Sidney H. Morse

Sidney H. Morse was one of the second-generation Transcendentalists who were dedicated to free thought and progress.  He was editor of a New Church periodical entitled the Radical, which first appeared in September 1865, and which Amos Bronson Alcott immediately endorsed as a “fit organ” for the “new faith.”  In Morse’s words, the magazine was “a medium for the presentation of the best floating free thought of the time.”

Over time, however, Alcott saw Morse as being more extreme than himself.  In 1873, when Morse advocated an end to all political rule, Alcott commented about Morse in his journal.  “Once, I might have accepted fully his doctrine of Individual Sovereignty, ignoring all interference from institutions conventions and creeds of all kinds, as during the Fruitlands and non-taxpaying periods of my life.  It was putting this logic to its ultimate consequences, and individual issues,—abolishing the social and political order altogether. . . .  It left me an outcast and a vagabond.—  The sincere victim of a half-truth seen in the light of an idea at last.”