Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [145]
Morse went to Philadelphia for the trial, in February 1847. It was a bleak occasion for him. His appropriation from Congress to maintain the original Baltimore-Washington system had run out, leaving him not a Superintendent but a man with no salary. And he felt alien to the scene—a U.S. circuit court. Never before had he been party to a law-suit: “I confess to great ignorance even of the ordinary, commonplace details of a court.” Attending the proceedings throughout the day, he for the first time learned the details of his contract with O’Reilly. Vail had often accused him of being a “granny,” and indeed he sympathized with O’Reilly’s situation and wished to make “every possible allowance” for him. If the court granted an injunction, he told Kendall, it would be decent to show leniency: “O’Reilly may have acted hastily, under excitement, under bad advisement, and in that mood have taken wrong steps.” When his lawyers advised him that the case would undoubtedly go for the patentees, he arranged to have $20 sent to O’Reilly’s wife, keeping the source secret: “I could not bear to think that an innocent wife, and inoffensive children should suffer.”
Morse got no chance to show O’Reilly his fellow feeling and generosity. The judge, named Kane, dismissed the motion for an injunction. His ground was narrowly technical: at the end of the year, the patentees had conveyed to Smith’s brother-in-law the construction rights to O’Reilly’s Philadelphia-Pittsburgh line. Ignoring the charge that O’Reilly had formed his own stock company, the judge ruled that since the patentees had given up their interest in his line, they could not appear as complainants against him. “An injunction cannot be awarded at the instance of a stranger,” Kane observed, “and a patentee who has assigned away his interest is nothing more.”
The ruling jolted Morse. Although disposed to let O’Reilly off easily, he had also been led to believe that O’Reilly’s contract violations were so manifest that an injunction would be granted as a matter of course. “I never was more deceived in regard to a case,” he told Kendall. A committed believer in the law, he now questioned whether it could protect his rights. “I feel there is no security … the effect has been to make me doubt every thing, and whether in the eye of our laws I have any rights at all.” In the aftermath of the trial, he wrote to O’Reilly in a friendly spirit, hoping to arrange a peaceful settlement. But he also girded himself: “I am preparing for the worst.”
Morse much needed to be prepared. Emboldened by his victory at court, O’Reilly forged onward with his lines, using Morse’s system, contract or no. “We are nobly vindicated! … Now, indeed, for the Great West.” As his poles began marching west from Pittsburgh through Cincinnati to Louisville, the press disclosed that he was also building from Buffalo to Chicago. Morse was stunned. “Pray what does it all mean?” he asked Kendall. “Is the effect of the Philadelphia decision to give O’Reilly and his associates the construction of all the Telegraphs in the Union?” O’Reilly thought so, and believed that further efforts by Kendall and Smith to nullify his contract would backfire, destroying public confidence in Morse’s system: “they may find that, like Sampson [sic] of old, they have pulled down ruin around their own heads.”
To win public support, O’Reilly mounted an unrelenting advertising campaign. Dispatching agents into towns and cities where he planned to build, he blitzed the country with pamphlets, memorials, handbills, addresses to local legislatures, daily letters and notices in newspapers and magazines, broadsides and circulars with booming