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For Morse and for the Observer, the spectacle of an ecclesiastic nominating candidates for the New York State Senate and Assembly gave unmistakable evidence of Catholic intentions to seize political control of America. It raised the supreme nightmare of “Protestant republicanism”: an American president holding his power from the Pope. “The mask was off,” the Observer jeered. “The foot of the Beast was trampling on the elective franchise, and his High Priest was standing before the ballot box, the citadel of American liberties.”

Two days after the Carroll Hall meeting, Morse, as president of the American Protestant Union, presented a rival nativist slate. Once again the Whig press opened fire on him. The Commercial Advertiser mocked him as a nativist version of Bishop Hughes. He had sent inquiries to Whig candidates asking their views on the school system, the paper said, then published only the replies that might be taken as support for the Protestant Union: “Why oppose Catholic juggling in one breath, and indulge in Protestant juggling in the next?” The Tribune denounced the Union ticket as a swindle, contrived to scare Irish citizens into voting for Democrats—who in the end won a sweeping victory. Morse’s Union ticket proved not much more popular than Morse the mayoral candidate. Of some 35,000 votes cast in New York City, the party received only 400, the all-Catholic Carroll Hall ticket got more than five times as many.

Morse continued to speak out against granting public school funds to Catholic schools, but his opponents soon won a partial victory. In the spring of 1842, the state legislature passed a bill giving over supervision of New York City’s schools to commissioners elected by each ward. This move toward community control brought mobs into the streets of Manhattan, who pursued Irishmen and stoned the house of Bishop Hughes. The militia was called out to protect Catholic churches. The Observer reviled the bill as “the most serious blow which has ever been struck at the citadel of religious liberty in this Western world.” The head of the Leopold Society, the paper reported, was on his way to the United States to help celebrate the advancing march of papal power in America.

Now fifty years old, Morse sometimes felt spent: “my prime is past; the snows are on my temples … my eyes begin to fail, and what can I now expect to do with declining powers.” Since returning from France he had been lonely, too: “trouble in various shapes … has shut me up within myself for two years past. I have made no visits, and scarcely have seen any one.” Fourteen years after Lucrece’s death he still marked the anniversary of her passing, recalling on every February 7 her faultless features, refined mind, devoted affection. The years, he said, “have scarcely healed the wounds which the loss of a most lovely wife on that day, first opened in my heart.”

The shock of his wife’s death, probably, and some later failed overtures to women made Morse wary of romantic attachments. “The burnt child dreads the fire,” he observed, “and I have been so scorched from my tinder box of a heart, that I have learned a little prudence.” So much ardor checked by a little prudence may explain why after more than a dozen years he still wrote to Catherine Pattison. When they first met, in 1828, she was in her teens, half his age. Now she was in her early thirties, unmarried, apparently available, and more desirable than ever for having undergone conversion: “Woman never appears in so lovely an attitude,” he wrote to her, “as when bending at the foot of the cross.” Yet he still presented himself ambivalently, expressing deep interest by emphasizing his desire to overcome it: “The more I have thought about you friend C. the more I felt disposed to keep my thoughts locked up, for I am not so ignorant of myself as not to know that my too sensitive feelings were not always under the control of a judgment which ought to be mature from years.” Sending mixed