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believed that O’Reilly was also actively promoting House’s system in England. He prepared an article for the press that incorporated a letter “from a gentleman of distinguished mechanical science in London to his friend in America.” The scientific gentleman avowed that the English considered printing telegraphs “philosophical toys, of no practical value.” The gentleman was his brother Sidney, then visiting London. The friend was himself, but he preferred “not being known in the matter,” he explained, withdrawal from bare-knuckle capitalism seeming more desirable than ever.

O’Reilly understood that House’s invention might infringe Morse’s patent. To head off any attempt to attack the printing telegraph on that basis he turned the legal question into an ideological issue. He had always looked for investors not among bankers and financiers but among farmers, shopkeepers, and small traders who had only tens or a few hundred dollars to spare. He mustered their support for House’s telegraph by calling his line “The People’s Line” and depicting Morse and his associates as monopolists, enemies of the competitive economy that would stimulate the development of new and better systems. “We take the strongest Anti-monopoly ground,” he proclaimed; “Equal Rights to all modes of Telegraphing.” A broadside ditty set his message to the tune of “Dan Tucker”:

The “People’s Line” has just begun, When we get thro’ we’ll have some fun….

CHORUS

—Get out of the way with your monopoly, Get out of the way with your monopoly….

O’Reilly especially aimed his propaganda at westerners, picturing Morse’s supposed monopoly as part of the eastern stranglehold on the burgeoning frontier.

Behind O’Reilly’s efforts to turn him into an “odious monopolizer,” Morse saw a quite different object: “It is to destroy any feeling of sympathy in the public mind, from the gross robberies committed upon me.” To his grief, the efforts worked. After years of threadbare hanging on, he found letter writers to the daily papers perversely deriding him as a “nabob,” comparing him to Nicholas Biddle, estimating his wealth at half a million, a million, “far beyond what any other patentee has ever obtained in this country.”

As Morse feared might happen, the press itself turned against him, “giving currency to falsehoods, and magnifying troubles.” Editors had come to depend on the telegraph and hoped to get cheaper rates from O’Reilly than from him: “they join in the cry of ‘monopoly,’ ‘no monopolies,’ to profit by the competition.” New York papers stood to profit most from lower rates, especially Horace Greeley’s Tribune, a leading consumer of telegraph news: “Shall [the telegraph] be republican and free,” the Tribune asked, “or an agent of aristocratic despotism—shall it be American or shall it be Russian?” Among the few New York papers that defended Morse, the Day Book accused O’Reilly of bribing editors with gifts of stock: he “has made half the editors in the country his partners. Why shouldn’t they think him one of the greatest men of the age?”

O’Reilly found other powerful allies in shielding House’s telegraph from charges of infringement. He spoke with America’s leading scientist, Joseph Henry. Henry had grown angry at Morse after reading Alfred Vail’s Description of the American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, a popular pamphlet version of the book Vail had published while Morse was abroad. The pamphlet gave a flattering account of how Morse created his system, but did not mention the contribution to it of Henry’s work in increasing the distance through which electromagnets could be actuated, or of Henry’s advice, encouragement, and endorsements. Henry blamed Morse for the omission, supposing that he had reviewed and approved Vail’s work. He denounced the pamphlet to one of his classes at Princeton—“HENRY sticks it into MORSE,” a student reported. He also discussed his opinions with O’Reilly, as O’Reilly informed the public: “some of the most competent judges in the Union, (such as Professor Henry,) familiar with House’s as well as Morse’s Telegraphs, declare