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The Society convened again at Delmonico’s a week later and elected Morse its president. He took up his new role vigorously. Addressing the group, he observed that the press had charged the S.D.P.K. with disloyalty. He answered by restating in terms of democratic ideals its aim of appealing beyond the President and the legislatures directly to citizens of America. “Can we overlook the great truth that the very foundation of our governmental system is based on the sovereignty of the people?” he asked. “Is this treason? Is this conspiracy?” In working to realize the S.D.P.K.’s program, Morse hosted private brainstorming sessions in his library, and promoted the organization of auxiliary societies throughout the North and as far west as Iowa. He contributed $500 to maintain the publication of the Knickerbocker magazine, which the Society used as an outlet for writings by its members and supporters. He corresponded with many like-minded people, stressing that a peaceful reunion with the South could not be achieved before the Emancipation Proclamation was repealed: “We must first retract our own wrong, and show our respect for the Constitution ourselves.”

Morse also helped to oversee the Society’s major educational effort, the publication of Papers from the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge. This series of twenty pamphlets issued from the Society’s office at 13 Park Row in New York City, bearing the motto “READ—DISCUSS—DIFFUSE.” Several pamphlets dealt directly with Emancipation, others presented the views of conservative ministers and legislators on civil liberties, states’ rights, and related topics. Being “backed up by millionaires,” as Morse said, the Society could offer its Papers for fifty cents a thousand, distribute them in colleges, and publish some in German as well as English.

In trying to reach “the christian mind of the country” personally, Morse became an eminent propagandist and apologist for slavery. He read widely in the heaps of pro-slavery and Abolitionist literature of the day, and closely followed the debate as it unfolded in the press. He made his views known in a steady stream of articles, letters, introductions to such kindred works as the Reverend Thornton Stringfellow’s Slavery: Its Origin, Nature, and History (1861). He contributed to two of the S.D.P.K. pamphlets and wrote the whole of one himself, entitled An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the Social System, and its Relation to the Politics of the Day.

Morse wrote from experience. He had lived in a slave society while painting in Charleston, and black people had been a near presence in his youth. A black boy named Abraham had lived with the family in Charlestown, taking care of the horse and cow. Jedediah had ministered to the black population of Boston. He gave them a two-year course of weekly lectures and helped to start a black church and a school for black children. He condemned the slave trade, called for its abolition, and in some of his geographies denounced slavery as inconsistent with republican principles.

Morse himself had contributed money to the building of black churches and schools. But in looking back on his father’s views from the current political crisis, he thought them misguided, “benevolently intended, but even then not soundly based.” Moreover the Abolition monster had sprung into being since his father’s death. Jedediah would surely have seen it as the hideous progeny of religious liberalism, “that Apostacy from the faith against which he battled so nobly during his life.” Jedediah’s views mattered to Morse not only in being his father’s, but also because he regarded the religious issue as crucial. To save the country from destruction, what desperately needed confutation was the notion—a rallying cry of the Abolitionists—that Slavery Is Sin. “This monstrous heresy lies at the root of all the fanatical outbreaks … the definite settlement of that fundamental point is vital.”

Morse himself tried to settle the point. After