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Samuel F. B. Morse, at about seventy-two (The Library of Congress)

SEVENTEEN

Is This Treason? Is This Conspiracy?

(1860–1865)

FOR SAMUEL F. B. MORSE, the Civil War was a surreal nightmare that transfigured fifty years of hope and belief. In the half century since his earliest trip to England, during the War of 1812, he had often written and spoken out passionately against the wishful view abroad that the United States, like all other republics, was inherently unstable and likely to break apart. But in the first months of 1861, he saw the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana follow South Carolina out of the Union. Early in February, delegates of the seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama, and formed a separate nation, the Confederate States of America, with its own president, Jefferson Davis. “We are now,” Morse lamented, “the scorn of the world.”

The breakdown of the Union left Morse with conflicting loyalties. He often said that he identified with no region, “an American who knows no North nor South nor East nor West, but who feels that every one within the United States is his fellow countryman.” But he had strong ties of kinship and memory with the South. Members of his mother’s family, the Finleys, had lived in Charleston; he had spent years there himself, as a painter. Sarah had lived in New Orleans, as her brother still did, the proprietor of a well-known sword-making company.

These connections and his loathing of the disruptive Abolitionists drew Morse’s sympathies to the South—“especially with the Christian Slaveholder,” he said. Mostly he hoped and believed that the “Almighty arm” would prevent war. Neither side could rejoice in shedding the blood of brethren: “There is something so unnatural and abhorrent in this outcry of arms, in our great family that I cannot believe it will come to a decision by the sword.”

To do what he could toward reconciling the sections, Morse hosted discussions at his town house, inviting ministers, missionaries, and other “warmhearted praying conscientious Christians.” With some New York friends he also formed an American Society for Promoting National Unity. There was much sympathy for the South in the city, whose port had flourished for years on the cotton-carrying trade. Morse’s Society aimed at showing Southerners that they still had allies in the North. It would do so by exposing the Abolitionists as crackbrained, the sole cause of America’s woes—“freedom-shriekers, Bible-spurners,” Morse called them, “fierce, implacable, headstrong, denunciatory, Constitution and Union haters, noisy, factious, breathing forth threatenings and slaughter.”

Morse’s group held meetings at the Bible Society building, printed up a constitution, and appointed him President. But it lasted only about three months, dissolving in a sense of futility after 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. At that moment the Confederate army began a thirty-three-hour bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, forcing the federal garrison there to surrender. With many New Yorkers now turning against the South, recruitment for the Union army began at once. Regiments formed, tents and wooden barracks went up in Central Park. Morse felt no sympathy for the war fever on either side. He refused to contribute to a fund for equipping Union volunteers, horrified by the vision of America at its own throat: “No one can tell the agony of mind which deprives me of sleep at night, and happiness by day, caused by this most deplorable civil strife, this war among brethren.”

Morse’s agony deepened to despair as other Southern states seceded—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee. Much as he believed the South had acted in torment, “maddened by the incessant outpouring of Abolition abuse,” he thought Secession rash and unjustifiable, a surrender of principle. Instead of trusting that the rightness of its cause would eventually triumph, the South had played into the hands of Northern fanatics, conceding to them all the cherished tokens and axioms of national honor: