Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [1]
Few details of Finley’s early childhood remain. When about a year and a half old he contracted smallpox during an epidemic that struck a thousand people in Boston. At the age of four he began attending a dame school near the parsonage. Nancy Shepherd sometimes took him to Bunker’s Hill and recounted its historic battle, which she had witnessed.
During the first ten years of their marriage Jedediah and Elizabeth had six more children. Only two survived, Finley’s younger brothers Richard and Sidney. In the same period Jedediah became a national figure. While writing sermons and preaching about mankind’s fallen state, he issued atlases, school texts, and travel guides with such titles as The American Universal Geography (1793) and The American Gazeteer (1797). He put the books to press, arranged for British editions, looked after sales and distribution, each year publishing a new geography or revision of some earlier one.
Jedediah’s geographies became second in popularity only to Noah Webster’s spelling books and the Bible. Producing them put him in touch with notable men at home and abroad. He dined in Philadelphia with Benjamin Franklin and at Mount Vernon with George and Martha Washington. His many, far-flung correspondents included John Adams; the Bishop of London; and the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, who also visited him in Charlestown. His publications brought him an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh and fame as America’s pre-eminent geographer. He did not hide his renown. On the title page of American Universal Geography he identified himself as a Doctor of Divinity, Fellow of the American Antiquarian Society, and Fellow of the Historical Society—as “Jedediah Morse, D.D.F.A.A.S.H.S.”
Jedediah became prominent in political life as well. Like the rest of the Congregationalist clergy he allied himself with the Federalist party. Against the more liberal, capitalistic social order taking shape in the wake of the American Revolution, he upheld the Calvinistic faith of his New England forebears, whose piety and sense of human dependence on God he considered essential to republican life. He hoped that the new United States would be left to itself, “kept out of the Whirlpool of European Politicks.” But there was no insulating the country from the long war for supremacy between Great Britain and Napoleon’s France. As the eighteenth century closed, Jedediah like most other Federalists viewed with growing alarm French interference in American affairs: use of American seaports as bases for privateering, attempted bribes to American envoys, manipulation of the American press—especially the export to America of deism, skepticism, Voltairean atheism, and other forms of French Infidelity.
Such ominous political-religious issues brought out a combative side of Jedediah’s personality, at odds with his usual mildness. He fought the French Antichrist from his historic pulpit, raging against France as the “destroyer of nations” that had enslaved millions and now menaced the independence of the United States. He sermonized against all the other enemies of Christian Republicanism as well: Masons, Illuminists, Roman Catholics—the last being not Christians but idolators, with a libertine priesthood. All were leagued with the French Imperium, Jedediah warned, in trying to foment revolution in America and ultimately seize the country.
Jedediah’s fiery sermons had no political effect. As the new century opened he grimly watched the nation choose for its president the gallified Thomas Jefferson, a man unaccustomed to attending