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Smith charged that O’Reilly had violated his contract in a more serious way as well. The language of the contract was in many places ambiguous. But in essence O’Reilly was required to turn over what funds he raised for the western lines to trustees, appointed to disburse the money and manage the business for the mutual benefit of the subscribers and the patentees. Instead, Smith charged, O’Reilly had formed his own stock association, the Atlantic and Ohio Company, and had issued stock in Baltimore—without the patentees’ knowledge. O’Reilly tried to explain that he meant his company to be “merely temporary,” a way of setting things in motion, “matter of form rather than substance.” He vigorously denied that he had issued any stock in Baltimore—“except one certificate was sent to the one subscriber in that City.” His several accounts of the stocks, however, are inconsistent and fuzzy, some conceding that he had also distributed certificates as gratuities to helpful newspaper editors.

Whatever the truth of these matters, Smith declared O’Reilly’s contract forfeit, putting him out of business. Kendall had been willing at first to negotiate the cost overrun with O’Reilly and to forgive the missed deadlines. But he could not ignore the charge that O’Reilly had formed a private stock association, in which the patentees themselves were not members. And when O’Reilly turned down an invitation to meet with him and Smith to discuss the situation, Kendall, too, had had enough. He joined Smith in declaring the contract a nullity. “I see storms ahead,” he said.

They came, for the cancellation incensed O’Reilly: “Never was a more dastardly attempt of things in the shape of men, to crawl out of a contract.” He had thrown himself into the telegraph business with visionary fervor, erecting posts, defying floods, overseeing operators, his eye fixed on Louisville, Kentucky, gateway for his western line to the Mississippi Valley. The thought of being compelled to abandon his quest seemed unreal. “It is like being out of the world,” he said, “to be away from telegraphs.” A proud man, he was also pained to disappoint the large public expectations he had aroused. A man of feeling as well, for all his braggadocio he had labored chiefly for his tenderly loved wife and sorely missed seven children. And creditors were pressing him to be paid for labor and material.

O’Reilly directed his rage at F. O. J. Smith. He believed that Smith’s aim in canceling the contract was to negotiate a more profitable deal for the western lines. Under the terms of O’Reilly’s contract, the patentees received a quarter interest; contracts that the patentees negotiated later with others gave them a half interest. O’Reilly believed that Smith was trying to get a half interest in the western lines as well. He also suspected that Smith wanted to cut in yet another brother-in-law, this time a Cincinnati newspaper editor named Eliphalet Case. “I for one will not tamely yield to one jot of any such scheme,” O’Reilly made it known; “I will hurl it back.” Attorneys having assured him that he had not violated the contract, he pressed on defiantly with the construction of telegraph lines to the West.

The “Napoleon of the Telegraph,” as the press tagged O’Reilly, soon won an impressive victory. Late in December, his line from Philadelphia reached Pittsburgh, making it possible to electrically transmit a message three hundred miles across the Allegheny Mountains. To mark the achievement, newspaper editors in Pittsburgh exchanged greetings with colleagues in Philadelphia, and a message went out to Washington informing President Polk that a regiment of Pittsburgh militia would soon be ready to leave for the Texas battlefront.

Morse got drawn into the quarrel at the end of the year, when Kendall and Smith filed an injunction to prevent O’Reilly from extending his line beyond Pittsburgh. O’Reilly laid no blame on Morse, with whom he had had no business contact, and even sympathized