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of some $13 million in damages to American merchants for shipping that had been seized or destroyed during the Napoleonic Wars. American representatives in France had been trying to arbitrate the issue with the French government for years. A breakdown in the negotiations had recently produced a buzz of war talk in Paris and Washington. Morse proposed that the issue could be settled in ten minutes, except for Louis-Philippe’s effort—in concert with the sovereigns of Austria, Russia, and Prussia—to suppress aspirations for popular government. The king’s aim in leaving the indemnity unsettled was to push France into war with America: “The feelings of hostility towards the United States which a war will inevitably beget in the masses, will be a natural and effectual antidote to all that love of republicanism among them, which is engendered by admiration of American institutions.”

Morse’s encounter with Europe left him particularly concerned to warn about the spreading influence of Catholicism, sustained by increasing numbers of foreign immigrants. He clipped scores of newspaper articles marking the inroads of the Church in America—“Popery in Kentucky,” “Romanism,” “Real Principles of Modern Papists.” The anti-Catholic novels, pamphlets, and journalism that deluged the country included his brothers’ Observer. It published anti-Catholic news in every issue and ominously measured the Church’s rapid advance. By 1833, it calculated, the United States had become home to 11 bishops, 35 seminaries, 320 priests, and 500,000 worshippers, “a greater number of communicants than are attached to any other denomination in the country.”

To Morse, the danger was already evident in the growing number of violent confrontations between Catholics and Protestants. The most notorious erupted in his own birthplace, Charlestown. On August 10, 1834, a warm Sunday evening, forty or fifty Boston truckers, bricklayers, and volunteer firemen ransacked the Ursuline Convent School, an imposing red building occupied by twelve nuns and fifty-seven girls. Shouting “No Popery,” the men smashed furniture, burned the altar ornaments and cross, and at last set the building itself ablaze.

Morse deplored the violence, but sympathized with the indignation behind it. In his version of the widely reported events, the rioters believed that a young woman had been abducted, brought to the school, and subjected there to a “secret tyrannical punishment.” So the indignation, he said, was honorable to the Charlestownians: “had they viewed such an outrage with indifference, they would have shown themselves unworthy of American citizens.” What most worried him was the threat allegedly made by the Mother Superior. Confronting the crowd that first gathered at the convent, she promised that if they dared to damage the building the bishop would order “20,000 foreigners” to rise up in vengeance. For Morse, here in effect was Pope Gregory XVI summoning the myrmidons of Austria, but on American soil—a faithless betrayal of the nation “uttered in sight of Bunker’s Hill.”

Morse’s disgust was widely shared. Within a week after the burning of the convent, two new anti-Catholic newspapers appeared, the Philadelphia Downfall of Babylon and the New York American Protestant Vindicator. Attacks on Catholic churches in New England soon became so frequent that many posted armed guards to protect their property.

In this atmosphere of alarm, Morse carried forward the work of his father thirty-five years earlier, when Jedediah defended the Republic against imported Infidelity and Jacobinism. Under the pen name “Brutus,” he wrote for the Observer twelve articles on the Catholic peril, published serially in August and November 1834. Revised and expanded, the articles soon appeared as a nearly two-hundred-page tract, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States. In a tone of alternating sweet reasonableness and anxious fury, he revealed that European governments, in their long effort to forestall their own overthrow, were now plotting to bring down republican America by means of