Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [227]
Morse worried that Arthur’s brother Willie, now seventeen, might also be headed for some Valparaiso. Morse had sent him for schooling to Phillips Academy in Andover, where he had been sent himself. There Willie showed a taste for vulgar “Velocipede rinks,” patronized by “low company.” The school notified Morse that the boy had played hookey, too. “See what evil it has already brought upon your poor brother Arthur, and what grief it has caused us all,” Morse wrote to him; “Oh, my dear Willie, are you going to be also a source of grief to us.” He had greatly desired the boy to master Greek and Latin, and to follow his father and grandfather into Yale. But he began thinking it might do Willie more good to expect something different from him. The boy was “unusually strong” and might succeed in some profession that called on his physical gifts.
In November 1869, just as his government report appeared and as he waited anxiously to hear from Arthur, Morse had one more shock. Amos Kendall was dead. He died in Washington, a wealthy man but desolate. He left unfinished the biography of Andrew Jackson he had worked on for years. No complainer in his lifetime, he brooded near the end over the anguish he had endured, including the deaths of nine siblings, the murder of one son, and the deaths by typhoid of another son and a wife. “My first marriage was into a family consisting of a father, mother, four sons, and three daughters. They are all dead. My second marriage was into a family consisting of a father, mother, two sons, and two daughters. They are all dead. I have had two wives, five sons, and nine daughters. The wives and the sons are all gone, and only four daughters are left.”
Kendall had been declining for three months, so his passing was not unexpected. Morse nevertheless felt bereft and damaged. He had confided in Kendall as in a father. Unlike many others, Kendall had never manipulated him or betrayed his trust. Thankful, too, for Kendall’s sound business sense and untiring effort, he grieved that he had lost his one necessary friend—“to whose energy & skill … I owe (under God) the comparative comfort which a kind Providence has permitted me to enjoy in my advanced age.”
The record of Morse’s life is scanty for the fifteen or so months between the end of 1869 and the summer of 1871. He complained of weakness, and in answering his correspondence sometimes used an amanuensis. Commuting between two residences had become wearying. He considered selling Locust Grove, although parting with it, he said, “is like amputating my right arm.” Items in the press occasionally announced that his health was failing.
Morse tried to keep up his many interests. He followed political movements abroad; endorsed Cyrus Field’s proposal for laying a San Francisco–to–Yokohama transpacific cable; agreed to serve as a vice president of the just-launched Metropolitan Museum of Art, with no duties to perform. The best of his remaining energy he devoted to Christian charities and evangelical work: “if I can use the little strength, and the few years that remain in furthering the cause of our Divine Master, I ought perhaps to rouze myself.” He found strength enough at least to address a convention of the Y.M.C.A., and draft a memorial to Czar Alexander II on behalf of persecuted Protestants in the Baltic provinces. He happily gave consent to Finley—now forty-five and seeming to him “old & sunburnt”—to become confirmed in