Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [133]
On Morse’s recommendation, Johnson boosted Vail’s salary and appointed him operator of the Washington station, now set up in the post office. “His time and talent,” Morse said, “are more essential to the success of the Telegraph than any two persons that could be named.” Transmissions were opened to the public, at the rate of one cent for every four characters. In securing salaries for himself and Vail, Morse inflamed Smith, who demanded part of the “sinecure” for himself, as one-quarter proprietor of the patent. Morse pointed out to Johnson that the original grant from Congress made no reference to paying the proprietors. Smith, he said, “has done nothing in the invention but throw obstacles in the way of its success ever since he had any connection with it.”
Morse’s defeat brought him back to the question raised the year before by his triumph: What next? With the government unwilling to develop his invention he might turn to private investors. But dealing with them meant asking help from Smith or trying to act as an entrepreneur himself. Both prospects repelled him. In his lifetime the American economic scene had changed dramatically. The earlier world of small farms and workshops supplying local needs had been taken over by competitive financiers, corporations, and wholesale commission houses geared to national and world markets. The distinctiveness of America was now to be measured by its New Men, as one commercial magazine declared: “it is the BUSINESS-MEN OF AMERICA that have made us what we are; and it is their enterprise that will still further advance our national power and greatness.”
Morse did not share the enthusiasm. “Money is the main thing to be got,” he complained, “character is of secondary & very trifling consideration.” He still lived for a personal glory unthinkable and unattainable without obedience to Christ, loyalty to artistic values, and pride in America’s Protestant Republicanism. His contempt for the scramble of moneymaking, his naiveté, his tendency to become easily vexed and discouraged—all disabled him for marketing his telegraph in the no-holds-barred world of buccaneer capitalism. He disdained the economic and social forces that might realize his hope of bringing his invention into universal use.
Morse’s deliverance from this bind was at hand. It appeared in the improbable shape of a short, emaciated-looking man of fifty-six—a “little whiffet of a man,” as a contemporary described Amos Kendall (1789–1869). Shoulders stooped, cheeks sunken, hair prematurely white, he had a cadaverous appearance that suggested disease. And indeed he coughed asthmatically and suffered chills, though sometimes bundled in an overcoat on even the warmest summer days.
Amos Kendall (The Library of Congress)
But Amos Kendall’s spindly fragility was deceptive. He was among the most influential politicians of the day, his name constantly before the public. At the time he and Morse met in Washington, around February 1845, Kendall had grown weary of government, but was deeply involved in Native American affairs, acting as a lawyer for one faction in a bitter dispute within the Cherokee nation. Betweentimes he worked on a biography of his political idol, Andrew Jackson. Jackson had brought Kendall to national prominence, appointing him Postmaster General—a cabinet position overseeing twenty thousand postmasters and a corrupt, mismanaged agency some half a million dollars in debt. By demanding efficiency and rectitude, Kendall quickly improved mail service, reduced expenses, and produced a $100,000 surplus.
Kendall became