boston Daily Globe, Oct. 5, 1893, at 1. 
• Forty Thousand Dollars, New York Times, Oct. 8, 1893, at 20.
• Van Houten v. Morse, 162 Mass. 414 (1894).
• Will Not Get $40,000: Van Houten-Morse Verdict Is Overruled, Boston Daily Globe, Dec. 1, 1894, at 7.
• Massachusetts Supreme Court Lays Down New Principles in Morse Case, Washington Post, Dec. 1, 1894, at 4. 
• Asa P. Morse Dead, Boston Daily Globe, Mar. 19, 1906, at 4. 
• Asa P. Morse Passes Away, Cambridge Chronicle, Mar. 24, 1906, at 14. 
• Zebulon V. Miletsky, City of Amalgamation: Race, Marriage, Class and Color in Boston, 1890–1930 (diss. 2008).
• Julie L. Holcomb, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2016). 
• Gad Heuman, The Apprenticeship System in the Caribbean, in New West Indian Guide (2023)
• History of Morse School, https://morse.cpsd.us/about_our_school/history (last visited Sep. 2024)

 

  

  All Morse School community members are invited to participate! 

 

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