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As Union troops moved decisively toward and then into Atlanta, Savannah, and Richmond, Morse seems to have fallen silent. He joined two hundred fellow New Yorkers in protesting plans by the Common Council to celebrate recent victories of the Union army. But his surviving papers contain no comments on General Sherman’s march through Georgia, on newsboys shouting in the streets “Richmond Ours!,” or any of the other closing scenes of the war. One of his sons later recalled being taken in the spring of 1865 to the second floor of a stable his father kept, a few blocks from the town house. From there he witnessed six gray horses covered with black cloth drawing through the city’s streets the coffin of President Lincoln, shot in the head and killed a week after the Confederacy surrendered.

Morse grieved for the South in its defeat. He declined an invitation to take part in ceremonies at the Yale commencement honoring his alma mater’s New England graduates who had served in the Union army. “I should as soon think of applauding one of my children for his skilful shooting of his brothers in a family brawl,” he said. Mostly he wanted to erase the last four years from his own and the nation’s consciousness and from the record of American history: “the whole era of the war is one I wish not to remember. I would have no other memorial than a black cross like those over the graves of murdered travellers to cause a shudder whenever it is seen.”

But as Morse soon learned, the racial problems that had ignited the war survived it in new forms, terrible for him to contemplate. “The future of our country looks very dark,” he thought. The president of Vassar College was hinting that he would teach miscegenation, “that he will prepare his female pupils to resist their so called ‘prejudices’ of color, so as to be in readiness to receive graciously, the matrimonial offers of our ‘citizens of African descent.’” The “false philanthropy” that had inspired the Abolitionists was growing not less but more bold, pressing now for black suffrage. And once freed, blacks felt helpless and angry, threatened with annihilation. Even as a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery was being offered to the states for ratification, two thousand freed slaves in Jamaica, impoverished by emancipation there, had taken over the town of Morant Bay, killing about twenty white militia, officials, and planters. “We look for the same result here,” Morse said. “I fear it cannot be avoided.”

Morse decided to remove himself and his family from the ominous scene by going abroad, for an extended stay of nearly two years. The children could study music and learn French and German, and the whole family would all enjoy the International Exposition to be held in Paris. Intending to take along Sarah’s mother, a teenaged niece, a governess, a tutor, and ten or more trunks, he financed the recess by offering his town house for rent, at $6000 annually, and selling six hundred shares of his Western Union stock, for $35,475.

Before leaving, Morse sent a ten-page letter to Cyrus Field. A few months after the war ended, Field had tried again to lay a transatlantic cable, now using only one vessel—the 700-foot-long iron-sided Great Eastern, by far the largest ship afloat. Again the attempt failed. Leaving from Ireland, the Great Eastern was only about 600 miles from Newfoundland when the cable broke; 1200 miles of it were lost in the bottom of the sea. Unstoppable, Field planned to make still another attempt. Morse offered him a novel method of paying-out devised by Sidney Morse, and expressed the hope of meeting him abroad.

A week or so later, Morse received a letter from Finley. It asked permission to come down from the Adirondacks to see him and Sarah in the city before their departure. Once more he did not answer the boy-man. Instead he wrote to the Davises, Finley’s caretakers, sending money for him but pleading that he must put off making a decision: “We should be glad