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But the Whig tricksters had not finished with Morse. On April 12 three Whig papers in the city ganged up on him. The Commercial Advertiser revealed that his nomination as a third-party candidate was a Democrat scam—“a mere ruse of the enemy. The design is to create a diversion in the Whig ranks…. we say to the Whigs beware! Mr. Morse IS A VAN BUREN MAN.” The cry echoed accusations during the 1836 election that although running as a Native American, Morse supported the Democratic nominee for president, Martin Van Buren, as Morse admitted he did. The Whig Tribune joined the attack: “BEWARE OF TRICKS … The wire-workers in this business will doubtless vote themselves for Morris, after decoying all the Whigs into voting for Morse that they can humbug.” The same day, the Whig Express reported that the Native American party had met and once more withdrawn Morse’s name as a candidate.

In the space of one week, Morse read in the city press: first, that his party had disowned him; second, that Democrat conspirators had nominated him; third, that his party had disowned him a second time. Next he read an announcement by himself that he had backed out of the race. The day before the election, the Express and the Advertiser published a counterfeited letter to the editor, with Morse’s name attached as the author:

Dear Sir—Seeing the discord among the friends of the Native American Party, and that no good can result from their running a separate candidate at this election, I have come to the conclusion to withdraw as their candidate.

The Advertiser congratulated Morse for stepping down, the “tempestuous sea of politics” being no place for his high qualities of mind and artistic gifts: “He is a gentleman—every inch of him. He is more—being a man of genius and talent—both of which have been highly cultivated.” Next day, Election Day, many other city newspapers reprinted Morse’s “letter of resignation,” every word a fake.

The flimflam succeeded in confusing voters about whether Morse was or was not a candidate. In the close election, the Democrat and Whig nominees almost evenly divided the 37,000 votes cast, the Whig receiving just over 18,000 and the victorious Democrat, Morris, about 18,500. Morse polled a ridiculous 78. In about a third of the city’s seventeen wards he received no votes at all. Nastily bamboozled, he was left privately denouncing the “unprincipled tricks and forgeries.”

But the Catholic threat represented by parochial school funding continued, and became a key issue in the fall state elections. In May, Morse was chosen President of a new group called the American Protestant Union. It apparently consisted of no more than the old Native American Democratic Association reorganized and renamed to give it a fresh look following its dismal showing in the city elections. The Union styled itself a “national defensive society” and aimed at consolidating opposition to “the perversion of the Common School Fund to sectarian purposes.” As the election approached, school funding was argued caustically in the press and in public forums. Morse probably wrote some articles anonymously for the Observer, which printed a warning by him on its front page:

Americans, when you shall have become tired with your liberty, when you shall envy the fate of Ireland, Spain, and Italy; when you wish that your children and your descendants may become superstitious slaves, introduce Catholic schools …

The Observer described several meetings of Catholics in which abuse had been heaped upon Protestants, “our cherished institutions and sacred doctrines denounced.”

The most notorious such meeting occurred at Manhattan’s Carroll Hall on October 29, less than a week before the state election. The meeting was addressed by the fiery bishop of New York, John Hughes—a “cunning, flexible, serpent tongued priest,” the young reporter Walt Whitman called him, supported by “scullions from Austrian monasteries.” The bishop told the crowded assembly that their only hope lay in fielding their