• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Morse Celebration at the Academy of Music (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 1, 1871)

The tribute left Morse feeling washed out for days afterward: “I Morse Celebration at the Academy of Music (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 1, 1871) find it more difficult to bear up with the overwhelming praise that is poured out without measure, than with the trials of my former life …. the effect on me, strange as it may seem, is rather depressing than exhilirating.” Others also found the event depressing, but for different reasons. Amanda Vail—Alfred’s second wife, now his widow—was present at the Academy, together with Vail’s three sons, her stepsons. It angered her that Morse’s valedictory address to the audience allowed Alfred but a single sentence, thanking him and his family for their financial aid. She considered the acknowledgment “meagre.” Her dead husband, after all, had made many improvements in Morse’s apparatus, and in her view had also invented the dotdash code and suggested the submarine cable. Altogether he had been Morse’s “truest, best, most faithful, most efficient friend.” And having made Morse and Kendall rich, Alfred died poor. On hearing her husband merely alluded to, she said, and only for his financial aid, “my whole soul filled with indignation.”

Amanda Vail confronted Morse at his town house two days after the event. The interview is known only through her account of it, which depicts Morse’s behavior as glib and hypocritical. Morse ushered her into his library cordially, she recorded, but was embarrassed to see her. She frankly told him that his remarks at the Academy “greatly disappointed” her, they said so little about Alfred:

“Professor Morse you know that I have in my house an immense amount of manuscript, letters, journals, drawings left by Mr. Vail and I have heard him say that some of the most important parts of the telegraph were his invention and the proof of it existed in these papers.”

By her account, Morse evaded the accusation:

“Oh yes, Mr. Vail preserved his letters and papers just as I did. I know I intended to have gone out to Morristown and seen them.”

With this, Morse went to a cabinet, took out a box, and showed her what it contained—his medals, the glittering gifts of foreign courts and potentates. “Some of these belong to you,” he said. “I am going to have some of these jewels set for you. I have for some time been intending to have it done.”

But Vail doubted that Morse would ever do so. It seemed to her that he handled the medals as if unable to part with them, “regarding with eye intent these gifts of God he had so long worshipped!” At that moment, some new guests entered, giving him an excuse to get rid of her. “I am glad to have seen you,” he said, handing her a photograph of himself. So ended what she called “this unsatisfactory visit to Professor Morse the Inventor! of the telegraph.”

Whatever Amanda Vail may actually have said to Morse, it hardly suggested the depth of her bitterness. Unknown to him, she had for some time been gathering supporters to prove her dead husband the driving force behind the telegraph, the man “to whom he owed his fame and fortune.” She sent extracts from Alfred’s letters and other papers to everyone who wrote about the telegraph or about American technology, pressing them to give Vail the credit she believed he deserved. She was listened to. Morse had never lacked critics, and since Western Union’s Delmonico banquet, several had grown increasingly irritated by the public attention lavished upon him.

In two of Morse’s former associates, Amanda Vail found especially willing allies—the much-scarred Henry O’Reilly and ever-vengeful F. O. J. Smith. Since his failure in the telegraph business, O’Reilly had moved on to other, also unsuccessful ventures: a machine called the Terracultor, meant to replace the plow by pulverizing soil; the National Anti-Monopoly Cheap Freight Railway League. The ex-“Napoleon of the Telegraph