What Hath God Wrought (102 page)

It took six days for the returns from New York to reach Nashville. “I thank my god that the Republic is safe, & that he had permitted me to live to see it,” declared Andrew Jackson after he learned that Polk had clinched the victory. “I can say in the language of Simeon of old ‘Now let thy servant depart in peace.’”
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Three months after Polk’s inauguration, the old soldier did just that, on June 8, 1845. His commemorative eulogy was delivered in Washington by the distinguished historian George Bancroft, whom Polk had appointed secretary of the navy. We would expect a speaker on such an occasion to mention Jackson’s patriotism, decisiveness, and capacity to inspire, his instinctive feeling for popular opinion. Bancroft employed romantic metaphor. He likened Old Hickory to “one of the mightiest forest trees of his own land, vigorous and colossal, sending its summit to the skies, and growing on its native soil in wild and inimitable magnificence.” Jackson had embodied the principle that “submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people, when in error, will amend their doings.” Jackson’s successful resistance to nullification meant to Bancroft “that the Union, which was constituted by consent, must be preserved by love.”
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The chances that mutual love would preserve the Union did not look good to another learned analyst of American history and politics, John Quincy Adams. He read the election returns as evidence of the fragmentation and perversion of American republicanism. “The partial associations of Native Americans, Irish Catholics, abolition societies, liberty party, the Pope of Rome, the Democracy of the sword, and the dotage of a ruffian are sealing the fate of this nation, which nothing less than the interposition of Omnipotence can save.”
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The consequences of the election of 1844 went far beyond Texas annexation, important as that was. If Henry Clay had won the White House, almost surely there would have been no Mexican War, no Wilmot Proviso, and therefore less reason for the status of slavery in the territories to have inflamed sectional passions. Although he would have faced a Democratic Congress, President Clay would probably have strengthened the Whig Party through patronage and renewed its commitment to the American System. In the South, he would have encouraged moderation on the slavery issue, including the acceptance of an alternative future characterized by economic diversification and, in the long run, the gradual compensated emancipation which he advocated all his life. There might have been no reason for the Whig Party to disappear or a new Republican Party to emerge in the 1850s. After the Civil War, the great newspaper editor Horace Greeley declared that if Clay had been elected in 1844, “great and lasting public calamities would thereby have been averted.” More recently, some historians have carefully examined the likely consequences of a Clay victory in 1844 and concluded that it would probably have avoided the Civil War of the 1860s.
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We too readily assume the inevitability of everything that has happened. The decisions that electorates and politicians make have real consequences.

IV

Communication has always been a priority for empires, including the Roman, Chinese, and Incan. The messengers of the ancient Persian empire inspired the famous encomium of Herodotus, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
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The first postal system available for public use was created in the fifteenth century by the German Emperor Maximilian I. In the 1790s, the French Revolutionary government originated, and Napoleon subsequently expanded and perfected, the fastest and most efficient communication network the world had yet seen: a system of what we would call semaphores placed about six miles apart, capable of relaying signals whenever visibility permitted. Besides facilitating political control and military operations, it typified the Enlightenment ideal of rationality. Other countries imitated the system on a smaller scale.
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To describe long-distance optical signaling, the word “telegraph,” meaning long-distance written communication, came into the European languages. Americans too employed optical signals of various kinds, though seldom in relays; they are commemorated in innumerable “telegraph hills” and “beacon hills.” By the 1820s, “telegraph” had become a popular name for newspapers, like the Jacksonian
United States Telegraph
, edited by Duff Green. The ambitious Postmaster General John McLean projected an optical telegraph relay for the United States, but capital was scarce, and a semaphore system, complete with trained operators and cryptographers to translate the signals, cost a lot. Nevertheless, by 1840, an optical telegraph line functioned between New York and Philadelphia, though only its owners were allowed to use it.
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In May 1844, politicians in Washington felt eager to learn news from the party conventions taking place in Baltimore, forty miles away. Help was at hand, for in March 1843 Congress had finally passed, after years of earnest lobbying, an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars for a Professor Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Finley to his family) to demonstrate an electromagnetic telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Morse and his team first tried laying the wire underground, but insulation problems forced them to string the lines on poles aboveground. When the Whig National Convention met on May first, the wire still stretched only about halfway to Baltimore. But Morse’s associate Alfred Vail got the news from the train at Annapolis Junction and telegraphed it ahead to Washington. The information that the Whig Party had nominated Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president arrived an hour and fifteen minutes before the train did. By the time of the formal opening of the telegraph all the way to Baltimore on May 24, no doubt existed that it would work. From the chambers of the United States Supreme Court, Morse transmitted to Vail the famous message,
WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT
.
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When the Democratic convention began three days later, some privileged politicians huddled around Morse receiving up-to-the-minute reports, while hundreds of others outside (many of them members of Congress) tried to gain entrance or at least view the information he posted on the door. “Little else is done here but watch Professor Morse’s Bulletin from Baltimore, to learn the progress of doings at Convention,” a reporter for the
New York Herald
told his paper.
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The Democratic convention used the telegraph to offer the second spot on its ticket to Martin Van Buren’s friend Silas Wright; he declined it via the same medium, and the party then turned to the Pennsylvania doughface George Dallas.

Professor Morse seemed an unlikely inventor. He was not a scientist, engineer, or mathematician but a professor of fine arts at New York University. A distinguished portrait painter, he had aspired to nurture American nationhood and shape public taste through painting historical panoramas and founding the National Academy of Design.
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When in 1837 Congress denied him a commission to paint a historical mural for the Capitol Rotunda, Morse felt so bitterly disappointed that he gave up painting and turned his energies instead to developing an electric telegraph, a project that had engaged his attention off and on since 1832. Morse’s surprising combination of artistic and technological creativity has caused him to be labeled (somewhat hyperbolically) “the American Leonardo.” But two important themes provide continuity between Morse’s art and telegraphy: his Calvinistic Protestantism and his American imperialism. Both of these preoccupations he had inherited from his father, Jedidiah Morse, Congregational minister and famous geographer, who prophesied that America would create “the largest Empire that ever existed.”
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If Finley Morse could not serve America’s providential destiny through painting, he would help fulfill it with electromagnetic current.

A series of international scientific advances paved the way for Morse’s demonstration. Alessandro Volta had invented the electric battery in 1800; Hans Christian Oersted and André Marie Ampère researched electromagnetic signals; William Sturgeon devised the electromagnet in 1824; and in 1831 the American physicist Joseph Henry announced his method for strengthening the intensity of an electromagnet so that the current could be transmitted across long distances. Leonard Gale, a professor of chemistry at NYU, called Henry’s work to the attention of his colleague in fine arts and became a junior partner in Morse’s enterprise. In 1837, they demonstrated the ability to send a signal through ten miles of wire. The Jackson administration, ever mindful of the Southwest, had taken an interest in the possibility of an American counterpart to the French optical telegraph to speed communication with New Orleans. The Van Buren administration continued this interest. In September 1837, Morse wrote Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury describing his own plan for a new kind of telegraph, based on electricity. To design the apparatus itself, Morse entered into a second partnership, one with Alfred Vail, an experienced machinist whose father owned a major ironworks and could provide some investment capital. Secretary Woodbury was impressed, but to secure financial aid from the government, Morse needed an act of Congress. When he took his project before the House Commerce Committee, chairman Francis Smith, a Maine Democrat, insisted on being made another partner in Morse’s enterprise. Morse reluctantly consented, whereupon Smith enthusiastically recommended the project to Congress, making no mention of his own interest in it.
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It proved a bad bargain. The favorable committee report did not win congressional approval for the grant, and in the years ahead Smith’s shameless self-seeking would make trouble for Morse.

Morse had grown up in a New England Federalist household and retained an elitist social outlook. Nevertheless, during his time in New York he became a Democrat in politics, like his literary friends James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and William Cullen Bryant (and like so many in the New York trading community). But in spite of Morse’s party affiliation, the corrupt support of Smith, and the imperial vision of Woodbury, a Democratic Congress evidently found Morse’s project too much like federal aid to internal improvements to endorse. Not until the Whigs controlled Congress did the Democrat Morse get his grant approved in 1843. It carried in the House only narrowly, 89 to 83, with many abstentions.
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Very likely Morse’s vociferous anti-Catholicism, unpopular with Congress, contributed to both his failure to get the painting commission in 1837 and the later political reluctance to endorse his invention.

Morse assumed that the federal government should control the electric telegraph. “It would seem most natural,” he declared, to “connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department; for, although it does not carry a mail, yet it is another mode of accomplishing the principal object for which the mail is established, to wit: the rapid and regular transmission of intelligence.”
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The French optical telegraph was owned by its government (private persons were not even allowed to use it). With the Baltimore-Washington line having demonstrated practicality, Morse tried to get the administration to buy the rights to the electric telegraph. He persuaded Tyler’s postmaster general, but not the president himself. Henry Clay wrote to Alfred Vail shortly before the election of 1844 that he believed “such an engine ought to be exclusively under the control of the government.”
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But Polk won the election, and his platform declared against aid to internal improvements. Not even Amos Kendall, Jackson’s postmaster general and kitchen-cabinet member, whom Morse named president of the Magnetic Telegraph Company, could win Polk over. The administration sold off the Washington-Baltimore link, and private enterprise strung the rest of American telegraph lines.

Meanwhile bitter fights ensued between the cantankerous Morse and his partners, Morse and scientists like Joseph Henry who felt he denied them due credit, and Morse and rival companies that he accused of infringing on his patent. Those who contested his claim to have invented the telegraph included Charles T. Jackson, the same Harvard chemistry professor who also contested William Morton’s claim to have developed anesthesia. Dr. Jackson had actually given advice on both projects but had pursued neither idea himself. As a result posterity has forgotten a man who played a part in both of the two greatest inventions of the 1840s. Morse, on the other hand, eventually became rich and famous, honored the world over. And he always got along with Kendall, who shared his Calvinism and his proslavery but pro-Union Democratic politics.
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From 1866 on, the Western Union Company, in which Morse held a large interest, dominated the American telegraph network. He had consistently believed the telegraph to be what a later generation would term a natural monopoly, and it eventually became, if not a public monopoly, virtually a private one.
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Inventors in several nations had been at work on an electric telegraph, although most European countries needed it less than the United States because distance posed less of a problem for them. The Austrian Empire, whose autocratic and Catholic regime Morse loathed, ironically led in overseas adoption of his invention. The British already had an electric telegraph of their own, developed by the distinguished scientist Charles Wheatstone, in operation since 1838 on a few lines, but Morse’s system worked better, and the British gradually converted to it. The French fell into line slowly because of their commitment to the optical telegraph. Russia, like the United States, needed the telegraph to overcome giant distances, but at first the tsar refused to string the lines for fear they would facilitate political opposition.

In the United States, decades of long-term economic expansion only temporarily reversed by downturns after 1819 and 1837 encouraged the business community to accord the electric telegraph an enthusiastic reception. Investment bankers had always prized quick news. The Rothschilds in London had used carrier pigeons to learn of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo before anyone else did; they bought British government bonds and realized a quick profit when their value rose once the victory became widely known. Following Morse’s demonstration, telegraph lines appeared rapidly in North America, chiefly in order to transmit the prices of stocks and commodities. They helped integrate financial markets so borrowers and lenders could find each other more easily. Accordingly, they first connected commercial centers: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Toronto. The Philadelphia
North American
welcomed the telegraph with the pronouncement: “The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced mails.” Remarkably, the wires reached Chicago by 1848, enabling the Chicago Commodities Exchange to open that year.
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