• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

HOUDINI!!!

Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather

A Cultural History of the American Revolution

Timothy Dwight

For Benjamin Berkman and Eve Silverman

Contents

FINLEY

ONE: Geography

TWO: No One Uninspired by the Muses May Enter

THREE: A Terrible Harum-Scarum Fellow

FOUR: An Affection of the Heart

MORSE

FIVE: Il Diavolo

SIX: Anomalous, Nondescript, Hermaphrodite

SEVEN: High Attribute of Ubiquity

EIGHT: Traveling on a Snail’s Back

NINE: Beware of Tricks

TEN: Hurrah Boys Whip Up the Mules

SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

ELEVEN: Mere Men of Trade

TWELVE: Tantalus Still

THIRTEEN: The Great Telegraph Case

FOURTEEN: A True Social Fraternity

FIFTEEN: Can’t! Sir, Can’t!

SIXTEEN: Forward

COMMANDADOR

SEVENTEEN: Is This Treason? Is This Conspiracy?

EIGHTEEN: Visions of Receding Glory

Coda: 1872–2000

Documentation

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

FINLEY

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labour employed in it, or the mental pleasure produced by it. As this principle is observed or neglected, our profession becomes either a liberal art, or a mechanical trade.

—Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Fourth Discourse on Art” (1771)

We are a people essentially active. I may say we are preeminently so. Distance and difficulties are less to us than any people on earth. Our schemes and prospects extend every where and to every thing.

—John C. Calhoun, speech in the U.S. Senate, June 24, 1812

Samuel F. B. Morse, Self Portrait (1812-13) (Addison Gallery of American Art)

ONE

Geography

(1789–1811)

ON APRIL 30, 1789, Jedediah Morse was installed as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, Massachusetts. The occasion was triply significant to him. Twenty-seven years old, he had come to his vocation by study at Yale and graduate work in theology. He felt eager to promote the interests of religion but awed to contemplate the degenerate state of his fellow mortals, who every day crucified their Redeemer anew. The labor now to be undertaken by him was worthy but daunting, “a good work,” he said, “but alas who is sufficient for these things.”

The place mattered to Jedediah no less than the occasion. The First Church was one of the oldest in America, a fit pulpit for a man whose ancestors had emigrated to the New World in 1635, among the first settlers of Puritan New England. The church stood, too, in the shadow of Bunker’s Hill. Just fourteen years earlier, armed provincials had defended the hill against three assaults by British infantry and marines.

And for Jedediah, the date was no less symbolic than the place. On the same day, on the balcony of New York City’s Federal Hall, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States and called on the new nation to preserve “the sacred fire of liberty.” Jedediah revered him as an epitome of republican virtue—self-sacrificing, pious, restrained, great because he was good, indeed, Jedediah said, “the greatest Man alive.”

Two weeks after the momentous day of his settlement, Jedediah married twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Finley, a granddaughter of the president of Princeton College. In appearance they were unlike, to judge from a later family portrait: Jedediah tall, slender, old-fashioned-looking in his knee breeches and black silk stockings; Elizabeth stoutish, buxom, jowly—“no dwarf,” she said of herself. Their personalities differed, too. Jedediah’s well-bred manner and sweet voice set him off from his wife’s no-nonsense practicality and tart wit. Just the same they made a close, affectionate couple. In letters home he addressed her as “My dearest Life & Love.” He borrowed the salutation, he explained, from a letter of George Washington to Martha Washington: “as he is an excellent pattern in almost everything, so in this I would imitate him, believing that my Love for you is as great as his for Mrs. W.”

On April 27, 1791, two years after marrying, the couple had their first child, a son whom they named after