Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [234]
The feud survived into the next generation and the new century. In 1891 a Senate committee introduced a bill appropriating $10,000 to buy the “original telegraph”—invented, the committee said, by Alfred Vail. Forty-year-old Lela Morse wrote to the committee protesting the form of the bill, “as the daughter of Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the original telegraph instrument.” Two years later, officials of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago set a medallion of Vail on a frieze around the Electrical Building, beside one of Morse. Objections from Morse’s family persuaded them to remove it. As late as 1912, Morse’s youngest son, Edward, publicly traded charges and countercharges with Vail’s son J. Cummings Vail, in the Century magazine.
By that time, Morse had few immediate descendants to defend his name. For his legacy to them was not only his renown but also his neglect and inner turbulence. Of the children by his first marriage, Susan, motherless since before the age of six, had been in poor health most of her adult life, afflicted by what Morse had called “nervousness.” “I feel sometimes as if I had no desire whatever to live,” she once wrote to him. She became estranged from her husband, the Puerto Rico planter Edward Lind. Their son, Charles, the gifted young painter who was Morse’s favorite grandson, committed suicide in 1880, while in his twenties. Five years later Susan followed him into the void. Sixty-six years old, she boarded a Spanish steamer en route to Havana and disappeared. “It is supposed,” the New York Times reported, “she threw herself into the sea in a temporary fit of mental aberration.”
Morse’s son Charles, long unable to support his family, worked for Western Union during the last few years of his life. He died in 1887, having helped to establish the Morse system in Venezuela. A dozen years later, his son Bleecker, Morse’s grandson, committed suicide, at the age of fifty-one. Depressed after being let go from his job in a telephone and telegraph company, he hanged himself from a rope tied to his children’s swing.
Of the fate of Morse’s disabled son Finley there is little account, beyond his having passed away in old age, living with a relative, as he had almost his entire life.
Of Morse’s four children from his second marriage, Arthur, the once-promising violinist, died brutally in New Orleans in 1876, at the age of twenty-seven. The city’s Daily Picayune reported that on the evening of July 17 he fell (jumped?) from the platform of a car on the Pontchartrain railroad. Seeing him about to go over the guardrail, a fellow passenger grabbed at his trousers but could not hold him. Arthur dropped onto the tracks between cars. The train rolled over him, the newspaper said, “crushing one of his arms, his leg, and shattering his skull, leaving the mask only.”
Morse’s powerful, liquor-and-gun-loving son Willie made his way to Comanche territory in Texas. Around 1910 he spent eighty-four days in jail for shooting to death an Indian named Juan Amador, in Valle La Trinidad, Mexico. Released when it was proved he had acted in self-defense, he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, as a cowboy.
Morse’s daughter Lela and his son Edward perpetuated him less destructively. Edward became a modestly successful painter. After studying in Paris with the vastly popular artist Adolphe Bouguereau, he taught for a while at the Art Students League before settling in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he died in 1923. Lela married a British concert pianist, Franz Rummel, and became an expatriate. For some time she lived in Berlin. Sarah Morse, her mother, died while visiting her there in 1901, having recently sold Locust Grove. Lela moved permanently to Paris, where she died in