Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [176]
Morse became a rallying point for the revived nativism. With new Catholic churches being built and new Catholic calls for an end to Bible reading in the public schools, he permitted nativist groups to reprint his Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration (1835). He also agreed to sit on the Council of the Order of United Americans, an organization of self-described “ultra kind of Americans” opposed to immigrant-borne “jesuitism.”
Although running for Congress as a Democrat, Morse boosted the Know-Nothing party, the most visible and successful manifestation of resurgent anti-Catholicism. The party’s platform included a resolution to restrict political office to native-born Americans (“AMERICANS ONLY SHALL GOVERN AMERICA”)—a cause Morse had espoused for twenty years. Rapidly gaining support throughout the country, the Know-Nothings elected eight governors by the end of 1855, and the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. “The American mind,” Morse wrote, “is at length awake.”
Morse drew most attention to the cause by dueling in the press with the American-born Catholic bishop of Louisville, M. J. Spalding. At issue was a statement supposedly made by the Marquis de Lafayette more than twenty years earlier: “American liberty can be destroyed only by the Popish clergy.” Lafayette’s warning had been often and widely quoted since first appearing in Morse’s Confessions of a French Catholic Priest (1837). Morse had included it on the authority of the ex-priest whose manuscript he edited for publication.
About ten days before the November 1854 election, an article made the rounds of American newspapers, denouncing the quotation as a “Disgraceful Forgery.” Reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer, the article maintained that Lafayette’s statement had been taken out of context from a letter he wrote, in a way that reversed its meaning. What Lafayette actually said, according to the Enquirer, was: “the fears … that if ever the liberty of the United States is destroyed it will be by Romish priests—are certainly without any shadow of foundation whatever.” Morse publicly called the Enquirer quotation spurious, a forgery itself, and demanded that the newspaper produce the supposed letter. He claimed that he had often personally heard Lafayette, who had been born a Catholic, warn against Catholic influence in America.
Soon Morse was trading insults in the press with Bishop Spalding, who attributed the reversal of Lafayette’s meaning to deceitful anti-Catholics. In their eight-month-long exchange of published letters and comments, the bishop sneered at Morse’s faulty memory and fondness for academic titles. Morse sneered back that it baffled “moral science” to account for so contradictory a thing as an American-born bishop:
that one who, with his first moral breath, inhaled the purified air of a Bible Christianity; that one whose infancy was nurtured amid the sound heads and honest hearts of a Kentucky community, should voluntarily shrink away from the day-light that surrounded him and deliberately prefer to grope for enlightenment in the foreign dens of a decaying and festering superstition….
Mostly Morse tried to out-argue the bishop, “Jesuit as I presume he is, and eel like as he may be.” With no less intensity than he brought to demonstrating the priority of his telegraph, he chased down evidence of the authenticity of Lafayette’s statement—writing to Paris booksellers, scanning old newspapers, contacting persons who had known Lafayette and historians who had written about the period, including Washington Irving and George Bancroft.
Morse’s months of research did not greatly help. Over the course of the controversy he shifted ground. Eventually