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Governor William H. Seward, in his 1840 annual address, had expressed concern for the quality of education being offered the children of immigrants—an important consideration if they were to be assimilated into republican life. He invited foreign-born New Yorkers whose children attended parochial schools to petition for a share in state funds for public schools. A group of Catholic churches in the city immediately applied to the Common Council, which administered the funds. According to the Observer, they demanded a third of the school budget, about $45,000 out of $140,000. The Observer warned of what was afoot: “a wide spread, long concerted, deep laid and powerfully sustained conspiracy is just breaking out, to make this land what Italy and Ireland are, so far as popery is concerned.”

To Morse’s relief, the Council turned down the request for public funds. “Their vote,” he said, “deserves to be recorded by the side of the Declaration of Independence.” But the issue stayed alive, too dangerous to ignore. In October 1840—about when he opened his studio atop the Observer building—Morse chaired the founding meeting of a new national association, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful & Religious Knowledge into Italy. It planned to evangelize the country by sending Protestant missionaries and distributing Protestant books and tracts. Addressing the new group in the chapel of Union Theological Seminary, Morse reminded them that his warnings of foreign conspiracy, a few years ago, had often been dismissed: “many if not most of you deemed it a false alarm, the visionary fears of a morbid imagination.” But the warnings were being borne out, indeed the half had not been told: “How is it now? … Popery has reared its head boldly in our midst, and stalks with giant strides over the land … has even dared to dictate in the politics of the country.” To help the Italian people toward their spiritual regeneration would be at the same time to “attack the monster in his den” and protect the homeland.

Angry and divisive, the school funding issue gave new life to the Native American Democratic Association. Quiescent since 1836, when it had run Morse as a mayoral candidate, it regrouped to field candidates in the April 1841 city elections. As a prominent New Yorker and leading spokesman for the party, Morse was again nominated as its candidate for mayor. His surviving papers do not explain why he chose to drop photography and return to political life. Catholic influence was a grave issue to him, of course, and he had often before shifted directions. Most likely, however, he considered himself to be still biding his time while waiting for Congress to act on the telegraph. Whatever his reasons for accepting the nomination, he hardly knew what he was letting himself in for.

Running as a third-party candidate, Morse was regarded as a spoiler. Whigs had felt confident about winning the city election, riding on the recent victory of the first Whig president, William Henry Harrison. Fearing that Morse would draw off enough votes from their party to elect the Democrat nominee, Robert H. Morris, they set out to obliterate him.

The political dirty tricks began on April 8, one week before the election. The Express, a Whig paper, reported that the Native Americans had met at a city hotel and withdrawn Morse’s name from the mayoralty race. That was news to Morse indeed. Not until reading the paper did he learn that he had been scuttled. The Executive Committee of the Native American party published in the Sun a formal letter to him, explaining that the “meeting” was a sham, held without knowledge of the officers and attended by only a few members and strangers. To restore his candidacy, the Committee also took out two ads in the Sun. One included a letter from Morse asserting that he remained actively in the race. The other restated the party’s endorsement of him for mayor: “The friends of American principles—all opposed to foreign influence … will vote this ticket. Our fellow citizens are