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Morse saw in the situation, however, his best-ever chance, after so many best chances, to rid himself of Smith forever. He gave Smith an additional $500 for agreeing to sign a “General Release.” Seemingly comprehensive, the document resolved all unsettled claims between them—“all manner of actions, causes of action, suits, debts, dues, sums of money, accounts, reckonings, promises, variances, trespasses, damages, judgments, decrees, executions, claims and demands what-soever.” Morse rejoiced in at last escaping from his tormented captivity to Smith, “bound hand and foot… to a corpus mortuum, to a body not merely dead but corrupted.” The release ended, he said, “twenty two years of apprehension, like that of being in a den of rattlesnakes.”

The much-reduced indemnity shrank some more as the family of Alfred Vail also claimed part of it. While in Puerto Rico, Morse had received news of his former student’s death, at the age of fifty-two. He had worked closely if uncomfortably with Vail for a dozen years, experiencing with him such awesome breakthroughs as the construction of the original Baltimore-Washington line. Saddened by the news, he praised Vail as a pious if sometimes cranky Christian: “his intentions were good, and his faults were the result more of ill-health, a dyspeptic habit, than of his heart.”

Vail died poor, having remarried and sold most of his telegraph stock in struggling to support his family. Before dying, however, he told his brother George that the Vails were contractually entitled to one-eighth of the indemnity. Morse paid over some $5000 to Vail’s widow, Amanda, saying he had always intended to give her husband a portion. Anxious nevertheless to cut loose from the Vails as well as from Smith, he worked out a similar “General Release” with Amanda Vail and with Vail’s brother. This release—to look ahead—also gave no release.

The various settlements left Morse with less than half the amount of the indemnity, plus of course the honor. But that, too, suffered new indignities. The first came when he applied for a seven-year extension of the 1846 patent covering his receiving magnet, the part of his system that actuated registers at telegraph stations along the main line. His onetime associate Charles Page printed up and issued what Page called a “manifesto,” proclaiming that credit for the receiving magnet—the “life and soul” of Morse’s system, he said—belonged to Charles Wheatstone, Joseph Henry, and himself: “the Invention claimed under the Patent of 1846 is not Morses and … he is entitled to no credit whatever in this connection.”

Astonished, Morse added Page to his long list of traitors, having counted him a friend. Not only that, Page’s assault represented an inexplicable change of opinion: when serving as an examiner in the Patent Office in 1846, he had approved Morse’s application. What motivated Page to now challenge the very same patent is unclear. An inventor himself, he had helped Morse to miniaturize the cumbersome receiving magnet. But he had been paid for the work and had sought no further recognition for it. As Morse put it, Page may simply have “had some ‘human nature’ in him,” envious that Morse had become world famous as an inventor. Morse protested to him the many misstatements in the manifesto, particularly the spurious charge that he had brought from abroad and put into use one of Wheatstone’s receiving magnets. Another avenging angel also reappeared—Henry O’Reilly, informing Morse that he too planned to oppose the extension. And Morse suspected that the supposedly vanquished F. O. J. Smith had joined the campaign—as Smith had.

Morse went to Washington in April 1860 for the hearing on his case. In a thirty-two-page decision, the Patent Commissioner ruled that his receiving magnet differed utterly from Wheatstone’s, and that its “combination of devices” was unique, “not to be found in any patent, or invention, or in any printed publication, or in public use, prior to its date;