Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [230]
Fog Smith needed no prodding to join Vail and O’Reilly. He was, as an associate correctly remarked, “one of the most heartless and vindictive villains that ever trod in shoe leather.” Involved the past few years in water companies, railroads, and numerous other business projects—and many more lawsuits—he had been indicted by a grand jury in 1864 for six cases of adultery, and convicted the following year of subornation of perjury. He encouraged Amanda Vail to think that her husband had transformed “very nearly the entire mechanism,” turning a gadget into a practicable invention: “the absolute monopoly … to which Professor Morse aspires, must become divided, when the public shall possess the actual truths of history.” He particularly wanted to expose the testimonials to Morse as undeserved and self-serving charades staged by William Orton: “the world will be astonished at the humbuggery that has been practiced from sordid motives, principally by the instrumentalities of the Western Union Telegraph Company in and with the name of Professor Morse as inventor of the telegraph.”
During the last six months of 1871, Vail, O’Reilly, and Smith made a concerted effort to destroy Morse’s reputation. For ammunition they had at their disposal the depositions and other testimony in voluminous court records, and several hundred personal letters Morse had written to them over the years. These they now exchanged with each other, collated, and reassembled to build a ruinous case against him. Using such material, O’Reilly and Smith had already been composing what they called a Colloquial History of the telegraph—dedicated, for extra punch, to Joseph Henry. “Professor Morse,” they announced in their preface, “has been too ambitious of realising and enjoying prematurely, a pretension to immortality as one of the great creative, original minds among men.” In reality, his pretensions as an inventor were “groundless, and hollow, as soap bubles [sic] which amuse frolicksome childhood.”
Vail was not through. She put O’Reilly and Smith in touch with her cousin Lyman W. Case, who was writing a chapter on telegraphy for a forthcoming encyclopedic volume entitled Great Industries of the United States. O’Reilly and Smith promised to supply him with evidence of “the gross deception which this Morse has practised upon the world.” Vail also joined Smith in protesting to the National Monument Association its plan to cap the proposed telegraph memorial in Washington with a statue of Morse. “Prof. Morse cannot justly claim, nor will authentic history sustain such pre-eminence for himself,” Smith wrote; “it is my conviction, that the statue most worthy to stand upon the pedestal of such monument would be, that of the man of true science … and that man is, Professor Joseph Henry.”
The results of this cabal began to reach Morse in mid-January 1872. At the time he was uniquely vulnerable. A few weeks earlier, on December 23, his brother Sidney had died at the age of seventy-eight, following a stroke or heart attack. By one account Morse sat beside him as he lay paralyzed on his bed, speaking into his ear, but Sidney gave no sign that he heard. Morse found consolation in knowing that his brother—a deeply religious man, equal to him in piety—was now “a happy spirit in the presence of his Savior.” But he and Sidney had always been extremely close and, as the minister of his congregation put it, he “began to die also.” Feeble and lame, his head pains growing