Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [4]
Finley’s talent developed quickly. By the age of twelve he was creating miniatures—small portraits painted on slices of ivory. And his handwriting began taking on the copperplate elegance it would retain to the end of his long life.
In the fall of 1805 Finley entered Yale College. The choice was inevitable. Not only was the school a Congregationalist bastion, but Jedediah had also earned two degrees there, taught there, and befriended Yale’s president, Timothy Dwight. A famous Congregationalist minister himself, called by some “The Pope of Federalism,” Dwight, too, had vigorously preached and written against the French peril. Under his effective administration, Yale was growing from a local college into a national university.
Finley now learned something of what it meant to have “The Father of American Geography” for his father. When he stopped at an inn during his first trip to New Haven, the owner treated him with special kindness, “more like his own son than a stranger,” he wrote home, “wholly on account of my being your son.” Once he arrived at the school, President Dwight took a personal interest in him. And fellow students nicknamed him “Geography.”
But attending Yale also had drawbacks for Finley. From Charlestown to New Haven was 160 miles, thirty dusty hours of horseback, chaise, stagecoach, and overnight taverns. He would rarely get home to see his family. And he was fourteen and a half, while most entering students were about sixteen. Jedediah and Elizabeth feared his falling in with older boys who might corrupt him. So instead of enrolling him as a regular member of the freshman class they boarded him off campus in the family of a Yale instructor. There he would do freshman work but postpone his formal admission until the following year.
Finley felt belittled by the arrangement, as he let his parents know by again getting off to a bad start. During his first month in New Haven, Jedediah and Elizabeth received only one letter from him. “We are extremely anxious to hear from you,” Jedediah informed him; “Your Mama is distressed & almost sick with anxiety lest you are sick.”
When Finley at last wrote to his parents, he sent more for them to be anxious about. He protested that because he had not been regularly enrolled he had already fallen behind the other freshmen in his studies. Elizabeth was unconvinced: “I am fearful my son that you think a great deal more of your Amusements than your studies and there lies the difficulty and the same dificulty [sic] would exist were you in Colledge.” Finley’s letter also served notice that when he officially became a student he would want brandy, wine, and cigars for his room. “Pray is that a custom among the students,” Elizabeth wanted to know; “your papa & myself positively prohibit you the use of these things.” As if this were not enough, Finley also mentioned that he had gone out hunting, on a “gunning party.” Elizabeth, always worried about his health and safety, gasped: “Does the Government of Colledge allow the Students to go a guning?”
The question of Finley’s status at Yale became a family quarrel. In letter after letter he bemoaned his failure to progress in his studies. The regular scholars got through fifty lines of Homer daily while he did twenty-eight: “I fall behind my class every day; it makes me homesick & very unhappy.” Every student that he knew advised him to get a room at the college as soon as possible. But Jedediah insisted he was “well situated” and Elizabeth told him to stop whining: “determine to be happy just in the situation that providence has plac’d you in & think that your Friends know better than you can possibly which situation is best for you.”
Finley retaliated in his own way. His letters shrank to a half page of large script: “I am in great haste to study, therefore