• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1657 0

’s promise that stirred old longings in Morse, “many yearnings,” he confided to a friend, “towards painting & sculpture.” When he tried to draw, however, he found that his perpendicular lines went awry: “I could place no confidence in my eyes.” In the spring of 1861, Asher B. Durand, W. S. Mount, Albert Bierstadt, and other leaders of the National Academy of Design asked him to serve once again as president, as he had for eighteen years. His long absence from the art world made him reluctant to do so, but many members told him that vital interests of the Academy were at stake. He gave in partway, agreeing to act as president until the next annual election: “the feeling of paternity is strongly revived in my heart, and I cannot forget the early travail with my honored associates, which brought into existence the National Academy of Design.”

Morse’s duties apparently amounted to little more than lending the N.A.D. his lustrous name. But during his term and over the next few years he also served as a benefactor. He contributed $500 toward purchasing for the Academy Charles Leslie’s portrait of Washington Allston, “my Master in Art.” For $7000 he bought as a gift to the Yale Art Gallery Allston’s seven-by-eight-foot Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem (1820). And recalling the “darkness and desolateness” of his own early painting career he donated shares of telegraph stock to the Artists’ Fund Society: “I still have an Artist’s heart, while deprived by long disuse of an Artist’s skill.”

On Independence Day 1863, telegraphed accounts appeared in New York City newspapers of the third and last day of hellish combat at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Times did not exaggerate in calling the battle “sanguinary in the extreme.” Of about 150,000 troops engaged, some 33,000 were killed or wounded. Hundreds of the survivors streamed into New York’s hospitals.

Scarcely ten days later, the city itself became a killing ground. A wild mob took to the streets on July 13 to protest the National Conscription Act, passed by Congress to draft troops for the Union army. Over three days of the worst rioting in the nation’s history, the horde broke into gun-shops to arm themselves, tore out railroad tracks and telegraph poles, sacked Fifth Avenue mansions, and beat up policemen and soldiers, the agents of federal power. Especially they hunted the black population. With cries of “Burn the niggers nest,” a mostly Irish pack of hundreds stormed the Colored Orphan Asylum, looted it, and torched the building. Black men were hanged from lampposts or drowned, the bodies burned or mutilated.

Spending the summer as usual at Locust Grove, Morse anxiously stayed informed about the battles in both Manhattan and Gettysburg. The anti-draft riots brought him down to the city in July to check the security of his town house. In the Pennsylvania fighting he saw an aspect of hope. General Robert E. Lee’s “fatal mistake” of leading his army into Pennsylvania—seen by many other Northerners as the great Union victory at Gettysburg—might hasten negotiations to end the war. Morse’s hope vanished when President Lincoln repulsed a peace feeler from Jefferson Davis. He found every occasion to revile the President as “illiterate,” “inhuman,” “wicked,” above all “irreligious”—“a coarse, vulgar, uncultivated man, an inventor or re-teller of stories so low and obscene, that no decent man can listen to them without disgust.” The great barrier to restoring peace was the administration in Washington. Nothing it did showed statesmanship, justice, or humanity, least of all magnanimity: “What can be expected of a President without brains.”

The country’s one hope of peace, Morse believed, lay in preventing Lincoln’s reelection in 1864. His candidate, favored by most members of the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, was General George B. McClellan. The “Little Napoleon,” as his admirers called him, was only thirty-seven years old and had no political experience. But as commander of the Army of the Potomac he had gained a national military