Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [180]
But the spring months of 1856, as Morse prepared to depart, brought more disquieting signs. New articles glorifying the Hughes telegraph appeared, these too by Daniel Craig. Implying that he wrote with the sanction of Field’s American Telegraph Company, he reported the imminent construction of Hughes lines in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere along the Atlantic coast. Morse fulminated against Craig as a “low-bred profane wretch.” But he could not ignore the possibility that Craig was covertly writing on behalf of Field. Kendall pushed him to ask Field bluntly whether American Telegraph, owners of the Hughes patent, had authorized the use of Hughes instruments on the lines reported by Craig—in competition with the key New York–Washington line of Morse’s Magnetic company: “This much you have a right to claim as due to you.”
Morse made his uncomfortable relation to Field no easier by endorsing a new British organization, the Transatlantic Telegraph Company. Finding the group composed, he said, of “substantial and honorable men,” he swallowed their tale that they did not intend to interfere with Field’s great undertaking but to aid it. Field and his associates quickly disabused him. Becoming “quite warm on the subject,” Morse said, they made it clear that Transatlantic Telegraph was in fact a rival. The British group had widely publicized Morse’s sponsorship, obliging him to take out a notice in the New York Herald announcing his withdrawal from them, “undoing today what I did yesterday.”
Morse may have undone too soon, for only a week later he received depressing evidence of Craig’s secret involvement with Field’s company. How it arrived and its exact nature are unclear. But Kendall described the information as certain proof of “some degree of contact” between Craig and “some members” of Field’s American Telegraph. “They have … confessedly been dealing with Craig,” he said, “knowing that he entertained designs hostile to the interests of the Magnetic Line in which you are so deeply interested, and yet, with all their professions of friendship, concealed those designs from you and me.” He told Morse flatly that Field and Field’s associates had betrayed them.
Against his every wish and inclination to consider Field a friend, Morse was beginning to lose faith in him. “I confess,” he told Kendall, “there has been so much mysterious manoeuvering.” More than that, he had joined Field’s enterprise not for gain but for the good of humanity, to help realize “the great plan of uniting the two continents by Telegraph.” Flattered as he felt to be treated as the “high priest” of telegraphy, advertised as “Electrician” of the transcendent adventure, the evidence of schemes harmful to himself and to the Morse lines could not be wished away. He told Kendall that they would continue to negotiate with Field and his associates for the sale or lease of the lines. But he would “get away from all connection with them,” he said, “the moment I can do so without too great sacrifice.”
Morse and Sarah were scheduled to depart for Europe with Field in early June, now only about a month away. He still meant to make the trip, but before leaving he visited Boston and walked over to Charlestown, his place of birth. He had not seen the town for eighteen years, and then for only a few hours. The landmarks were so changed he scarcely recognized them. A pump in the square had vanished, a tavern stood in place of a mansion, the church where his father had preached was gone, together with the parsonage and garden.
But his first home, a two-story wooden house, still existed. Allowed in by the present owner, he viewed the room in which he supposed he was born, the walls unsubstantial, the ceiling low. At another house in town he discovered the watercolor portrait of his family he had painted in his teens.* He had wondered where the picture might be—his young self, his brothers, his mother and father gathered around a Chippendale table, on which stands a globe of the world.
Jedediah was much on Morse’s mind. About two weeks before leaving