Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [68]
Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy became controversial. Widely circulated and often extracted in the anti-Catholic press, it spurred the formation of such anti-Catholic groups as the New York Protestant Association, dedicated to exposing the inconsistency of popery with civil liberties. Its narrative of the il diavolo episode made Morse’s defiled hat something of a symbol to anti-Catholic activists. Some newspapers dismissed his revelation of foreign conspiracy as a “chimera.” But he replied that during his years abroad he had observed the network firsthand, and that parts of the press itself might be even “unconsciously” a victim of Jesuit arts. “I have the fullest persuasion that this Conspiracy exists, that it is no chimera, and that all Americans of all parties religious and political should be aware of this new danger to our institutions.”
Living proof of the conspiracy, Morse believed, arrived in the fall of 1835 at his very doorstep. He was visited at New York University by a young German, about twenty-four years old, named Lewis Clausing. Formerly a medical student at Heidelberg, Clausing had just come from Pittsburgh—by way of Brussels, London, and Boston. He was in flight from Jesuit spies, he explained. They had been sent to pursue him because of his membership, while at Heidelberg, in a secret republican association. No longer knowing whom to trust, he sought out the author of Foreign Conspiracy.
By his account, Morse helped Clausing find a place to live, and to divert the young man from his troubles gave him tickets to lectures at the University and a pass to the N.A.D. exhibition. But Clausing’s troubles persisted—maps stolen from his room, he said, seductive women set in his path, a mysterious deaf man. Jesuits tracked him to his job at a New York printing office, plotting to make him seem a petty thief.
Morse soon began to suspect that Clausing was mentally unbalanced. He frankly told the young man that he saw no reason for the Jesuits to relentlessly pursue someone his age. But Clausing produced a copy of a German magazine entitled Der Geächtete (The Proscribed). It contained a list of political outlaws drawn up by the Austrian Central Committee and sent to all police officers in Germany. Clausing’s name appeared sixteenth on the list. “I saw by this document that his proscription was indeed not a dream of the imagination, but a truth,” Morse said. Nor could he discount as irrational the young man’s belief that he was under surveillance. Jesuits adept at espionage were being sent to America by the hundreds and “disposed all over the land, in the pay of the Austrian Leopold Foundation.”
Eventually Clausing also revealed to Morse the crime for which he was proscribed and pursued, which had nothing to do with membership in a secret society. Morse recounted without comment what Clausing told him. But as the author of Foreign Conspiracy it surely must have astonished him.
Clausing’s story was this: While a student at Heidelberg he went to see the revival of a long-discontinued ceremony—the “procession of the host”! Ignorant of the appropriate behavior, he did not remove his pipe from his mouth or his cap from his head. An ecclesiastic, in a passionate manner, left the procession—and struck off his cap! Unlike Morse in Rome, Clausing retaliated. Feeling humiliated before his fellow students and their code of honor, he went to the priest’s home and shot him through the face.
During Clausing’s final visits to him, Morse found the young man increasingly paranoid, construing the most ordinary events as evidence of a cabal. Clausing tried to see him at the University on July 2, 1836, but he was away. The same evening, in the Battery, the young man put a gun to his head and killed himself. Whatever else Morse felt about Clausing’s death, he considered his literary remains valuable in the crusade against foreign conspiracies. He printed from manuscript Clausing’s “Treatise on the Jesuits” and turned the unfortunate