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By Root 1566 0

Locust Grove on May 1. The city had become the dynamo of the northeastern United States. Huge amounts of money circulated through its many banks and insurance companies, its one million inhabitants supported 104 newspapers, its mass transit system carried more than 50 million passengers a year. Morse’s house and its two adjoining lots stood at No. 5 West 22nd Street, in the fashionable Gramercy Park section. One block away rose the brand-new Fifth Avenue Hotel, described by a British newspaperman as larger and handsomer than Buckingham Palace. Employing four hundred servants, it had its own telegraph office—one of fourteen American Telegraph Company stations now operating in the city.

Morse’s house was a four-story brownstone, its front matted by a Morse in his New York City study (The Library of Congress) spreading wisteria vine. The interior offered such comforts as a conservatory for plants, a library with bookcases of black walnut, and a top floor gymnasium. Morse bought a new piano and a burglar-proof safe. Although “no great connoisseur in wines, and no great consumer of them,” he admitted, he ordered six cases from a city merchant and sent to France for six cases of champagne. In the adjacent vacant lots he had a spacious study built for himself, and a story-high picture gallery.

Morse in his New York City study (The Library of Congress)

Morse continued to house Sarah’s mother; Sarah’s sister and her family had rooms in the neighborhood and called almost every evening. Richard and Sidney had recently sold the Observer, and to Morse’s great satisfaction they both lived nearby. Restless as ever, Richard had trekked to Canton, Macao, and Java, learning Portuguese and translating a history of French literature. Well aware that he had never settled down, he felt he had done the best he could, “an inglorious life, but yet a prosperous & happy one.” Morse joined his brothers in erecting a monument to their father in the New Haven cemetery, a twenty-foot granite shaft topped by a globe emblematic of The Geographer. Morse contributed most of the cost. In the past, when he was poor, his brothers had helped support him: “I am now, through the loving kindness and bounty of our Heavenly Father, in such circumstances that I can afford this small testimonial to their former fraternal kindness.”

With Morse’s fine house came standing in New York society. As a member of the upper crust he was elected to a committee appointed to arrange the social event of the year—a public banquet and ball honoring the visit of Queen Victoria’s nineteen-year-old son, the Prince of Wales. He extended a fulsome personal invitation for the “illustrious Prince” to stop by Locust Grove, to see American country life “as it were, en dishabille.” The offer was politely declined (“Every hour of our time is fully engaged”). But he apparently had a brief interview with the Prince in the New York University chapel, where he also delivered an address of welcome on behalf of the faculty.

With a momentous national election coming up in November 1860, friends tried to put Morse’s name forward as a possible candidate for the presidency. He appreciated the gesture but declined, citing his advancing age, his lack of qualification, and the thankless vexations the office brought with it. “I have no taste for its duties, and its honors have no attraction for me.” But the outcome of the election worried him. All eighteen free states except New Jersey—a majority of the electoral college—chose a possibly divisive candidate, Abraham Lincoln. And only six weeks later, the state of South Carolina voted in convention to secede from the Union. “The tea has been thrown overboard,” the Charleston Mercury announced, “the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”

COMMANDADOR

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force

—Walt Whitman, “Beat! Beat! Drums!” (1861)

It is stated on good authority that the vintages of Los Angeles County will this year produce one million and a half gallons of wine.

—New York Times,