Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [179]
Morse knew about this company. He had given it his blessing, in the understanding that Field hoped to join the submarine cable to a national network, and therefore planned to lease or buy existing lines along the Atlantic seaboard and bring them under a unified management, including Morse lines. But his understanding of what Field hoped to do had not included the building of new lines worked by Hughes telegraphs. Such lines would put Field’s American Telegraph Company in direct competition with the Morse companies. He worried anew about Field’s intentions: “I hope collision may & will be avoided. Yet alas! my experience of men leads me to distrust the promises of the best of them.”
Morse calmed down again after a few days. He decided that the Herald article amounted to no more than another of those self-interested jeers at his system by the press, aimed at getting Morse lines to cut their rates for telegraphic dispatches. It strengthened his belief to learn that the article had been written by an agent of the Associated Press, Daniel Craig. Craig was the journalist whose transmission of international news from Halifax had been blockaded by F. O. J. Smith. A forty-year-old New Englander, Craig had a shady reputation. He sabotaged Smith’s Boston–New York line—Smith claimed—by sending a mistress to cut the wire. On several grounds Morse discounted the Herald article. To clinch the matter, he heard directly from Field that the article in the Herald was untrue. Field said that he and his associates in the American Telegraph Company had no intention of building new Hughes lines. “They were as much surprized as any one,” Morse told Kendall, “and as indignant of such misrepresentations.”
Kendall was less convinced. Suspicious of Field from the beginning, he again warned Morse that Field’s friendliness was a snare, designed to gain his confidence in order to exploit him. This time, he said, Field would use the fanfare about the Hughes telegraph to drive down the value of stock in companies that ran Morse equipment. Then Field’s American Telegraph would buy or lease the Morse companies at bargain prices. “It was not friendship to us which induced them to buy the Hughes instrument,” Kendall said; “it was in fact, say what they will, to hold it in terrorem over our heads and the heads of our companies to induce us to let them have our lines at a reduced rent.”
But Morse was by nature trusting—of an “unsuspicious disposition,” as Kendall put it. He also felt too deeply committed to the “great enterprize” of a transatlantic telegraph to risk alienating the men who made it possible. He conceded no more than that the motives of Field and his allies might be mixed. “They are kindly and I believe generously disposed towards me,” he replied to Kendall, “but they are business men too.”
Morse agreed to accompany Field over the summer on a trip abroad. Field wanted to enlist English capital and the English government in laying the cable across the Atlantic. He asked Morse to come along in order to experiment on submarine conductors, “of which,” Morse noted, “we have none of any great extent in this country.” A friend advised Morse to have the New York, Newfoundland, and London company pay for the trip: “the stockholders are a few wealthy men & you are to go to great expence for the benefit of the line & they bear none of the burden … is that liberal, or selfish?” Morse would hear nothing of Field’s supposed selfishness, however. Besides, he meant to take advantage of the trip by seeking payment for the ever-increasing adoption of his system abroad: “not a mile contributes to my support,” he complained, “or has paid me