Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [7]
The political situation too had worsened. With France and Great Britain both harassing American commercial shipping in their never-ending conflict, Jedediah feared that the United States would come to war with one or the other. President Jefferson and Congress had tried to retaliate by restricting trade, forbidding any American vessel to sail from the United States to a foreign port. But the embargo crippled New England’s once-prosperous maritime business and disrupted the American economy. To Jedediah, the country’s future, clouded as well with Infidelism and Unitarianism, looked dismal: “Our Nation, alas, how fallen!—What is to become of us?”
Finley’s graduation from Yale, in 1810, was for him a mixed occasion of delight and misery. The delight he owed to a young Saybrook woman named Jennette Hart, apparently his first romantic attachment. During the commencement season he sat beside her at tea parties, walked with her in the evenings, read Milton to her—“and while my eye was on the book my heart was with you,” he said. He counted himself “the happiest mortal breathing.”
The misery arose from Finley’s vocational plans. He had decided, he wrote to his parents, to be a painter. The decision was chancy. America had no community of artists, no schools of instruction, no great collections, no part in the urgent continental debates on aesthetics. Paint, brushes, and other basic materials were scarce, and many Americans associated art with luxury and self-indulgence, forces that corrupted republics. Yet Finley asked his parents to arrange for him to study in Boston with Washington Allston (1779–1843), an American painter of growing prominence. Not surprisingly, “Geography” had developed a yearning to travel, and hoped that after studying with Allston in the winter he would be allowed to accompany the artist to London: “I should admire to be able to go with him.”
Jedediah put off a full response until he could speak with Finley during the Yale commencement, which he always attended. Meanwhile he told the boy to do nothing: “it will be best for you to form no plans. Your mama and I have been thinking and planning for you.” The plan, when he revealed it to Finley in New Haven, was for his son to become an apprentice to one of his publishers, the Boston booksellers Farrand & Mallory.
After learning the plan, Finley wrote to his mother assuring her that he would do what his parents thought best for him. “I was determined beforehand to conform to his and your will in everything.” The obligation to gratify his parents had been preached to him in letter after letter from home, week after week. But within and around their demands for compliance he had followed his own inclinations and talents, not to be sacrificed without pain. “I have been extremely low-spirited for some days past, and it still continues,” he added, without explaining to Elizabeth why or for what reason; “I am so low in spirits that I could almost cry.”
Returned to Charlestown, Finley started work at Farrand & Mallory’s bookstore at an annual salary of $400. He needed the money. He had left Yale with debts, a fact he concealed from his parents; creditors in New Haven were dunning him for payment. Lonely, he missed Jennette Hart, to whom he sent an edition of Sir Walter Scott. Evenings he spent painting, fitting up a room above the kitchen of the parsonage and working by lamplight.
Finley’s training for the book business lasted only about three months. Once again Jedediah softened and gave in, this time generously and on no small