Samuel Finley Breese Morse papers
Contributors: Clausing, Ludwig, 1809?-1834
Language: eng
Number of pages: 10060
Subjects: American Art; American Portrait painting; Immigrants; Slavery; Abolitionists; European Art; Architecture; British Art; Patents; History; Correspondence; Nativism; Art; Patents law and legislation; Study and teaching; Italian Art; Anti-Catholicism; Photography; Germans; Telegraph
Other titles: Samuel F. B. Morse Papers at the Library of Congress, 1793-1919.
Description: Family and general correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, clippings, newspapers, printed matter, maps, drawings, photographs, and other papers. Includes letters from Morse to his family describing his studies in England during the War of 1812 and his subsequent struggle to support himself as a portrait painter in the United States and commenting on American, British, and European art; correspondence and other papers relating to his invention of the telegraph, law suits over patents, and his dispute with Joseph Henry who also claimed to have invented the telegraph; diaries (chiefly 1829-1831) recording his travels in Italy and elsewhere in Europe and his observations on art and architecture; and papers of Ludwig Clausing (also known as Lewis or Louis), a German immigrant to the United States whom Morse befriended.  Other topics include abolitionism, Anti-Catholicism, the nativist movement, and the science of photography.

Correspondents include Louis Agassiz, Washington Allston, J. G. Chapman, DeWitt Clinton, Thomas Cole, John S. Cogdell, James Fenimore Cooper, Ezra Cornell, Louis Daguerre, Jeremiah Evarts, Cyrus Field, Horatio Greenough, Thomas Smith Grimké, Joseph Henry, Amos Kendall, Charles B. King, Marquis de Lafayette, Charles Robert Leslie, Jedidiah Morse, Lucretia Pickering Walker Morse, Sidney E. Morse, Richard Rush, William H. Seward, Francis O. J. Smith, Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West, and William Wilberforce.
Notes: Open to research.

Restrictions may apply to unprocessed material.

Selected correspondence, letterbooks, diaries, scrapbooks, printed matter, maps, drawings, and other miscellaneous materials also available through the Library of Congress Web site.

Microfilm edition available for general and family correspondence (containers 1-53); letterbooks, diaries, notebooks, and scrapbooks (containers 58-62); and printed material (containers 69-70), no. 16,372.

Microfilm edition of additional family letters (container 75) available, no. 6,295A.

Microfilm produced from originals in the Manuscript Division. Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress Photoduplication Service, 1944 and 1975.

Gift, Edward Lind Morse and Leila Livingston Morse, 1916-1944.

Purchase and gift, 1922-1995.

transferred to Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

transferred to Smithsonian Institution.

Artist and inventor.

Collection material in English.

Finding aid available in the Library of Congress Manuscript Reading Room and on Internet.