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By Root 1517 0

as the powerhouse more simply became known. This and his other holdings of telegraph stock and government bonds became so valuable that he employed a New York stockbroker to look after them. He had daily price reports telegraphed to him, using a word-number code in which “fire,” for example, might mean 9: “You wish to tell me that W.U. stock is 185, you therefore send me the words, ‘home, mat, run.’ ” As the price of Western Union zoomed, in one case rising 25 percent over a few days, he sold off hundreds of his shares. Having money to spare—the Tribune spoke of his “regal income”—he invested in a petroleum company, an insurance company, western copper mines, California gold mines. Always generous when he could afford to be, he subscribed $10,000 toward erecting a Theological Hall at Yale. He also sent money to aid Philadelphia’s deaf mutes, build hospitals, and help out strangers in financial distress because of the war.

To Morse’s delight, the wealth produced by his telegraph also enabled others to carry out large philanthropic works. Kendall gave money and land to create the famed Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Washington, D.C., the world’s only college for deaf mutes. Ezra Cornell had returned to farming in Ithaca, New York, but kept his telegraph stock. He became the largest stockholder in Western Union. His telegraph income allowed him to donate a half-million dollars plus three hundred acres of land to build and endow a nonsectarian school in Ithaca—Cornell University. “I have viewed his course with great gratification,” Morse said, “as the evidence of God’s blessing on what He hath wrought.”

At the time Southern troops fired on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, Morse was seventy years old, the father of seven children ranging in age from four to forty-two. The youngest and most recent was named Edward Lind Morse, in honor of his son-in-law, the Puerto Rico planter Edward Lind. Of his three other children with Sarah he confessed feeling some special warmth toward Lela (Cornelia) because of the “artlessness” natural to her sex. But he meant to give all of them the benefits of his wealth and what he called “the position I hold before the world.”

Morse sent his sons Arthur and Willie to Newport for schooling, got them French lessons, treated them to a terrier and a pony. In return for his generosity he demanded submission, gratitude, and achievement, as Jedediah had demanded of him: “you must remember you are a Morse and that your grandfather was the Father of American Geography.” He covered his lengthy letters to the boys with Jedediah-like instructions and maxims—diligence in studies, kindness to others, control of temper: “When you write, fill your paper …. be strictly obedient to all the directions of your teachers … guard against Slang.” Above all, he expected his children to be prayerful Christians, to follow “the old orthodox paths” in asking God to guide them through life and direct their way. It saddened him to think he would not live to know them as adults, but there would be time enough in the afterlife: “Then shall we meet,” he told them, “where we shall know each other forever.”

Morse’s adult children were entering middle age, each in a different way blighted. That does not seem surprising, given the early death of their mother, and their abandonment to relatives, family friends, and paid caretakers as their father struggled to become a famous history painter. Approaching forty, Finley remained childlike. He now permanently lived in the Adirondack Mountains, where he passed the time gardening and fishing, looked after by Morse’s cousins, the Davises. Morse paid for his upkeep, but found one excuse after another not to write to him, and asked the Davises to explain: “Please say to Finley that I received his letter, and would have replied … but the truth is I am so overwhelmed with cares just now.” At least once, he himself tried to explain:

My dear Son,

Perhaps you think it strange that I have not written you, but the truth is, that unless I have something very important to say, I