James Otis Morse (1788–1837), attorney and judge, was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and as a child moved with his family to Bridgewater, Oneida County, New York. He graduated from Union College at Schenectady in 1809 and afterward studied law in Cherry Valley, where he settled and practiced. Morse became a director of the Central Bank in Cherry Valley in 1818, served as president of the Central Asylum for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb in Canajoharie in 1824, helped to found the New-York State Colonization Society in 1829, and was a delegate to the national convention that nominated Martin Van Buren in 1832 to be Andrew Jackson’s running mate in that year’s presidential election. In 1828 Morse was appointed an Otsego County judge, and four years later he rose to first judge. He also speculated in western lands, and his estate was said to have been worth about $60,000 early in the 1830s. Morse died in Little Falls, Herkimer County, New York, after attending the circuit court of neighboring Montgomery County (Cyrus Felton, A Genealogical History of the Felton Family [1886], 73, 146; A General Catalogue of the Officers, Graduates and Students of Union College, from 1795 to 1854 [1854], 16; Aaron Clark, Manual, compiled and prepared for the use of the Assembly [Albany, 1816], 39; John Sawyer, History of Cherry Valley From 1740 to 1898 [1898], 84, 93, 110; Levi Beardsley, Reminiscences [1852], 156, 171, 180–3, 429; New-York Spectator, 20 July 1824, 11 Dec. 1837; Albany Argus, 17 Apr. 1829; Washington Globe, 29 May 1832; Roger Sherman Skinner, The New-York State Register, for the year of our lord 1830 [1830], 233; Franklin B. Hough, The New-York Civil List [1858], 363; gravestone inscription in Cherry Valley Cemetery).