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By Root 1462 0

went with him from New Haven to New York, where he took the steamboat for Philadelphia—the first leg of his journey to Washington, where he would join the legation, accompany it to New Orleans, then on to Vera Cruz. Lucrece planned to move back to her family’s home in Concord, but expected little solace: “no one can supply that place in my affections which you have ever occupied.” On his trip to Philadelphia, Finley himself was overcome by recollections of leaving his mother and little Susan and Charles in New Haven: tears and kisses; his children frolicking, too young to understand; his desolate last look at every room, “farewell, farewell, seemed written on the very walls.”

When he reached Washington, Finley learned that he had set out for his long journey badly unprepared. He was told that he would not find bed and bedding on the road to Mexico, and should have brought them along. He should have brought a saddle, too, and his own provisions. And he would not be able to wear the black suit he had packed: to Mexicans, a man dressed in black meant either a priest or a Freemason. He bought a bed in Washington and sent the suit back to New Haven, asking for a blue one and for a keg of crackers to sustain him on the road.

A week later, still in Washington, Finley received jolting news. The legation’s departure for Mexico would be long delayed. Perhaps suspended. Ninian Edwards had been detained on a warrant while a House committee investigated serious charges of fraud he had presented against a congressman. In some desperation, Finley went to see the Secretary of the Navy, to find out whether the vessel, too, was to be detained. If not, he might proceed to Mexico himself, leaving the legation to follow after the House inquiry. But neither staying nor going seemed a good idea: “to go back seems ruin, and forward hazard.”

Finley went back—all the way to New Haven. Sending to New Orleans for the baggage he had shipped on, he felt more dejected than ever. To what was his latest defeat due if not to his own religious failings?—failure in his duties toward others, failure to pray enough, failure to keep his religious resolves: “I must plead guilty, guilty; and feel that it is but perfectly just that God should desert me, when I have deserted him.”

Whatever the cause, the sudden death of his Mexican venture left Finley where he was after exhibiting The House of Representatives—without prospects. “I can form no plans for the future, they have all been frustrated,” he wrote to Lucrece; “all is darkness and gloomy suspence before me.” He could bear hopelessness, if his thwarted plans affected only himself. But on his success had hung the well-being of Lucrece and their children, who deserved better of him: “when I see before me poverty & neglect, the deepest, severest pang I feel is that I am a married man.”

For a few months Finley painted in New Hampshire and Maine, disgusted with scrambling for commissions: “I have run about long enough.” But where to stop running? New York beckoned, although he had had little success in the city. “If I am to live in poverty it will be as well there as any where, and if to make money, why there is the place.” New York had yet to reap the profits of the soon-to-open Erie Canal, connecting its trade and busy harbor to the fastgrowing West. But it would be wise, he believed, to make himself known in the city before the wealth began pouring in. New York was booming anyway, everywhere putting up new hotels and banks and shops and publishing firms, on its way to becoming the London of the New World. And with the city’s best-known artist, John Trumbull, growing old, he would have no serious rival in painting.

Finley was further drawn to New York by the presence of his brothers. They had moved there the year before to publish a large four-page weekly, the New York Observer. An immediate success, it attracted some 2400 subscribers in the first three months, aimed at 10,000, and would become the most widely circulated religious paper in the country. Its news and articles focused on the state of Protestantism