Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [26]
Samuel F. B. Morse, Lucretia Pickering Walker Morse (Mead Art Museum)
As summer approached, the air in Finley’s studio became oppressively close, and Lucrece found the city so hot that she badly wanted to leave. Even with a dozen other painters working in Charleston, however, his waiting list had kept growing—enough patrons to justify his returning for another five or six seasons. And he had a choice commission for later in the year. The city council, recognizing his ability, offered him $750 to paint a full-length portrait of President James Monroe, who was coming to town. Finley had a long interview with him but the President’s time was so taken up that no sittings could be arranged. Instead, Monroe agreed to have Finley paint him during the winter in Washington.
Lucrece was pregnant when she and Finley returned to Charlestown. As she came to term she was looked after in the Morses’ parish house by Elizabeth and by the aging family nurse, Nancy Shepherd, who nearly thirty years ago had attended Finley, too, and told him about Bunker’s Hill.
Jedediah had preached from the First Church pulpit since his settlement in 1789, on the day of George Washington’s inauguration. Now nearly sixty years old, his temples sunken, he was being forced out. Twenty-five members of his flock had requested him to convene a council to discuss whether he should be removed from his ministry.
The basis of the request was a new edition of one of Jedediah’s geographies, further evidence of his indifference to church matters. A deacon of his flock charged that he trifled away whole months, “without producing scarcely one, original, well studied discourse.” Elizabeth understood the situation differently: “if every Old woman in the Church & parish is not visited as often as she thinks she ought to be … there is a hue & cry raised and it is made the subject of constant reproach till we are sick of hearing it.” Jedediah viewed the objections to his geographies as a pretext, the dissenters’ real motive being to convert his church to Unitarianism.
Finley encouraged his father to leave. Although born in Charlestown he had never grown attached to the place or even spent much time there. Except for a few friends, he did not care to see Charlestown and Boston again, nor their provincial, self-important residents—“the meanest, most selfish, most narrow-minded set of beings in the world.” He thought of moving his parents to Charleston. In their advancing age they would benefit from the climate. And Jedediah could combat the “Unitarian Hydra” now rearing itself in Charleston, too, an indulgent place well suited to the sect’s easygoing religion.
But to Finley’s dismay, his father resisted leaving. Wounded and angry, Jedediah wanted to deny his enemies the triumph of making him seem cast out. He went along with a plan by supporters in his church to put off his departure and hope for an end to the dissent. To Finley, with his touchy sense of personal honor, the delaying tactics seemed “idle and mad,” certain to make Jedediah appear crafty. “Do determine speedily to go, dear Father, if you value your own reputation, peace, and usefulness and that of your loving family.”
But Jedediah, and everyone else, clearly understood that he must sooner or later resign his pulpit. He wanted to have at least the satisfaction of not being present when the congregation installed his replacement. So he informed the church board that he intended to seek a government commission to investigate the state of the Indians on the country’s borders. Just the same, he and Elizabeth felt evicted, thrown out of their only and lifelong home. They decided that, next year, they would pack up and move to New Haven, near Yale, his alma mater, a town with no trace of Unitarianism.
Over the summer, despite the turmoil in the church, Finley