Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [118]
Morse’s scrupulous sense of personal honor gasped at the crude scheming. Smith asked him, he said, for “a sacrifice of what to me is dearer than life.” Nothing if not brazen, Smith in response took the high moral ground. He grandly accused Morse of casting “undeserved reproach” on his motives: “I fear not the strictest scrutiny. I have done nothing secretly.” In reality it was Morse who had a “secret purpose,” he charged, namely, to evade the Bartlett contract altogether, as if it had never existed. Smith prepared a substitute letter for Morse’s signature, asking the Secretary of the Treasury merely to pay Bartlett proper damages.
Morse had been inclined to do something like that. But in Smith’s offensive tone of injured innocence he detected a clawing opportunist who held in contempt his own ideal of public service. He told Smith he had read his reply with “much surprize,” unable to reconcile it with “the professions of regard you have so often expressed towards me.” He would tell the Secretary no more than how much of the trenching had been completed, and how much money paid out for it; the Secretary could decide whether to award damages to Bartlett. Not to be denied, Smith personally took his case to the Secretary, complaining about Morse’s superintendence. As it happened, the Secretary had no authority to investigate the merits of Bartlett-Smith’s case or to entertain any claims for damages. Smith denounced him as a “knave at heart” and asked Morse to join in an appeal to the President.
Morse declined, but as the new year approached he again began to feel desperate. “I was never so tried,” he wrote to Sidney from Washington. “Troubles cluster in such various shapes, that I am almost overwhelmed.” He had come to realize that he was locked in partnership with a slick-tongued finagler, a bully on the make: “where I expected to find a friend I find a FIEND.” It appalled him that he had nearly fallen for Smith’s attempt to skim government money from the Tatham contract. And now, for having repulsed his shabby trickery, Smith was hounding him: “because I refused to accede to terms which, as a public officer, I could not do without dishonor and violation of trust, he pursues me thus malignantly.” The recognition that he now had a hell-raising enemy made prospects for the Baltimore-Washington line look dark, “but I know,” he said, “who can bring light out of darkness, and in Him I trust.”
While uneasily waiting to resume work in the spring, Morse spent most of the winter in Washington. He put up at the house of Henry Ellsworth, who allowed him to store the telegraph apparatus and materials in the basement of the Patent Office. Alfred Vail and Ezra Cornell remained in the capital too, busy but discontented.
Vail roomed near the Patent Office, indulging before breakfast his mineralogy hobby, collecting petrified hickory from nearby streams and railroad beds. Mostly he spent the interlude studying Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches, laboring as always to improve the components of Morse’s ever-more-demanding system. While working on the line he had invented many perhaps useful devices, such as a machine for winding magnets in fine, silk-covered copper wire. Skilled in mechanical drawing, he set down detailed illustrations of them in his lab books. But he still griped that his salary was inadequate and confided to his wife that Morse’s management was inefficient and indecisive: “I should not at all wonder if the appropriation is exhausted before we are