Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [186]
Morse’s craven request for “something” was unlikely to waken fear and trembling in a rip-snorting capitalist who had brought back a jaguar from the Amazon. But Morse considered his appeal decisive. It would “bring the whole matter to a head,” he told Kendall: “I shall know definitely how I am to stand in my relations with these gentlemen, and am prepared to cut loose if necessary, at almost any sacrifice.”
Morse’s ever more desperate efforts to stay on good terms with Field strained his bond with Kendall. Impatient, perhaps disgusted, with Morse’s timorous trust in Field, Kendall said it might be best if he gave up his agency and resumed the “sacred obligation” of completing his biography of Andrew Jackson. Morse had suggested as much himself two years earlier, when he told Kendall it might be in their mutual interest to close their business association. But Kendall’s eagerness to now take up the suggestion jangled him. “I fear my ‘bluish’ letters have given you more uneasiness than they ought …. Pray overlook the infirmity.” Without Kendall to protect his interests he could not survive in the marketplace: “you form such a contrast in all your feelings and acts to the cold and selfish and sordid doings of others that were you to withdraw I should truly feel widowed and alone and exposed to the arts of mere men of trade.”
Morse anxiously longed to compose his differences with Field’s company before departing for England to lay the cable. In March, with only a month to go, he met face-to-face with president Peter Cooper, the vice president, and one of the directors. “I wish if possible,” he told a friend, “to avoid rupture with them on all accounts.” The wish was probably intensified by Field’s success, the same month, in getting aid from Washington. Congress voted by narrow margins to grant Field’s company an annual subsidy of $70,000 for the government’s use of the completed cable—equivalent to the British crown’s £14,000. It also supplied two steamships of the American navy to join the British ships in laying the cable. Peter Cooper offered Morse passage to England aboard one of the official U.S. Navy ships.
The offer cannot have diminished Morse’s yearning for a prominent role in Field’s extravaganza. He apparently came away from his meeting with the leaders of American Telegraph willing to believe that Craig was promoting the Hughes telegraph without their blessing and that they had no intention of building Hughes lines. Willing to believe, that is, without exactly believing. In this half-hopeful mood he offered to put aside for a while any request for a financial stake in Field’s new British company. “Whatever claims equitable or otherwise I or my friends may think are just on my part upon the company,” he told Cooper, “let them for the present be waived. I shall not thrust before the company, at this moment when the harmonious action of all is necessary to carry forward the enterprize to a successful result, any private or mere personal object to embarrass our united action.”
Morse did not say so to Field or Cooper, but he revealed to others that despite the concessions and seeming amity, on certain points he remained “not satisfied.” Later on, it might be necessary to call together the directors of the major Morse lines to exchange views on a plan for defense. It could be that Field’s group, he had to admit, “is thinking to swallow us all up.”
As a world-historic event, the attempt to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable aroused an intense, international air of expectancy. Newspapers ran full-page stories headlined “THE GREAT WORK OF THE AGE,” calling the expedition “a voyage more important than any in marine annals since the days of Columbus.” Every feature of preparation became a subject for description and comment, as much so as before the launching of Apollo 11 toward the moon a century later: “where in the annals of the world,” one