Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [23]
In the summer of 1817, seven or eight months after his admission to the church, Finley made a startling announcement to Lucrece. He had new plans—“a change of profession,” he said, “for Divinity.” As a minister he could be more useful to others than as a painter. He was prepared to sacrifice his noble profession for the sake of duty and conscience. “The salvation of a soul! who can tell its worth!” he explained; “Oh that I might be made the instrument of turning many from the error of their ways unto the Lord.”
Finley planned to study at the Andover Theological Seminary for a year, then at the new Episcopal seminary in New York City. He would take orders in the Episcopal Church, whose form of worship he considered close to that of the Primitive Church, as described in the New Testament. Congregationalist friends and clergy approved his decision, he said, and he felt no misgivings except those arising from a sense of his own insufficiency to undertake so high an office. He would complete his remaining portrait commissions—as “the Painter Clergyman,” he joked. But after beginning his ministerial studies in the fall, he would abandon art, at least as a profession.
Finley kept to his new course barely two months. He began having serious doubts: his mediocre record at Yale implied that he did not have a scholarly temperament; his eight years of training as an artist had given him habits wholly different from those of a divine. After discussing the situation with his family and friends he concluded that it was not his duty to change professions.
Lucrece had affectionately approved Finley’s decision to enter the ministry, and affectionately accepted his counter-decision to go on as a painter. But his conscience accused him of rushing thoughtlessly into new schemes—shuffling about, he told himself, like “the most fickle being in the world.”
To restart his painting career Finley headed south. He had several ties to Charleston. His father had preached there and knew such prominent Charlestonians as Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who invited him to visit. His mother was the niece of a prominent Charleston physician, James E. B. Finley, who thought him destined as an artist for America’s “earliest lists of its Great Men.” Charleston was the birthplace of Allston, too, and patronage in the city was said to be lively, with much demand for Northern painters.
Finley timed his arrival in Charleston to coincide with the beginning of the annual social season, in late January. From then through March the prosperous rice and cotton planters brought their families and slaves to town to enjoy the horse races, concerts, and theatrical performances. Finley’s impression of the place was mixed. The people seemed hospitable, their elegant brick homes graced with balconies and piazzas; gardenias and olive trees thrived in the sultry climate. On the other hand, the moral climate of the South seemed debased—“all the dirt, and indolence, and inconvenience, and comfortlessness, inseparable from slave population.” Both slaves and people of fashion in Charleston used the Sabbath not to pray or study but to pay visits. And with the social season came brothels and gambling tables—a “torrent of dissipation, and ungodliness.”
Staying with his uncle James, Finley established a studio on King Street,