Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [132]
Although Morse surely would not have taken such advice himself, he did still long to have a family life. “I feel my loneliness more and more keenly every day,” he lamented. “Fame and money are, in themselves, a poor substitute for domestic happiness.” He quietly courted his “young friend” Annie Ellsworth, to whom he addressed some verse:
… when I review all the scenes that have past,
Between me and thee, be they dark be they light.
I forget what was dark, the light I hold fast.
Nothing is known of the “scenes” that passed between Morse and Annie Ellsworth. But they or Morse’s accounts of them were intimate enough to convince Susan that her father meant to marry the young woman: “you seemed so fondly attached to her.” Morse also kept up his cryptically flirtatious correspondence with Catherine Pattison. She sent congratulations on his success, hopes of seeing him, and the (beckoning?) news that she was not engaged.
Morse stayed in only distant touch with his former colleagues in art, and presided over the National Academy of Design as a figurehead. In July 1843 he had been obliged to call a special meeting of the N.A.D. to mark the sudden death, at the age of sixty-three, of Washington Allston. Allston had been unwell for a few years, struggling to climb his painting ladder, his face inflamed with erysipelas. Morse delivered an affectionate eulogy, honoring him as “our great American Painter,” a Christian gentleman of delicate sentiment who held to the highest standard of artistic excellence—“my long known, long tried, most valued friend and master.” At the family’s request he journeyed to Allston’s home near Boston to discuss arrangements for the uncompleted wall-size Belshazzar’s Feast that his mentor had made and unmade for twenty-five years. Looking through the paintbrushes Allston had last used, he chose one and accepted it from the family as a token.
In January 1845, Congress at last returned to deliberating on Morse’s request for an appropriation to extend the telegraph to New York City. Having already waited six months for a decision, he waited two months longer, in “unpleasant suspense,” as the bill made its way out of committee and into the House, then to the Senate. With his original grant about to expire he applied for a separate appropriation of $8000, for salaries and material to keep the Washington-Baltimore line in operation another year. He took pride in the fact that during its first year the line had been out of commission only one day, despite winter storms that had strewn the seashore with wrecks and halted railroad traffic. Many newspapers supported both his applications and even called on Congress to run the line to all large cities along the Atlantic coast.
Savvy and cynical about the workings of Congress, Smith doubted that the extension bill would pass. “A good feeling exists on all sides towards it,” he told Cornell, “yet it is like universal charity that fixes upon nothing in particular and helps nobody.” If the appropriation failed, as he believed, he intended to insist on a geographical division of the patent rights. As for the additional $8000 Morse asked, he considered the figure inflated, calculated only to provide another year’s salary for “the ‘puritan’ ” and Vail, with nothing for himself. Still well connected in official Washington, he let it be known that maintenance of the line required no more than $2500. The award of any larger grant would amount to a “sinecure.”
Morse’s eight-month wait ended mostly in defeat. The bill for running the Washington-Baltimore telegraph to New York failed. As Smith understood, Congress had little real interest in extending the line. Development policy in Washington had in general turned away from public financing of internal improvements, leaving them to