Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [177]
Despite his passion for the nativist cause, Morse felt no more at home in the movement than in the Democratic party. Unexpectedly he found himself leaving the Order of United Americans, and no longer endorsing the Know-Nothings. Like other political parties, the Know-Nothings were split by sectional loyalties. Many northern members aligned themselves with the Abolitionists, believing that the Catholic Church and nearly all Irish immigrants supported slavery. To Morse, the Know-Nothings were in this way “neutralizing” their influence, and he withdrew his support: “I cannot thus identify myself while there is any likelihood of my giving my influence to the ruinous anti-Slavery movement of the North against the South.”
To a lengthening list of disillusionments with the country that included the American press and American patent laws, Morse added the American party system. The Whig party having collapsed, the Democrats being sharply divided by the “dangerous ultraisms” of the day, and the new, anti-slavery Republican party being contemptible, he began to feel disenfranchised altogether: “my own views … are not in accord with the platforms of any present political organization, nor can I be identified entirely with any of them.”
During Morse’s year-long intermission, the first, North American stage of the transatlantic telegraph had been nearly completed. Six hundred workmen had built a road from one end of Newfoundland to the other. It wound around bays, and through rocky gorges and dense forests roamed by bears and herds of caribou—a giant causeway of telegraph poles eight feet wide and four hundred miles long. Simultaneously a 140-mile telegraph line had been strung through Cape Breton Island, about sixty miles away across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. What remained was to lay a cable in the gulf electrically linking Newfoundland with Cape Breton Island, where transmissions would pass through nearby Nova Scotia into the United States. A land-and-water line of telegraph would then be in operation some 1200 miles from Newfoundland to New York City, waiting to be attached to the undersea cable from Ireland.
On August 7, Morse and Sarah sailed from New York City to witness the laying of the gulf cable. For the critically important event Field chartered a sleek sidewheel steamboat, the James Adger. He invited fifty-eight guests as passengers—clergymen, doctors, lawyers, reporters, as well as the other directors of the New York, Newfoundland, and London company with their wives and children. The atmosphere was party-like. The flag-decked Adger left its Hudson River pier amid steam whistles, three-gun salutes, and displays of the Stars and Stripes. The first night out, Field’s guests heard a concert of airs from popular operas and selections of minstrelsy, such as “The Colored Fancy Ball.” Morse brought along and demonstrated a telegraph apparatus. When thunderstorms struck that evening, guests jokingly blamed them on the Lightning Man.
On August 20, Morse and the others aboard the Adger reached Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland, from where the submarine cable would be laid to Cape Breton Island. They were scheduled to meet up with a vessel from England bearing the cable and paying-out equipment. But the vessel had been delayed. On Field’s order the Adger steamed around the southern end of Newfoundland to the capital city of St. John’s, for a four-day goodwill