Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [215]
Morse may have found Finley’s mental incompetence too distressing to face, much less manage. He told himself and others that his son was the happiest member of the family despite his “unfortunate” condition—“catches sometimes a dozen fish in a day as long as your finger, and is as happy as if they were whales.”
Susan, now in her mid-forties, stayed at Locust Grove during the summers and for other periods as well. Frail, she slept poorly, suffered from fevers, and had taken several falls that may have injured her spine. While at Locust Grove she underwent some unspecified “treatment,” seemingly an early form of psychotherapy for what Morse termed her “mental condition,” her “nervousness.” The decline of her husband’s sugar business in Puerto Rico because of the war deeply worried her. Morse loaned Edward $14,000 to help him out of debt, and tried to persuade him to quit his plantation and join Susan in Poughkeepsie, perhaps permanently. Otherwise, he said, “we fear her health if not her life may seriously suffer.”
Charles, too, was now in his forties, and in Morse’s eyes could do nothing right. Charles had gone west to work with a federal surveying party among the Sioux nation. He came back financially ruined, “the victim of dishonest sharpers,” Morse said, “who owe him money and will not or can not pay him.” He scolded Charles for having remained gullible in business dealings—a shortcoming in which Charles resembled no one so much as himself, although he did not say so. Instead he attributed Charles’ too-trusting nature to idiocy. “I sometimes think there must be a constitutional mental defect in you, in some respects like that of your brother Finley’s.”
Charles was much discouraged, unable to pay his rent or feed his family. Morse helped him out financially, giving him over four or five years some $30,000—along with a barrage of criticism: “You are too easy and good natured …. you should put on a bolder attitude …. you act upon very loose principles of disbursement.” He provided a hundred-dollar-a-month allowance for Charles’ wife, Manette, when Charles headed west again, this time for Central City, Colorado, to find work in local mining operations. A gifted writer, Charles sent home vivid descriptions of dust-begrimed bull-whackers, charred bodies of teamsters massacred by Indians, carcasses of oxen putrefying in the sun.
To Morse’s displeasure, Charles’ grim picture of frontier life upset Manette, suggesting that her husband was unhappy with his situation. “I do hope you will not give way to any weak longings for home,” Morse wrote to him. “Love to your wife and family can be better shown by persevering effort to provide for them, and be an independent man, even if you have to be absent for years …. You must be more manly.” But Charles became ill and depressed in Colorado and soon declared bankruptcy: “all I have done for him,” Morse brooded, “seems to be like throwing it into the sea.”
Both Charles and his sister Susan had presented Morse with grandchildren. Charles and Manette’s son Bleecker sometimes stayed at Locust Grove, “quite a favorite with us,” Morse said. With Charles away in Colorado, Morse inquired after Bleecker’s “standing and moral character” at school, and with “real joy” attended his formal admission to communion in a Brooklyn church. Susan’s son, also named Charles, came with her when she visited Locust Grove and as a teenager remained in the United States to enroll at Union College, Schenectady. Proud of his grandson’s unmistakable talent for painting, Morse paid for his education and looked forward to his someday setting up professionally in New York City. “Artists are now in high esteem,” he told the boy, “and their general character both as to talent and moral elevation is of a vastly superior type compared with that which belonged to them when I first came to New York.” He wrote off to Puerto Rico urging Edward Lind to allow Charles to study painting in Europe.
It may have been his grandson