Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [206]
Morse recalled bitterly that his pleasure in the honors lavished upon him had always come from the thought that not he but his country was being honored. So now his honors meant nothing: “I have no country; the dismembered limbs of a convulsed and dying body, do not constitute my country.” Having no country he might as well for his family’s safety settle in more peaceful Europe. He had once before thought of retiring permanently to the Continent, but the irony of the temptation now seemed excruciating: “to flee for refuge, from the world’s great city of refuge, to flee for safety from the boasted land of freedom, to despotic Europe! What a change! what an anomaly!”
Instead of fleeing, Morse entered more fully than ever into national politics, hoping to avert all-out war. He wished to personally confer with the governments at Washington and Richmond about ways of ending the conflict. Physically he did not feel up to carrying out such a mission. But he sent a paid representative (unnamed), who did manage to discuss the subject with both President Lincoln and President Jefferson Davis. Meanwhile he returned to political journalism. He tried to convince both sides that the calls to arms envenoming the country did not issue from “the American truly Christian heart.”
Morse first presented his case in a series of newspaper articles, soon republished as a forty-page pamphlet entitled The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union, A British Aristocratic Plot (1862). He revealed that the North and the South had been tricked, turned against each other by a scheme “long-concocted and skilfully planned” to weaken the country by stirring up sectional animosity. Among much other evidence, he cited the activities in America of George Thompson, a fire-eating British Abolitionist who allegedly was awarded a seat in Parliament for exhorting slaves to cut their masters’ throats. He also quoted damning speeches by British officials such as the Earl of Shaftesbury: “I, in common with almost every English statesman, sincerely desire the rupture of the American Union …. With a population of thirty millions, they will soon, if not checked, overshadow Great Britain.” (Shaftesbury denied having made the remark.) Morse called on Americans to forget their domestic quarrel and attend to the external danger that contrived it: “Where are the people? why do they sleep when incendiaries have fired the house?” Plenty of people evidently heard him, however. Distributed by the New York publisher Daniel Appleton, the pamphlet found enough readers to justify a second printing.
As Morse pointed out, The Present Attempt repeated what he had written in his tract Foreign Conspiracy (1835), and had often prophesied. “I have for thirty years watched these foreign intrigues … predicting that if the warning were not heeded, or was looked upon as a false alarm, the Union would be dissolved. It was nevertheless unheeded, it was ridiculed as visionary, and the event has occurred as I predicted.” His warnings took in French Infidelity and a more recent threat, German Transcendentalism. His focus on England of course reflects a lifetime of distrustfully contemptuous Anglophobia, intensified by the British government’s unwillingness to contribute to his indemnity. Although publicly sworn to work for peace, he suggested privately that the Union and the Confederacy might be reconciled by joining forces to fight England: “Deplorable as war is … yet when we are compelled to choose between two wars, we may be allowed to express our preference for a foreign over a domestic war.”
Morse’s alarums about the “British Aristocratic Plot” did not express mere personal vendetta. The notion that Abolitionists were pawns of British imperialism, that Great Britain promoted an end to slavery in order to cripple its commercial rivals, had been widespread in America since the 1830s. Nor should Morse’s warnings about foreign intrigue