Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [154]
Morse first saw Sarah at a relative’s house a half-dozen years before their marriage. “I was exceedingly struck with her beauty, her artlessness, her amiable deportment…. I found myself in love with her then before I was aware.” His financial situation ruled out any thought of marrying, however, and she was then barely twenty. He stifled his feelings and thought no more of her until—“accidentally shall I say? no providentially”—he saw her in Utica at the wedding of his son Charles in June 1848.
Sarah had matured, and her character impressed him. The wedding party included his partly deaf son Finley, whose “defects” kept him apart, seated alone in a corner. “I saw Sarah go to him, and taking his hand drew him up and putting her arm in his, she walked the room for some time with him endeavoring to amuse him, and then seated herself by him and in every way she could devise amused him for a long while.” Sarah’s kind sympathy fixed itself in his mind. Two months later they married.
Sarah and Susan Morse at Locust Grove (Daguerreotype by Samuel F. B. Morse) (New-York Historical Society)
Sarah had been deaf since the age of one, owing to a fall or perhaps to scarlet fever. Early in adolescence she attended for three years the state-run New York Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, where she learned to communicate in sign language. Morse believed, or more likely only wanted to believe, that she had gradually been recovering her hearing. He said that he found no difficulty conversing with her, but this may have been due mostly to her proficiency in lipreading: “the simple movement of the lips seen across the room, without a sound being uttered she understands perfectly.” Although her speech, too, was impaired, he deliberately did not learn the sign alphabet, certain that if she conversed with him her articulation would improve: “I have little doubt that I can with God’s help teach her to speak as plain as anyone.” About two years after their marriage, he put her under the care of a physician named Turnbull, well known for his treatment of ear and eye problems. Turnbull tried to persuade him that as a result of the therapy Sarah could hear better than ever. But Morse’s own senses provided no evidence of improvement, and he wrote off Turn-bull as a fake.
Sarah’s impairment deepened Morse’s feeling for her: “her misfortune of not hearing, and defective speech only excited the more my love & pity.” He recalled Sidney remarking, before his own marriage, that he intended to choose a respectable poor girl, who would feel for him not only affection but also gratitude for befriending her. Sarah’s situation at the time of their marriage was similar—“portionless” and partly dependent on the beneficence of her sister’s husband. He increased Sarah’s debt to him by taking in her mother to live with them. Such bonds of need, he believed—“guarantees of affection aside from mere personal love”—augured well for the solidity of their marriage.
Morse felt no less indebted to Sarah. She had come to him in an up-and-down, “singularly checkered” existence. As a widower he had courted a succession of young women, each time ending up frazzled and dejected: “how many several trials I have passed through on this subject of another wife … how many times I have been thwarted and disappointed till almost in despair.” But having bowed in submission to God’s will, he now had everything in a wife he could have desired. “She is noble hearted, considerate, most anxious to please me in all things,” he beamed. “I say every thing when I say that my dear Lucretia could not be more so.” He relished the aura of content Sarah gave off—always busy with her needle or