Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals Volume II Part 32

FEBRUARY 26, 1864--NOVEMBER 8, 1867

Sanitary Commission.--Letter to Dr. Bellows.--Letter on "loyalty."--His brother Richard upholds Lincoln.--Letters of brotherly reproof.-- Introduces McClellan at preelection parade.--Lincoln reelected.--Anxiety as to future of country.--Unsuccessful effort to take up art again.-- Letter to his sons.--Gratification at rapid progress of telegraph.-- Letter to George Wood on two great mysteries of life.--Presents portrait of Allston to the National Academy of Design.--Endows lectures.h.i.+p in Union Theological Seminary.--Refuses to attend fifty-fifth reunion of his cla.s.s.--Statue to him proposed.--Ezra Cornell's benefaction.--American Asiatic Society.--Amalgamation of telegraph companies.--Protest against stock manipulations.--Approves of President Andrew Johnson.--Sails with family for Europe.--Paris Exposition of 1867.--Descriptions of festivities.--Cyrus W. Field.--Incident in early life of Napoleon III-- Made Honorary Commissioner to Exposition.--Attempt on life of Czar.--Ball at Hotel de Ville.--Isle of Wight.--England and Scotland.--The "Sounder."--Returns to Paris.

All the differences of those terrible years of fratricidal strife, all the heart-burnings, the bitter animosities, the family divisions, have been smoothed over by the soothing hand of time. I have neither the wish nor the ability to enter into a discussion of the rights and the wrongs of the causes underlying that now historic conflict, nor is it germane to such a work as this. While Morse took a prominent part in the political movements of the time, while he was fearless and outspoken in his views, his name is not now a.s.sociated historically with those epoch-making events. It has seemed necessary, however, to make some mention of his convictions in order to make the portrait a true one. He continued to oppose the measures of the Administration; he did all in his power to hasten the coming of peace; he worked and voted for the election of McClellan to the Presidency, and when he and the other eminent men who believed as he did were outvoted, he bowed to the will of the majority with many misgivings as to the future. Although he was opposed to the war his heart bled for the wounded on both sides, and he took a prominent part in the National Sanitary Commission. He expresses himself warmly in a letter of February 26, 1864, to its president, Rev. Dr. Bellows:--

"There are some who are sufferers, great sufferers, whom we can reach and relieve without endangering political or military plans, and in the spirit of Him who ignored the petty political distinctions of Jew and Samaritan, and regarded both as ent.i.tled to His sympathy and relief, I cannot but think it is within the scope and interest of the great Sanitary Commission to extend a portion of their Christian regard to the unfortunate sufferers from this dreadful war, the prisoners in our fortresses, and to those who dwell upon the borders of the contending sections."

In a letter of March 23, to William L. Ransom, Esq., of Litchfield, Connecticut, he, perhaps unconsciously, enunciates one of the fundamental beliefs of that great president whom he so bitterly opposed:--

"I hardly know how to comply with your request to have a 'short, pithy, Democratic sentiment.' In glancing at the thousand mystifications which have befogged so many in our presumed intelligent community, I note one in relation to the new-fangled application of a common foreign word imported from the monarchies of Europe. I mean the word '_loyalty_,' upon which the changes are daily and hourly sung _ad nauseam_.

"I have no objection, however, to the word if it be rightly applied. It signifies 'fidelity to a prince or sovereign.' Now if _loyalty_ is required of us, it should be to the _Sovereign_. Where is this Sovereign?

He is not the President, nor his Cabinet, nor Congress, nor the Judiciary, nor any nor all of the Administration together. Our Sovereign is on a throne above all these. He is the _People_, or _Peoples_ of the States. He has issued his decree, not to private individuals only, but to President and to all his subordinate servants, and this sovereign decree his servant the is the Const.i.tution. He who adheres faithfully to this written will of the Sovereign is _loyal_. He who violates the embodiment of the will of the Sovereign, is _disloyal_, whether he be a Const.i.tution, this President, a Secretary, a member of Congress or of the Judiciary, or a simple citizen."

As a firm believer in the Democratic doctrine of States' Rights Morse, with many others, held that Lincoln had overridden the Const.i.tution in his Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation.

It was a source of grief to him just at this time that his brother Richard had changed his political faith, and had announced his intention of voting for the reelection of President Lincoln. In a long letter of September 24, 1864, gently chiding him for thus going over to the Abolitionists, the elder brother again states his reasons for remaining firm in his faith:--

"I supposed, dear brother, that on that subject you were on the same platform with Sidney and myself. Have there been any new lights, any new aspects of it, which have rendered it less odious, less the 'child of Satan' than when you and Sidney edited the New York Observer before Lincoln was President? I have seen no reason to change my views respecting abolition. You well know I have ever considered it the logical progeny of Unitarianism and Infidelity. It is characterized by subtlety, hypocrisy and pharisaism, and one of the most melancholy marks of its speciousness is its influence in benumbing the gracious sensibilities of many Christian hearts, and blinding their eyes to their sad defection from the truths of the Bible.

"I know, indeed, the influences by which you are surrounded, but they are neither stronger nor more artful than those which our brave father manfully withstood in combating the monster in the cradle. I hope there is enough of father's firmness and courage in battling with error, however specious, to keep you, through G.o.d's grace, from falling into the embrace of the body-and-soul-destroying heresy of Abolitionism."

In another long letter to his brother Richard, of November 5, he firmly but gently upholds his view that the Const.i.tution has been violated by Lincoln's action, and that the manner of amending the Const.i.tution was provided for in that instrument itself, and that: "If that change is made in accordance with its provisions, no one will complain"; and then he adds:--

"But it is too late to give you the reasons of the political faith that I hold. When the excitement of the election is over, let it result as it may, I may be able to show you that my opinions are formed from deep study and observation. Now I can only announce them comparatively unsustained by the reasons for forming them.

"I am interrupted by a call from the committee requesting me to conduct General McClellan to the balcony of the Fifth Avenue Hotel this evening, to review the McClellan Legion and the procession. After my return I will continue my letter.

"_12 o'clock, midnight._ I have just returned, and never have I witnessed in any gathering of the people, either in Europe or in this country, such a magnificent and enthusiastic display. I conducted the General to the front of the balcony and presented him to the a.s.semblage (a dense ma.s.s of heads as far as the eye could reach in every direction), and such a shout, which continued for many minutes, I never heard before, except it may have been at the reception in London of Blucher and Platoff after the battle of Waterloo. I leave the papers to give you the details. The procession was pa.s.sing from nine o'clock to a quarter to twelve midnight, and such was the denseness of the crowd within the hotel, every entry and pa.s.sageway jammed with people, that we were near being crushed. Three policemen before me could scarcely open a way for the General, who held my arm, to pa.s.s only a few yards to our room.

"After taking my leave I succeeded with difficulty in pressing my way through the crowd within and without the hotel, and have just got into my quiet library and must now retire, for I am too fatigued to do anything but sleep. Good-night."

A short time after this the election was held, and this enthusiastic advocate of what he considered the right learned the bitter lesson that crowds, and shouting, and surface enthusiasm do not carry an election.

The voice of that Sovereign to whom he had sworn loyalty spoke in no uncertain tones, and Lincoln was overwhelmingly chosen by the votes of the People.

Morse was outvoted but not convinced, and I shall make but one quotation from a letter of November 9, to his brother Richard, who had also remained firm in spite of his brother's pleading: "My consolation is in looking up, and I pray you may be so enlightened that you may be delivered from the delusions which have ensnared you, and from the judgments which I cannot but feel are in store for this section of the country. When I can believe that my Bible reads 'cursed' instead of 'blessed' are the 'peacemakers,' I also shall cease to be a peace man.

But while they remain, as they do, in the category of those that are blessed, I cannot be frightened at the names of 'copperhead' and 'traitor' so lavishly bestowed, with threats of hanging etc., by those whom you have a.s.sisted into power."

In a letter of Mr. George Wood's, of June 26, 1865, I find the following sentences: "I have to acknowledge your very carefully written letter on the divine origin of Slavery.... I hope you have kept a copy of this letter, for the time will come when you will have a biography written, and the defense you have made of your position, taken in your pamphlet, is unquestionably far better than he (your biographer) will make for you."

The letter to which Mr. Wood refers was begun on March 5, 1865, but finished some time afterwards. It is very long, too long to be included here, but in justice to myself, that future biographer, I wish to state that I have already given the main arguments brought forward in that letter, in quotations from previous letters, and that I have attempted no defense further than to emphasize the fact that, right or wrong, Morse was intensely sincere, and that he had the courage of his opinions.

Returning to an earlier date, and turning from matters political to the gentler arts of peace, we find that the one-time artist had always hoped that some day he could resume his brush, which the labors incident to the invention of the telegraph had compelled him to drop. But it seems that his hand, through long disuse, had lost its cunning. He bewails the fact in a letter of January 20, 1864, to N. Jocelyn, Esq.:--

"I have many yearnings towards painting and sculpture, but that rigid faculty called reason, so opposed often to imagination, reads me a lecture to which I am compelled to bow. To explain: I made the attempt to draw a short time ago; everything in the drawing seemed properly proportioned, but, upon putting it in another light, I perceived that every perpendicular line was awry. In other words I found that I could place no confidence in my eyes.

"No, I have made the sacrifice of my profession to establish an invention which is doing mankind a great service. I pursued it long enough to found an inst.i.tution which, I trust, is to flourish long after I am gone, and be the means of educating a n.o.ble cla.s.s of men in Art, to be an honor and praise to our beloved country when peace shall once more bless us throughout all our borders in one grand brotherhood of States."

The many letters to his children are models of patient exhortation and cheerful optimism, when sometimes the temptation to indulge in pessimism was strong. I shall give, as an example, one written on May 9, 1864, to two of his sons who had returned to school at Newport:--

"Now we hope to have good reports of your progress in your studies. In spring, you know, the farmers sow their seed which is to give them their harvest at the close of the summer. If they were not careful to put the seed in the ground, thinking it would do just as well about August or September, or if they put in very little seed, you can see that they cannot expect to reap a good or abundant crop.

"Now it is just so in regard to your life. You are in the springtime of life. It is seed time. You must sow now or you will reap nothing by-and-by, or, if anything, only weeds. Your teachers are giving you the seed in your various studies. You cannot at present understand the use of them, but you must take them on trust; you must believe that your parents and teachers have had experience, and they know what will be for your good hereafter, what studies will be most useful to you in after life.

Therefore buckle down to your studies diligently and very soon you will get to love your studies, and then it will be a pleasure and not a task to learn your lessons.

"We miss your _noise_, but, although agreeable quiet has come in place of it, we should be willing to have the noise if we could have our dear boys near us. You are, indeed, troublesome pleasures, but, after all, pleasant troubles. When you are settled in life and have a family around you, you will better understand what I mean."

In spite of the disorganization of business caused by the war, the value of telegraphic property was rapidly increasing, and new lines were being constantly built or proposed. Morse refers to this in a letter of June 25, 1864, to his old friend George Wood:--

"To you, as well as to myself, the rapid progress of the Telegraph throughout the world must seem wonderful, and with me you will, doubtless, often recur to our friend Annie's inspired message--'What hath G.o.d wrought.' It is, indeed, his marvellous work, and to Him be the glory.

"Early in the history of the invention, in forecasting its future, I was accustomed to predict with confidence, 'It is destined to go round the world,' but I confess I did not expect to live to see the prediction fulfilled. It is quite as wonderful to me also that, with the thousand attempts to improve my system, with the mechanical skill of the world concentrated upon improving the mechanism, the result has been beautiful complications and great ingenuity, but no improvement. I have the gratification of knowing that my system, everywhere known as the 'Morse system,' is universally adopted throughout the world, because of its simplicity and its adaptedness to universality."

This remains true to the present day, and is one of the remarkable features of this great invention. The germ of the "Morse system," as jotted down in the 1832 sketch-book, is the basic principle of the universal telegraph of to-day.

In another letter to Mr. Wood, of September 11, 1864, referring to the sad death of the son of a mutual friend, he touches on two of the great enigmas of life which have puzzled many other minds:--

"It is one of those mysteries of Providence, one of those deep things of G.o.d to be unfolded in eternity, with the perfect vindication of G.o.d's wisdom and justice, that children of pious parents, children of daily anxiety and prayer, dedicated to G.o.d from their birth and trained to all human appearance 'in the way they should go,' should yet seem to falsify the promise that 'they should not depart from it.' It is a subject too deep to fathom.

"... It is my daily, I may say hourly, thought, certainly my constant wakeful thought at night, how to resolve the question: 'Why has G.o.d seen fit so abundantly to shower his earthly blessings upon me in my latter days, to bless me with every desirable comfort, while so many so much more deserving (in human eyes at least) are deprived of all comfort and have heaped upon them sufferings and troubles in every shape?'"

The memory of his student days in London was always dear to him, and on January 4, 1865, he writes to William Cullen Bryant:--

"I have this moment received a printed circular respecting the proposed purchase of the portrait of Allston by Leslie to be presented to the National Academy of Design.

"There are a.s.sociations in my mind with those two eminent and beloved names which appeal too strongly to me to be resisted. Now I have a favor to ask which I hope will not be denied. It is that I may be allowed to present to the Academy that portrait in my own name. You can appreciate the arguments which have influenced my wishes in this respect. Allston was more than any other person my master in art. Leslie was my life-long cherished friend and fellow pupil, whom I loved as a brother. We all lived together for years in the closest intimacy and in the same house.

Is there not then a fitness that the portrait of the master by one distinguished pupil should be presented by the surviving pupil to the Academy over which he presided in its infancy, as well as a.s.sisted in its birth, and, although divorced from Art, cannot so easily be divorced from the memories of an intercourse with these distinguished friends, an intercourse which never for one moment suffered interruption, even from a shadow of estrangement?"

It is needless to say that this generous offer was accepted, and Morse at the same time presented to the Academy the brush which Allston was using when stricken with his fatal illness.

As his means permitted he made generous donations to charities and to educational inst.i.tutions, and on May 20, 1865, he endowed by the gift of $10,000 a lectures.h.i.+p in the Union Theological Seminary, making the following request in the letter which accompanied it:--

"If it be thought advisable that the name of the lectures.h.i.+p, as was suggested, should be the Morse Lectures.h.i.+p, I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is so named in honor of my venerated and distinguished father, whose zealous labors in the cause of theological education, and in various benevolent enterprises, as well as of geographical science, ent.i.tle his memory to preservation in connection with the efforts to diffuse the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and his gospel throughout the world."

Curiously enough I find no reference in the letters of the year 1865 to the a.s.sa.s.sination of President Lincoln, but I well remember being taken, a boy of eight, to our stable on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, from the second-floor windows of which we watched the imposing funeral cortege pa.s.s up the avenue.

The fifty-fifth reunion of his cla.s.s of 1810 took place in this year, and Morse reluctantly decided to absent himself. The reasons why he felt that he could not go are given in a long letter of August 11 to his cousin, Professor E.S. Salisbury, and it is such a clear statement of his convictions that I am tempted to give it almost in its entirety:--

"I should have been most happy on many personal accounts to have been at the periodical meeting of my surviving cla.s.smates of 1810, and also to have renewed my social intercourse with many esteemed friends and relations in New Haven. But as I could not conscientiously take part in the proposed martial sectional glorification of those of the family who fell in the late lamentable family strife, and could not in any brief way or time explain the discriminations that were necessary between that which I approve and that which I most unqualifiedly condemn, without the risk of misapprehension, I preferred the only alternative left me, to absent myself altogether.

"You well know I never approved of the late war. I have ever believed, and still believe, if the warnings of far-seeing statesmen (Was.h.i.+ngton, Clay, and Webster among them) had been heeded, if, during the last thirty years of persistent stirring up of strife by angry words, the calm and Christian counsels of intelligent patriots had been followed at the North, and a strict observance of the letter and spirit of the Const.i.tution had been sustained as the supreme law, instead of the insidious violations of its provisions, especially by New England, we should have had no war.

"As I contributed nothing to the war, so now I see no reason specially to exult in the display of brave qualities in an isolated portion of the family, qualities which no true American ever doubted were possessed by both sections of our country in an equal degree. Why then discriminate between alumni from the North and alumni from the South at a gathering in which alumni from both sections are expected to meet?... No, my dear cousin, the whole era of the war is one I wish not to remember. I would have no other memorial than a black cross, like those over the graves of murdered travellers, to cause a shudder whenever it is seen. It would be well if History could blot from its pages all record of the past four years. There is no glory in them for victors or vanquished. The only event in which I rejoice is the restoration of Peace, which never should have been interrupted....

"I have no doubt that they who originated the recent demonstration honestly believed it to be _patriotic_, for every movement nowadays must take that shape to satisfy the morbid appet.i.te of the popular mind. I cannot think it either in good taste or in conformity with sound policy for our collegiate inst.i.tutions to foster this depraved appet.i.te. Surely there is enough of this in the political harangues of the day for those who require such aids to patriotism without its being administered to by our colleges. That patriotism is of rather a suspicious character which needs such props. I love to see my children well clad and taking a proper pride in their attire, but I should not think them well instructed if I found them everywhere boasting of their fine clothes. A true n.o.bleman is not forever boasting of his n.o.bility for fear that his rank may not be recognized. The loudest boasts of patriotism do not come from the true possessors of the genuine spirit. Patriotism is not sectional nor local, it comprehends in its grasp the whole country....

"I have said the demonstration at Commencement was in bad taste. Why? you will say. Because Commencement day brings together the alumni of the college from all parts of the Union, from the South as well as the North.