MORSE, CHARLES S. (1849-1902). Charles S. Morse, lawyer, son of L. B. and Elizabeth Morse, was born in Troy, Pennsylvania, on October 23, 1849. During the Civil Warqv he enlisted at the age of fourteen in Company B, Fifth Georgia Regiment, which in April 1862, owing to the considerable loss of men, became part of the First Regiment of Georgia Regulars under Col. Sandy Wayne. After the war Morse was in the mercantile business for a short time before he entered Savannah Medical College, from which he received his diploma in March 1870. He moved to Navarro County, Texas, in March 1871 and practiced medicine briefly before he became a business manager of the Navarro Banner at Corsicana, where he was deputy collector of taxes in 1874-75. On October 12, 1875, he married Helen J. Chambers of Montgomery County. They had a daughter. He studied law in the office of Clinton M. Winklerqv and on April 21, 1876, was appointed clerk of the Supreme Court at Austin, a position he held for twenty-one years. Morse was secretary of the Texas Bar Association (now the State Bar of Texasqv) from 1882 to 1902. He was also a thirty-third-degree Mason. He died on May 13, 1902.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin Daily Statesman, May 14, 1902. Lewis E. Daniell, Personnel of the Texas State Government, with Sketches of Representative Men of Texas (Austin: City Printing, 1887; 3d ed., San Antonio: Maverick, 1892). C. W. Raines, Year Book for Texas (2 vols., Austin: Gammel-Statesman, 1902, 1903). William S. Speer and John H. Brown, eds., Encyclopedia of the New West (Marshall, Texas: United States Biographical Publishing, 1881; rpt., Easley, South Carolina: Southern Historical Press, 1978).
Jeanette H. Flachmeier
