Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [157]
Morse had intently followed the progress of the politically divisive Mexican War. What many Americans condemned as a war of aggression aimed at extending slavery, he saw as a chance to prove the nation’s military valor and open a field to Protestant evangelism: “The Mexican race is a worn out race; and God in his Providence is taking this mode to regenerate them…. Our Bible & Tract Societies and Missionaries ought to be in the wake of our Armies.” He also gave credence to long-existing rumors of plans abroad to install a French or Spanish—that is, Catholic—monarch on the throne of Mexico: “how far these designs are connected with the Leopold operations in our own country, may be guessed at.” An American victory would halt the further spread of popery and teach European despots not to interfere in American affairs. He looked forward to an honorable peace with the Mexicans, he said—“after we have given them a thorough thrashing.”
Morse had also kept an eye on the revolutions overtaking Europe. In February 1848 a Paris mob clashed with a detachment of troops, who opened fire, killing or wounding some fifty people. The mayhem touched off massive civil disorder. More than a thousand barricades went up throughout the city; crowds overran the Tuileries Palace, tossing the throne into the courtyard. Leaders of the insurrection proclaimed that the people would not again allow the government to betray republican principles, as had happened under Louis-Philippe, who was forced to abdicate. The upheaval in Paris inspired popular uprisings in Italy and central Europe as well, driving the Pope from the Vatican and Metternich from Vienna.
Like many other Americans, Morse rejoiced in the revolutions, which President Polk called the most important event of modern times. Morse wrote to Arago congratulating the French on what they had achieved. “In a most important sense,” he said, “France now holds the destiny of the world in her own hands.” The question was whether she would succeed in finding a “moral basis” for maintaining republican government, or again relapse into anarchy and despotism. The first amendment to the American Constitution offered a model, he told Arago. An act similarly forbidding the French state to make laws concerning religion would “lay the Corner Stone of Liberty and happiness in France and throughout the world.” That, of course, did not happen. Napoleon’s conservative nephew, Louis Napoleon, staged a coup d’état, proclaimed himself Emperor, and suppressed the liberal constitution. One after another the other uprisings collapsed or were beaten down. “All is crushed,” the Observer lamented, “trampled under foot, rent at the point of the bayonet: justice, law, liberty, honor.”
As for his aesthetic life, Morse had taken scarcely any interest in painting for many years: “the very name of pictures produces a sadness of heart I cannot describe.” He visited the National Academy of Design with Sarah, but before leaving for Europe in 1845 he had declined reelection as president, and not once during his stay in Paris had he visited the Louvre. He blamed his withdrawal from art largely on John Quincy Adams. He still believed that it was Adams who had denied him a commission for one of the Capitol rotunda paintings out of ill will toward Jedediah Morse. And he still reflected bitterly on what the former president had done by thus blocking his development: “he killed me as a painter, and he intended to do it…. May God forgive him as I do.”
His eyesight deteriorated, Morse no longer wished to be remembered as a painter. By his own high standard, he felt, he had never been one. Of the more than three hundred canvases he had produced, some family portraits remained valuable to him for their likeness. But he retained only The Muse, the full-length portrait of teenaged Susan in a butterscotch-colored dress. Otherwise, nothing: “I could wish that every picture I ever painted was destroyed.”
Morse’s disgust did not take in his adventurous work in photography, which many still appreciated. “It was