Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [3]
Jedediah rarely if ever enforced such threats, and Finley did often return to Charlestown at vacation times. But affairs at home were troubled. Angry party divisions had developed in the continued turmoil over American relations with France and England. Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans held separate Independence Day ceremonies in Charlestown, both claiming to be the true heirs of the American Revolution. Jedediah’s affairs were troubled by more than politics. In many ways he enjoyed his situation in the First Church—a pleasant house and garden rent-free, just a mile from Boston. But the salary of only $ 11 a week was inadequate to support him and his family, and the congregation refused him a raise. “They are a people of a very peculiar character,” he complained. The congregation complained, too. As new editions of Jedediah’s geographical works appeared, they objected to the time he devoted to them and his frequent travel away from Charlestown to gather information. Their griping so wounded his feelings, and parish affairs became so disorganized, that he found it difficult to faithfully discharge his ministry. He seriously thought of leaving the place.
And Jedediah and Elizabeth lost another child, their fifth—a boy named Russell who died after a siege of dysentery. Finley learned of the event through a tutor at the Academy, who drew out for him the lesson: “Remember that good children only will hereafter meet in heaven to be forever happy. Earnestly endevour [sic] to be of that number that you may meet your little brother, and all good people in a better world.”
Once Finley left the Phillips preparatory school and entered the Academy proper his studies improved, some. Reading the Greek New Testament and the Aeneid, he sent home letters in Latin. Jedediah was pleased but, as usual, not entirely: “Write your Latin letters first on a piece of waste paper & shew them to your preceptor, for correction, & then copy them & send them to me.” Another time, Finley sent him a three-page summary in English of Plutarch’s life of Demosthenes: “written very well for one of his age,” Jedediah conceded. “He omitted an important circumstance, however.”
And Finley’s improvement turned out to be temporary, or worse. He soon wrote home asking Jedediah’s permission to quit Greek and Latin, to study English instead. He could not remember the lessons, he said, and was often put back. Jedediah recommended greater application and perseverance: “All good scholars have found it laborious to acquire knowledge—the ‘hills of science, is [sic] represented as steep & of difficult ascent.’ ”
Of Finley’s improvement in piety there was less doubt. In the evenings he began reading about and summarizing the lives of Protestant martyrs, devout ministers who for their faith had been jailed, assassinated, burned at the stake. When his younger brothers Sidney and Richard entered the Academy, he read them religious works. Sometimes he adopted with them the godly manner of their pious elders. When Elizabeth again gave birth to a stillborn child—the sixth of her children to die—he told Sidney and Richard: “Now you have three brothers & three sisters in heaven, and I hope you & I will meet them there at our death. It is uncertain when we shall die, but we ought to be prepared for it.” He presented them a copy of The Christian Pilgrim.
While becoming more learned and pious, as his parents wished, Finley also began finding his own way. In taking drawing as one of his academic subjects, at about the age of eleven, he discovered a talent for art. He sent samples of his work to Charlestown. The much-published Jedediah had his own share of worldly gentility, and boasted about his son’s gift: “he is self taught—has had no instructions.” He encouraged the boy, but reminded him that art should be “your amusement merely,” and that his approval