Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [69]
Some of Clausing’s fellow workers denounced Morse’s accounts of his life. In an article for the New Era, they denied his “atrocious calumny” that after a Corpus Domini procession their friend had attempted to murder a priest. One shopmate, born near Heidelberg, noted that the city is Protestant, and had witnessed no such ceremony since the Reformation. They all maintained that Clausing’s proscription had strictly to do with his membership in a republican organization that corresponded with Polish rebels. Morse investigated the matter and replied through the press. He quoted a letter to him from Charles Follen, professor of German at Harvard, affirming that Heidelberg celebrated the procession of the Host and was about half Catholic. Information he received from Heidelberg itself, however, forced him to acknowledge that Clausing’s tale of having shot a priest was untrue.
Morse completed his warnings about the Catholic menace by uncovering sexual corruption in the Church. He edited from manuscript a 250-page account of ecclesiastical lechery, published in 1837 as Confessions of a French Catholic Priest. The book appeared amid a burst of similar exposés inspired by Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of … Five Years as a Novice and Two Years as a Black Nun in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal (1836). Her slim but sensational volume became the all-time American bestseller before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, its first buyers grabbing up 20,000 copies in a few weeks, later sales surpassing 300,000. A novice claiming to be a Protestant convert to Catholicism, Monk told a sado-Gothic tale of her sexual abuse in a conventual system designed, as she put it, to “comfort the priest”—illegitimate offspring being baptized then strangled. Morse credited Monk’s account, as many people did not, and may even have interviewed her.
A sort of male Maria Monk, Morse’s French priest presented himself as a refugee from popish tyranny and licentiousness, seeking shelter in America. He revealed how the Church’s vow of celibacy served only to inflame the passions of its priests beyond control. To quench his own lust he had worn vermin-infested clothing and drunk potions of water lilies, yet became attracted to one of his young female confessants. His fellow priests spoke as freely about their girlfriends as about theology. One killed his lover and cut her body into pieces; another made love to his mistress’s corpse. The French priest’s alarum summed up Morse’s own message to Americans about the militant fanatics among them: “Open your eyes and see: Popery overflows, invades you, and you are not aware of it; it strides with the steps of a giant to the conquest of your glorious land, and you do not resist, yea, you stretch out your hand to it.”
Morse’s anti-Catholic campaign led him for the first time into the rough-and-tumble of American party politics. Whatever the exact influence of Foreign Conspiracy and his similar works, they fed the closely related but broader fear of immigration. During the 1830s more than half a million immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany arrived, in New York City alone.
The hope of controlling the tide gave rise, in the early summer of 1835, to the Native American Democratic Association—the country’s first explicitly nativist political party. It declared opposition not only to the Church, but also to the immigration of paupers and criminals and to office holding by foreigners. Based in New York, the Native Americans got the support of several city editors and sponsored their own penny journal, the Spirit of ’76. But they meant to do more than write. Claiming to stand apart from existing political parties, they organized ward committees and ran Native American candidates in the 1835 local elections. The party polled an impressive 9000 votes out of 23,000 cast. Similar nativist organizations sprang