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By Root 1469 0

be seen as unfounded political paranoia. Anti-democratic elements in England and Europe did fear popular education, separation of church and state, and other forms of Americanization. And whatever Shaftesbury may or may not have said, the Earl of Shrewsbury did remark that “men now before me will live to see an aristocracy established in America.” News and rumors abounded of foreign designs to exploit the divisions within the United States—of France outfitting warships in response to a possible Union blockade of Southern ports, of Spain sending troops to the Gulf of Mexico, looking to reassert its position in the Americas. A Boston newspaper alerted its readers to the gathering of the European vultures: “The terror of the American name is gone, and the Powers of the Old World are flocking to the feast from which the scream of our eagle has hitherto scared them.”

Not surprisingly, for his efforts to bring North and South together against a common enemy Morse was seen by both as a turncoat. “I am charged by the administration with ‘Secession’ proclivities, and at the South with ‘abolition’ sentiments.” Of the two accusations, the Southern hurt more, deepened by a sense of betrayal. Morse learned that the Confederate government, under a sequestration law enacted by the Confederate Congress, had seized his investments throughout the region, identifying him as a resident of the United States of America, therefore an “Alien Enemy.” Some $40,000 of his stock in Southern telegraph companies was declared null and void, and transferred to the Confederate States of America. “I am no ‘alien enemy,’ ” Morse howled; “Is this the return for my confidence reposed in the honor of the South? Is this the return for my sympathy with Southern wrongs, and my efforts to stem the torrent of evils which threaten to involve all in a common ruin?”

The eruption of full-scale combat left Morse in stunned anguish: “two armies, more numerous each than have met face to face in all the European wars at least for a century, are at this moment opposite to each other … to enact the bloodiest battle that civilization (?) has ever witnessed.” Just how staggeringly bloody began making itself known after April 1862: 3500 killed, 16,500 wounded at Shiloh on the Tennessee River; 3100 killed, 16,000 wounded at the second Battle of Bull Run, Virginia; nearly 5000 killed and 20,000 wounded at Antietam Creek, Maryland; another 13,000 troops missing. To Morse the bloodbath seemed a delusional orgy of self-destruction, a communal madness he often compared to the Salem witchcraft crisis: “fight it out, kill, burn, devastate … misrepresent, exasperate, exaggerate, vituperate; fight the devil with fire, lie against lie … and gild the whole with the name of Patriotism.”

Morse told Kendall that he felt unusually depressed: “I see no hope of Union. We are two countries, and what is most deplorable two hostile countries. Oh how the nations with England at their head crow over us.” Foreign predators would find the torn corpse of the United States a helpless prey, too. American children now living might well grow into adulthood under the rule of a king or emperor: “I leave … this prophecy in black and white.”

For Morse as for millions of other Americans, a turning point in the war came on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On the first day of the new year, it said, all slaves in the rebellious states would be declared “forever free.” Morse regarded the Proclamation as both unconstitutional and fatal to the South. “I read it with astonishment,” he said; “I thought it infamous, and ridiculous if it were not so wicked.” Lincoln had seemed tolerable during his first days, prosecuting the war not to end slavery but to preserve the Union. But the war aims he now proposed were contradictory, Morse thought, “the one legitimate, the establishment of the authority of the Constitution, the other illegitimate, the emancipation of the negros.” Turning the fight against Secession into an Abolitionist crusade, the Proclamation was