Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [119]
Cornell too read up on electricity, in books he withdrew from the Library of Congress. Mostly he looked after the mules, enthusiastic about being part of the government project—and grateful. He saw a real chance of improving the hand-to-mouth existence of his much-loved family by getting a permanent place with Morse, who had put him on the payroll as a full-time “Assistant” to replace Fisher. Just the same, in debt and patching his work pants he considered peddling his pipe-laying machine in Washington and grumbled that he was treated unfairly: “I do more work myself than the other men that Professor Morse has attached to the Telegraph put together and one of them at least [i.e., Vail] receives as much pay as I do.”
During the break, relations between Smith and Morse grew so tense that they could no longer speak to each other without wrangling. Morse’s first mistake had been to involve himself with the conniving Smith. His second was to rile him, for Smith was rabid about settling scores. It seems certain that it was Smith who prodded Tatham & Company to now demand full payment for their lead tubes, as Bartlett had for his trenching. Tatham claimed (not unreasonably) that the charring of the wires inside was the result of the hollow mandril devised and supplied to them by Morse and Fisher. Smith backed up the Company in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, attributing the damage to “the error in Professor Morse’s whole theory of laying his wires.”
Smith also took sides against Morse with the dismissed Fisher—unjustly accused of negligence, he said, when the real fault was Morse’s “supposed knowledge of electric current.” He stirred up further trouble by protesting Vail’s receipt of a government salary, on the ground that Vail’s agreement with the other proprietors of the patent required him to give his personal services without pay. Aware of friction between Vail and Cornell regarding which “Assistant” had the higher authority, Smith played on it by advising Cornell to badmouth Vail to Morse: “I would just take Professor Morse aside, & tell him in plain terms how utterly worthless Vail is in all the practical matters of constructing the work.” Needling Morse more directly, he asked reimbursement now for postage, cabs, and other alleged expenses during his legal service in England and France six years earlier.
Morse still hoped to settle their differences amicably. For all his intelligence and imagination, he was easily flustered by worldly men, fearful that they might undo his prestige and his financial independence. And he had yet to fathom Smith, whom an adversary described as “one of the most heartless and vindictive villains that ever trod in shoe leather.” To inject real torment into the petty feuding, Smith joined Charles Jackson and François Gouraud in branding Morse an intellectual thief. Morse’s inventions, Smith told him, were shams, “pieces of deception & humbuggery” filched from Steinheil and others. “The day of exposure in this matter is fast approaching,” he threatened. “You have driven me by the interest of self protection & self defence to hasten it.” He reportedly began knocking Morse’s telegraph to others, calling it “not such a great affair”; “it will be superseded by other plans.” In his reckless rage, Smith apparently did not care that his threats to destroy Morse recoiled on himself, that as one of the proprietors of Morse’s patent he stood to lose if the telegraph failed. “He seems bent on his own ruin,” Vail said.
Morse replied to the bullying with a dozen dignified letters, lecturing Smith on every issue between them in a controlled, unperturbed tone. But his wounds showed. Waiting out the winter at Ellsworth’s house he sometimes went sleepless, and became bedridden with a bad cold. To Vail he seemed more than usually overbearing and irritable, making a “great fury” if one of his crew was absent even when there was nothing to do. Morse understood that Smith