Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [174]
Morse thought of disengaging from Amos Kendall as well. Since the extension dissolved their ten-year-old agreement, he told Kendall, it might be in their mutual interest to “close up our business relation.” As Morse’s agent Kendall had worked long and hard on his behalf. He not only fulfilled the terms of their agreement but also provided assistance and favors well beyond it—defending Morse at length in print, trying with Christian fellow-feeling to lift him from his blue periods. But Morse was irritated by Kendall’s attempts to steer him away from Cyrus Field. And Kendall’s never-robust health was worse than usual. Having suffered an attack of pleurisy and the death of another child, he could write for barely an hour without feeling exhausted; his hold on life, he said, was “very precarious.” Moreover, when business records were gathered to apply for the extension, they revealed that for a long time Kendall had kept the accounts on loose slips of paper. Among other results of his carelessness, money owed to Morse had apparently never been paid to him.
Morse sent Kendall an aloof letter, setting forth his terms for continuing their arrangement. “I have felt the want of a systematic keeping of our Telegraphic accounts,” he said. “This want has been felt most seriously when apprized of your often recurring illnesses, to which all indeed are more or less liable.” For years he had impressed on Kendall his indifference to mere trade. Now he required documentation of all the business Kendall had conducted as his agent over the past decade, with dates and amounts of every payment and receipt, and full details of the transaction. “Such a statement is, I conceive, a necessary prerequisite to any negotiation for setting up the business of your Agency, to which it seems the ‘extension’ has unexpectedly put an end.”
Morse’s tone sounds thankless, suggesting that he took Kendall’s devoted agency for granted, as if entitled to it. It turned out, however, that the extension did not alter Morse’s legal agreement with him, which remained in force. Kendall had experienced far worse in his life than thanklessness, and did not gloat. He continued selling patent rights and taking on the aggravation and legal mess that often followed. “Indeed,” he told Morse, “what is there connected with your patents and your telegraph property, that I have not to attend to? I do not complain, but do it all cheerfully.” A quick tally of debits and credits apparently revealed that a considerable amount of money was owing—not to Morse but to Kendall, who offered not to take it. A lawyer and clerk were hired to sort through heaps of correspondence and scraps of paper, assisting Kendall as he attempted to organize the business records, prodded now and then by Morse for a definitive statement.
In a final gesture of casting off the past, Morse tried to exorcise Joseph Henry. He had not replied publicly to Henry’s damning court testimony against him. But recently the testimony had been quoted at length in several new books on telegraphy, such as Alexander Jones’ Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph (1852), which cited Henry in attempting to show that Morse had contributed nothing essential to the invention. Morse answered in a ninety-page tract, The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, A Defence against the Injurious Deductions Drawn from the Deposition of Prof. Joseph Henry, (in the Several Telegraph Suits).
In private, Morse accurately referred to his Defence as his “Attack!” Dropping his usual polite deference to Henry, he walloped him as a befogged academic whose testimony in court misrecollected and misrepresented their meetings. Henry’s supposed scientific discoveries were based on discoveries by