Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [196]
Field’s exact part in dumping Morse is unclear. Peter Cooper and other leaders in his companies were involved in making decisions, and probably had a say. They would not have been the first of Morse’s associates to be put off by his shifting moods of whining self-pity and imperiousness. However culpable or not, Field expressed surprised hurt at Morse’s unfriendliness. “I am totally unconscious of having deserved it,” he told Morse. He attributed their break to Kendall and Kendall’s cronies, “persons of more worldly cunning than enters into your own nature, and who have been glad to put forward your great and honored name for the advancement of mere selfish objects.”
Morse replied by recalling their discussion aboard the Arabia when returning to the United States. Field had assured him that negotiations between the American Telegraph Company and other Morse companies were “going on favorably.” Instead, on returning home he had found Field’s company promoting the Hughes telegraph and aiming at “the utter extermination of my system …. Do you say this is not so? Can you be so blind as not to perceive it?” He did not blame his expulsion from the cable project on Field, he said, but on Field’s allies: “Be this as it may, I was thrown out.” As happened twenty years earlier when Congress refused him a commission for the Capitol rotunda, the richest reward of his labor had again come in sight and been snatched away.
Hopeful news from France eased Morse’s distress. His agent Frederic Van den Broek informed him that, under the direction of the French government, representatives of ten European countries had met in Paris late in April to discuss compensation for their use of the Morse system. This unusual international gathering agreed to propose an indemnity of 400,000 francs, payable to Morse in four annuities, each country contributing in proportion to the number of Morse instruments it had in use. The delegates had returned home to present the recommendation to their governments, but would convene again that fall in Paris to report the decision.
“My faith in those who now rule the destinies of France has not been misplaced,” Morse said. He had in mind the éclat rather than the cash, which he thought small—about $80,000, of which a third would go to Van den Broek. Kendall had suggested an indemnity of at least half a million dollars, and considered the amount “niggardly”: “I know not how to express my contempt of the meanness of the European governments in the award they propose to make you as the inventor of the Telegraph.” But for Morse what mattered was that the brokers of his indemnity were not men of trade but Counts and Ministers Plenipotentiary. “I accept the gratuity,” he wrote, “with tenfold more gratification than could have been produced by a sum of money, however large, offered on the basis of a commercial negotiation.” The U.S. minister in France urged him to come to Paris when the delegates adjourned again in August. “My friend,” he wrote, “you are about to have awarded to you a higher honor than COLUMBUS lived to receive.”
Morse and Sarah sailed in July aboard the steamer Fulton. He planned to make a lengthy trip, including a visit in Puerto Rico with his daughter Susan and her family. He leased out Locust Grove and sent Finley, now thirty-four years old, to live with cousins in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Since the railway journey involved several train changes, he wrote a note for Finley to hand to conductors along the route,