Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [213]
The blare of the war and war news obscured some momentous events in very long distance telegraphy. In the spring and early summer of 1861, telegraph work gangs and wagon trains set out toward each other east from Sacramento and west from Omaha. They planned to link up at Salt Lake City to form a transcontinental line stretching 5500 miles from San Francisco to St. John’s, Newfoundland. In just over four months they spanned the vast prairie and the Sierra Nevada mountains. On October 24 the Chief Justice of California sent the first transcontinental message, wiring Abraham Lincoln to express his state’s loyalty to the Union. Morse telegrammed his congratulations to California, rejoicing in a feat of “indomitable perseverance and consummate skill.”
Morse applauded a still more audacious plan by the Russian government, in cooperation with the Western Union Telegraph Company, to construct an overland line from Russia to the United States. The Russian superintendent of the project visited him at Locust Grove and gave him a map of the proposed route. It showed the line moving eastward from St. Petersburg through Siberia across the thirty-six-mile Bering Strait to Alaska, thence to San Francisco, where it could hook up with the transcontinental American line. Morse invested $30,000 in the venture and enthusiastically publicized it. By the spring of 1862 the Siberia-America line had already crossed the Ural Mountains. Its robust telegraph workers advanced on snowshoes, dogsleds, and sealskin-covered umiaks. For nourishment they survived on white rum, dried woodchucks, and Siberian Manyalla—frozen loaves of clotted reindeer blood.
The vastly long lines made actual what Morse had long ago envisioned: “Early in the History of the invention in forecasting its future, I was accustomed to predict with confidence, ‘it is destined to go round the world,’ but I confess I did not expect to live to see the prediction fulfilled.” A telegraph convention in Paris, attended by representatives of twenty governments, provisionally voted to adopt his apparatus for all international telegraphy. Against many competitors and with little modification, it pleased Morse to think, his system was coming into universal use, providing a single common world language of electrical communication.
As the war raged, Morse kept in touch with his American telegraph interests mostly through Amos Kendall. Now in his mid-seventies, Kendall wrote in a hand sometimes illegible for its trembling. And typhoid fever had taken his second wife and another son. As always he carried on: “It is my religion as well as my philosophy to submit to the dispensations of Providence without repining.” His political views essentially matched Morse’s: “We are both for the Union to the last,” he said. A former slaveowner, he detested Abolition, but had no sympathy with Secession either. He wrote to President Lincoln, urging him to punish the secessionists for the “pride of wealth and … lust for power” bred in them by the cotton monopoly. He proposed that as Union armies advanced in the South, the federal government should confiscate slaves abandoned by their masters, set them free, and surrender their masters’ lands to them for cultivation.
Morse and Kendall kept particularly close watch on the consolidation movement, which had continued actively despite the war. The aggressive directors of the Western Union Telegraph Company strove to overtake Cyrus Field’s American Telegraph and seize control of all the major American telegraph associations. They scooped up several independent companies in which Morse had large investments. Such mergers, according to the New York Tribune, were making telegraphy “the most profitable business in the country.”
Wealthy already, Morse became wealthier. He owned 7500 shares in Western Union,