Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [212]
Sidney Morse shared his brother’s thinking and echoed it. He published several pro-slavery articles and pamphlets, similarly affirming that the Bible sanctioned slavery, that slaveholding was as much a God-given right as government, that only infidels considered all men entitled to liberty: “Is not this deification of liberty, this apotheosis of the will of the negro, the most insulting of all violations of the first commandment of the decalogue?” Richard Morse, always a free spirit, announced that he intended to vote for the reelection of Lincoln. His brother Samuel tried to reason with him but gave up: “I pray you … may be delivered from the delusions which have pursued you.”
It gratified Morse that his defense of slavery reached a large and appreciative audience, “some of the most pious, as well as distinguished, intellectual minds in the country.” The West Virginia Intelligence, for instance, praised him as a communicator—first technological and now political:
There is a great fitness that the distinguished originator of the American Magnetic Telegraph, whose genius has chained the lightning and made it an obedient messenger to carry information with the rapidity of thought from end to end of the land, should be among the foremost to flash the light of political knowledge into the minds of his fellow countrymen.
His S.D.P.K. pamphlet on The Ethical Position of Slavery sold so well he was hard put to find extra copies, “to supply the constant demand upon me for them.”
But Morse’s writing also brought him much vituperative criticism. “Oh my Brother,” his former pastor wrote to him, “what a work of repentance, deep bitter repentance, have you made for yourself.” The New York Times mocked his views on human equality, not for holding that one body of men might be less able than another, but for deducing that in such a case “it is the right of the latter to rob, beat and sell the former.” The prestigious North American Review derided as “worthless and shallow” his treatment of slavery as merely a form of government, his endorsement of the cornerstone doctrine, his sneers at the Declaration. The journal attributed these and his other notions to “the self-conceit of a weak man.” A Boston newspaper recommended that he be imprisoned.
Morse did not comment on the fact, but within the whistling of bullets on American battlefields could be heard the click of his invention. Both armies extensively telegraphed military information. The Confederacy used private telegraph companies, the Union organized a Military Telegraph Department that transmitted some six and a half million dispatches. Over the course of the war a shortage of wire and other supplies silenced many of the South’s lines. Meanwhile the North strung 15,000 additional miles of wire and laid a twenty-mile submarine line across Chesapeake Bay, using a section of Cyrus Field’s abandoned 1858 Atlantic cable.
Morse’s telegraphs put strategic decisions in motion. The web of circuits allowed commanders to coordinate troop movement at a distance from their forces. Atop the chain of command, President Lincoln visited the telegraph office at the War Department several times a day to receive reports from the front and send orders to his generals, sometimes staying late at night. General U. S. Grant, during his final campaign, telegraphed daily orders from his headquarters to all the Union forces engaged over thousands of square miles. As the head of the Military Telegraph Department described the potent efficiency of Morse’s invention, “orders are given—armies are moved—battles are planned