History Today - Samuel F. B. Morse - Accomplished Artist, Innovative Inventor and Unabashed Bigot

American has produced many great mean and women, but even more characters.  And when great accomplishment meets with strange eccentricity, it may not always be pretty, but it sure makes a great story.  Since today is Morse's 221st birthday, it seems like a good time to tell it.

Most of us know Samuel Morse as the inventor of the telegraph (Morse code, and all that); but he was also one of the most important American painters of antebellum era.  He was born in Charleston, Massachusetts in 1791, the son of famous Calvinist preacher, whose strict puritanical beliefs his son inherited.  Morse's talent for drawing and painting were evidenced at an early age; but his education was broad.  He attended Phillips Academy and Yale University, where he studied religion, philosophy, mathematics and the sciences (especially electricity).  Morse was not only a brilliant student (he graduated Phi Beta Kappa), but he supported his education through his painting.

In the early 1800s, most American artists of any note, spent time in Europe absorbing the culture and art museums, and studying under established masters.  Morse was no exception, and due to his talent, he was sent to London in 1811, where he studied under Washington Allston and Benjamin West.  He was admitted to the Royal Academy and was influenced by the neo-classical school and the work of Raphael and Michelangelo.  He first major work was the Dying Hercules.

Morse returned to the U.S. in 1815.  The next 15 years were to be productive for Morse as an artist, and he turned to American subjects as well.  Here is just a sampling of his work:

The aging John Adams:

President James Monroe:

The old Chamber of the House of Representatives:

In 1825, Morse was commissioned to do a full-length portrait of the Revolutionary hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, who was making a final tour of America:

In the 1830s, Paris was the center of the art world, and Morse went to Paris for additional study (there he became fast friends with the American author, James Fenimore Cooper, who was residing in Paris at the time.)  There he completed another masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre, which recreates over thirty masterpieces hanging in the museum.  It was a huge canvas (6 ft. x 9 ft.) and when he brought it back to America, this was the first chance many people had to see these masterworks:

Beginning in the 1830s, Morse became interested in electro-magnetic telegraphy after encountering the scientist, Charles Jackson, on a voyage back to America.  Morse watched Jackson's experiments (which were in turn, based on work done by Wilhelm Webber and Charles Grauss.)  Morse's simple, one wire system, improved this work and was superior to others experimenting at the time (although his life would be taken up with defending his system and patents against others.)

Morse secured patents throughout the 1830s and 1840s and spent nearly all his time defending them and his status as "Father of the Telegraph."  (Ironically, his invention was mad practical by the work of Leonard Gale, who figured out how to transmit the telegraph signals over long distances.)  He received federal support and foreign recognition (although the rest of the world seemed content to give him honors, but no royalties.  Here is a picture of Morse near the end of his life with all his medals.

The Great American Success Story, right?  No doubt - revered artist and inventor - and also one of the great racial and religious bigots of all time.  Morse accepted all the stereotypes of the African-American slaves of the time, writing, “My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom. The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler.”

And it wasn't just blacks that Morse didn't like.  As he was making his trips to Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants were coming the other way - to America.  The vast majority of these new immigrants were Catholic, which didn't sit well with the American Protestant culture in which Morse was raised.  He joined the anti-immigrant Nativist Party, even running for Mayor of New York in 1836 on the party ticket (he received a little over 1400 votes in a city whose population was several hundred thousand.)  The anti-catholic sentiment of the time is best expressed in Thomas Nast's famous cartoon, The American Ganges River:

Not content with trying to shut-down catholic schools and forbidding catholics to hold public office, Morse wrote an anti-catholic screed called Foreign Conspiracies Against American Liberties, in which he opined, “Surely American Protestants, freemen, have discernment enough to discover beneath them the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy. They will see that Popery is now, what it has ever been, a system of the darkest political intrigue and despotism, cloaking itself to avoid attack under the sacred name of religion. They will be deeply impressed with the truth, that Popery is a political as well as a religious system; that in this respect it differs totally from all other sects, from all other forms of religion in the country.”

Morse deserves credit for helping establish American art, and for the real revolution in communications his telegraph created.  But his extreme political views leave a stain on his historical record.  Maybe it would have been better if he had gone back to painting.