Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [232]
During the same few weeks Morse received a troubling letter from his son Willie, in New Orleans. Having apparently quit or been withdrawn from school at Andover, Willie had headed west to seek his fortune in Texas. “We part with him with great anxiety for his welfare,” Morse said. There was reason to worry, for the physically powerful young man was turning out to be much like his brother Arthur, impulsive and hot-tempered. Morse had sent him off with money to start a business, but the letter asked for more money. He feared that instead of settling down, Willie was dawdling with his much-loved dogs and gun, and reaching for the bottle. “I hope you keep rigidly to your resolution not to touch for drink any alcoholic liquor,” he wrote to him; “we pray for you that you may be kept from temptation.”
Ill and besieged, Morse at the same time tried futilely to reach a man named John Lindsay, to whom he had handed over more than $25,000. The nervewracking predicament arose from his son Charles’ continued inability to support himself and his family. “There is a ‘screw loose’ somewhere,” Morse told him, “with all my efforts to help you, you are just where you were years ago.” Making one more effort, he had set Charles up as manager of a store near Wall Street, the Lippiatt Silver Plate Company. He arranged for the job by purchasing stock in the company and allowing his name to be used as President. To his grief, he had learned a few months earlier that as President he was liable for Lippiatt’s many debts. This Lindsay, an acquaintance of Charles, had persuaded him that his best strategy was to acquire the company.
Now, having given Lindsay $25,000 to buy Lippiatt Silver Plate, Morse was unable to reach him. He had nothing to show for his money but dread, “a state of anxiety which is seriously affecting my health.” He died without learning that the swindler—later arrested for fraud—had bought the company for less than half the money and kept the rest for himself.
In March, Morse suffered severe head pains and became so weak that he had to remain in bed. All but one of his last few letters are in the hand of his son Arthur, his physician having forbidden him to read or write. He apparently defied both orders, however. He probably read Fog Smith’s latest anti-Morse tract, History Getting Right on the Invention of the American Electro-Magnetic Telegraph. And he wrote in his own hand what seems to be his final letter, dated March 14. It begins: “I should be much gratified to know what part Prof. Henry has taken, if any, in this atrocious & absurd attack of F. O. J. S.”
By the end of March, Morse was comatose. He briefly regained consciousness on April 1 and smiled at Sarah, but could not speak. He died just before 8 p.m. the next evening, three weeks short of his eighty-first birthday. As his death was recorded in the family Bible at Locust Grove, he “entered into life on the 2nd of April 1872.”
According to his death certificate, Morse died of “Subacute Cerebral Meningitis.” But his physician added a note to the document, naming a secondary or complicating cause: “Unusual anxiety & exertion of brain for some months past.”
Others also understood that in his debilitated physical condition, Morse had been subjected to a punishing psychological ordeal. The New York Times speculated that “the vexations and annoyances, the troubles and sorrows of the last few weeks of his life … contributed, in a great degree, to bring on his last fatal attack.” F. O. J. Smith agreed. With rabid ill will, he told Amanda Vail that he had greatly desired Morse to live longer—to cope with the many new charges they and O’Reilly had brought against him. “But I was fearful that the strong visions recently opened to him, of receding glory, would overload his brain as I doubt not they did.”
Coda: 1872–2000
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