Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [231]
It was in this deteriorated condition that Morse came upon articles in the press with outworn titles like “Who Invented the Telegraph.” The impulse to freshen such stale news, he discovered, came from Fog Smith’s letter to the Monument Association, calling on it to honor Henry, not Morse, on the telegraph memorial. Smith cared nothing for Henry, Morse believed: “It is simply a matter of spite, carrying out his intense & smothered antipathy to me.” But Smith’s protests, and those of Vail and O’Reilly, succeeded in scaring off the memorial committee and, according to one of its members, “killed the project.” No statue of Morse was erected in Washington. “I plead guilty,” Smith said, contented.
In February—perhaps the most harrowing month of his life—Morse received advance sheets of “The American Magnetic Telegraph,” a sixteen-page chapter from the forthcoming Great Industries of the United States. It seemed to him the monstrous climax to a lifetime of slanders, “the most atrocious and vile attack upon me, which has ever appeared in print.” The writer wiped him from the record as an unscrupulous charlatan, eliminated him as an utter fake:
In the whole range of “pious frauds,” romantic imaginings, and spurious pretences of all kinds, perhaps there never was a more ludicrous and lamentable delusion practised than that which … has been practised upon the credulous masses, causing them to believe that Prof. Morse is the inventor of the practical telegraph known by his name.
Morse could not have produced the so-called Morse telegraph, the writer went on, because he lacked the requisite scientific knowledge, mechanical skill, and entrepreneurial ability. These had been supplied by its actual inventors: by Joseph Henry, “the legitimate father of the American electro-magnetic telegraph”; by Alfred Vail, “the brains of the mechanical portion”; and by F. O. J. Smith, who “made it a commercial success.” The writer also trashed the “almost divine honors” recently bestowed on Morse by the crowds of dupes Western Union had lured to Central Park and the Academy of Music, “as the necessary stock actors in a play.”
Morse sidelined and annotated passage after passage of the proof sheets: “false …. false …. false …. false …. oh!” He wrote to the publishers—Burr and Hyde, in Hartford—asking them to withhold the chapter from the published volume, as being “spiteful, distorted and untrue.” Probably because the chapter contained information from his private correspondence with Smith and O’Reilly, he believed it to be the work of these “ancient enemies.” For confirmation he wrote repeatedly and urgently to Lyman Case, editor of the volume, unaware that Case had written the chapter himself, from material supplied by Smith and O’Reilly and by his cousin Amanda Vail.
Case again and again fended off Morse’s inquiries. He said that the name or names of the author(s) might be given out later; that the “chief author” was little known; that he was too busy to reply. Morse never learned how the information in the chapter was collected, or who shaped it into a murderous assault on his reputation. Nor was the chapter suppressed. The popular volume in which it appeared, a celebration of American technology, quickly sold 10,000 copies.
February brought another jarring surprise from the past. Upon the death of Archbishop M. J. Spalding of Louisville, the New York Herald published a eulogistic letter to the editor recalling the prelate’s newspaper duel with Morse eighteen years before. Morse had attributed to Lafayette the remark that “American liberty can be destroyed only by the Popish clergy.” Spalding had countered with a pamphlet and newspaper articles claiming that the partial quotation reversed the meaning of Lafayette’s full statement, which was that Americans had no reason to fear Catholicism. His admirer in the Herald now recalled that Spalding’s powerful arguments, “the rude force with which his blows fell,” had compelled Morse to retract. Morse saw the letter and in his greatly weakened state wrote a five-and-a-half-page