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Unless, Morse thought, the President had acted with subtle shrewdness. He saw sense in the view of some nonabolitionists in the North who discounted the edict as a brutum fulmen, an impotent threat that “freed” only those slaves beyond the federal government’s reach. Lincoln, Morse surmised, had come under increasing pressure from ultra-abolitionists in his cabinet demanding that he end slavery. To head them off he made a show of yielding. “Look at it,” Morse told a friend. “It is only a proclamation of his intention, at a future day, of proclaiming emancipation. That day is the first of Jany. 1863. Now what is to happen before that date? The Elections.” Elections for Congress, that is, would be held in November, certain to purge the legislature of radicals from Lincoln’s Republican party. The President could then say that the people had declared their will against Abolition, and could withdraw the Proclamation.

Morse’s fantasy proved half right. The 1862 midterm elections produced heavy Republican losses that some blamed on Lincoln’s preliminary Proclamation. Just the same, shortly after noon on January 1, 1863, the President signed the final Proclamation, ending slavery in the United States. Portentously, the document also authorized the service of freed slaves in the United States Army. “Rabid bloodthirsty radicals,” Morse decided, “seem to have got into the places of power.”

Morse found some hope in a group of influential conservative Democrats. Early in February he accepted their invitation to chair an exclusive meeting at Delmonico’s, a posh Fifth Avenue restaurant that offered the latest in Paris cuisine (at a price, Harper’s noted, that could “support a soldier and his family for a good portion of the year”). The guest list consisted of twenty-four powerful New York business and professional men, including Horatio Seymour, the newly elected Democratic Governor of New York; the corporation lawyer Samuel Tilden; and Morse’s fellow Centurion August Belmont, head of the Democratic National Committee, who apparently called the meeting.

What drew these luminaries together was a desire to revoke the Emancipation Proclamation. They would work toward that end by appealing over the President’s head directly to The People, gathering Northern support for the idea of preserving the Union without making Unionism a vehicle for Abolition. A program would be devised and financed to educate the public about which powers and rights the Constitution granted to the federal government, and which to the people and the states. The group appointed a committee to draft its own constitution, and resolved to call itself the New-York Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge.

The wealth and prominence of Belmont, Morse, and the others involved made the Delmonico’s meeting headline news. William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post, which had long urged immediate emancipation, sent or smuggled a reporter into the restaurant and published several accounts of what transpired. The paper shocked its readers by depicting a revolutionary cabal—a “reactionist conspiracy,” a “secret caucus,” a “brotherhood of Carbonari.” There on the “luxurious seats of parlor No. 4” were August Belmont, “a Hebrew from Germany,” and Samuel F. B. Morse, “artist and inventor, born at Charlestown, Massachusetts”—a traitor, the tag implied, to the patriotic heritage of New England.

The paper gave a sinister version of the Society’s aims: “The rich men of New York are to supply the money … for an active and unscrupulous campaign against the government of the nation, and in the behalf of a body of rebels now in arms.” A huge fund would be amassed, not to disseminate knowledge of constitutional principles but “to hand the government over, if they can, to the malignant slave-holding oligarchs who for nearly two years have been slaughtering our sons.” Many other papers picked up the story, including one in Poughkeepsie, which reported that the town’s leading citizen “figured among the infamous gang of conspirators,