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By Root 1615 0

Depressingly too, he learned at the end of the year that a $1500 debt of his father’s, of which he had known nothing, remained unpaid after twenty years. At 7 percent interest, there was owing $8000, for which he remained responsible. His whole life seemed cursed by such a pattern of cancellation, a stasis of self-negation that got him nowhere—profit came with loss, success with failure, attraction with repulsion. “So the world goes,” he told his brother Richard. “It is as Sidney says, ‘Tantalus still.’ ”

A showdown in the conflict came late in 1847, when O’Reilly organized the People’s Telegraph Company to build a line from Louisville through Nashville to New Orleans. The route unmistakably violated his contract with the patentees, which placed the termination of his western line at St. Louis. Kendall challenged O’Reilly by forming a rival group, The New Orleans & Ohio Telegraph Company. Tauntingly, it planned to mirror the movement of the People’s company, building alongside it from Louisville to Nashville, thence to the Crescent City. Kendall formed companies to construct other lines in direct competition with O’Reilly’s from Buffalo to Detroit, Detroit to Milwaukee, and elsewhere. “We must be everywhere,” he said.

On the New Orleans route, O’Reilly intended to use what he advertised as “A NEW AND IMPROVED AMERICAN TELEGRAPH (and NOT Morse’s plan).” Not Morse’s, or House’s either. While publicly beating the drum for House’s telegraph, he had always privately thought it “not simple enough.” For his potentially lucrative line to New Orleans he chose an instrument called the Columbian telegraph, designed by two young telegraphers in his Cincinnati office, Samuel K. Zook and E. F. Barnes. Admirers of the Columbian alleged that it differed from Morse’s system in two ways. Its register used permanent magnets instead of electromagnets; and it had a novel galvanometer-like relay that supposedly protected transmission during thunderstorms. O’Reilly-friendly newspapers played up the device as “the greatest discovery of the present day.” The St. Louis Reveille congratulated its creators for teaching that “there are other minds in this country than Mr. Morse’s.”

Probably so, but it was less certain that the “other minds” included Zook and Barnes. Morse thought their apparatus unquestionably illegal, “a manifest and direct infringement of my Patent.” Here he did not differ greatly from O’Reilly. For all the hoopla in the press, several of O’Reilly’s associates and legal counsel told him frankly that the Columbian telegraph violated Morse’s patent rights—advice that did not deter him from using it.

By January 1848 a gang of twenty-five Irish workmen were erecting Morse wires and posts on the road from Louisville to Nashville, alongside a gang of fifteen erecting a Columbian line for O’Reilly. Morse’s contractor, a Louisville lawyer named Taliaferro P. Shaffner, expected fights and prepared for a “real ‘hug.’” “My men are well armed,” he told Morse, and “I think they can do their duty.” Morse implored him to avoid violence: “It would give me the deepest sorrow if I should learn that a single individual, friend or foe, has been injured in life or limb.” The harm, it turned out, went no further than some yelling. The rival crews worked side by side for fifteen miles, when Shaffner’s pulled ahead and in another four days left O’Reilly’s men twenty-five miles behind.

As the competing lines proceeded, pro-O’Reilly newspapers in Kentucky treated Morse and Kendall to withering scorn. The Massachusetts-born Kendall had spent ten years in Lexington and Frankfort as a lawyer, newspaper publisher, and politician. Old animosities against him had lived on. The Frankfort press mocked him as a “venomous reptile,” “poor driveller,” or “demented old man”—a hireling of “the blood-sucking calves that are hanging on the teats of Morse’s monopoly.” Kendall took it all with suave cynicism, as ravings sufficient, he said, “to excite the sympathy of every kind heart.” Morse, as he often did, met the abuse of himself on the Washingtonian high ground of