Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [195]
Morse had had enough. He accepted what before he had only understood, that he must give up his part in the historic cable drama, however painful to quit: “I have contributed so much of my time, and made so much sacrifice.” His resolve was tested only a few weeks after his return home. Field asked him to make good his offer to write an endorsement for publication, particularly supporting Field’s appeal to Washington for the use once again of the naval frigate Niagara. In the circumstances, Morse bitterly resented Field’s request: “they who have made the arrangements for hostility to me and my invention,” he told Kendall, “ask me to aid them in their hostility to me.” He was being taken for a fool, “as willing to commit a sort of suicide, for their benefit. It is asking a little too much.” Kendall had his own plans for answering Field, and advised Morse to do nothing.
But before Morse could do or not do anything it was done to him. Atlantic Telegraph, Field’s British partner, declined to appoint him an “Honorary Director” of the second cable attempt. In doing so the company deprived him of more than another mark of distinction. It was precisely his standing as “Honorary Director” that had entitled him to join the official party aboard the Niagara. The decision banished him from the expedition.
Field explained that under British law only stockholders in a company qualified for directorships. Morse doubted this: after all, he had owned no shares in Atlantic Telegraph when it named him an Honorary Director for the first attempt. “If they really desired me to be present, as I was last year,” he told brother Sidney, “they could easily have found the means of making me an Honorary Director without violating the spirit of any rule.” He believed that Field had represented him to his London partners as hostile to their company. “I hope Mr. Field can exculpate himself … before the world and especially before his own conscience, for the course he has taken.”
Hurt and angry, Morse told Field he still wished the new expedition success. But he added that he had no part in attempts others might make to obstruct it. “I am not responsible for the schemes or plans of self-defence and self protection of those interested in the established lines,” he said; “I hear of plans, the details of which are not imparted to me, for I have shut my ears.” This was both quietly menacing and disingenuous. Morse well knew that Amos Kendall felt double-crossed by the Six Nation Treaty and was doing everything he could to undermine Field’s preparations: “I feel a zeal to punish this perfidy,” Kendall had told him, “even if my own interest suffer in the process.” Kendall was pressing his many influential friends in Washington to oppose Field’s request for further government aid. He also presented a formal “Memorial” to Congress, condemning Field’s cable enterprise as an enormous scheme of monopoly, “aiming to control the telegraph business of the two hemispheres for the purpose of securing, directly and indirectly, inordinate gains to a few individuals.” The memorial asked Congress to pass a law requiring the cable’s owners to offer connections on equal terms to all telegraph lines in the United States.
Morse companies excluded from the Six Nation Treaty shared Kendall’s outrage. They unanimously agreed, he said, to “ ‘carry the war into Africa.’” New Morse circuits began going up in the South and West in competition with lines of the Six Nations, and patent rights to the Morse system were sold in the seven-year-old state of California.
Morse had always striven to emulate his father in forgiveness of enemies, but he too wanted to get even. “I would foil them with their own weapons … let there be another Atlantic Telegraph, which shall connect only with the excluded Morse lines.” He thought of forming a rival company to lay a transatlantic telegraph from the Azores, running to