Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [175]
While at Locust Grove waiting out preparations for laying the Atlantic cable, Morse also reentered politics. He accepted an invitation from Democrats in the district to run for a seat in Congress. He did so without much enthusiasm, uncertain whether if elected he would be able to satisfy his constituency. As he put it, for forty years he had “cordially acquiesced” in Democratic policies—assented to the policies, he seems to mean, without espousing them. He disapproved the party’s “bargaining for Catholic votes,” and during the 1836 New York City mayoralty race he had run as a candidate of the Native American party.
In the congressional election, in November 1854, Morse received about 5000 votes, losing to the victor by just over 3000—a respectable showing: “I came near being in Congress,” he said. Defeated or not, he got a chance during the two-month campaign to make his views public. The paramount issue remained European designs on America. With the Revolutionary generation dying off—only about a thousand veterans of the war were left—he hoped to keep alive its ideal of an America purged of Old World corruption: “I am content to stand on the platform … occupied by Washington in his warnings against foreign influence.”
Morse had always thought the Abolitionists dangerous to the nation, comparable to the bloodsoaked Jacobins of the French Revolution. And European intriguants, in their latest attempt to divide the country, were insinuating into every public issue great and small the “rabid Abolition spirit.” The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, for instance, permitted settlers in the newly created territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide through their territorial legislatures whether to allow or prohibit slavery, repealing the thirty-year-old Missouri Compromise, which had excluded slavery from the same area. Morse believed that the act would pacify the now-tumultuous agitation over slavery and produce “lasting good to the slave as well to the country.” But Abolitionists had drummed up so much excitement over it as to shut out of public view vastly more important issues. And among the foreign inciters of Abolitionism, the most disruptive was the Catholic Church, now more than ever to be abhorred. “The reckless spirit of a wild and truly un-Christian abolitionism, is that which I believe Jesuits may, and do, use as one of the most efficient means to accomplish their great end, and the end for which they have been sent here, to wit, the dissolution of the Union.”
Despite efforts by Morse and others in the 1830s to warn Americans about subversion from abroad, Nativism had been quiescent for a decade. But it revived following waves of European immigration that from roughly 1845 to 1855 brought to America nearly three million foreigners, more than had come in all the time since the American Revolution. “It is a problem yet unsolved,” Morse said, “how far our moral strength can withstand the shock of such an avalanche.”
Morse felt the effects himself. He allowed an Irish railroad laborer named Brien to erect a “shantee” on his land at Locust Grove. Returning from a trip to Washington he found not only the Brien family but a whole shantytown on his property, “a complete Irish village” of railroad workers who had cut down his trees and burned his fences. “An incursion of savages could not have done so much injury in so short a time,” he howled. “I declare I almost cried when I looked at the scene.” He ordered the shanties removed and demanded “heavy damages.” With forecasts in the press of further large Irish