Divine Mandate
Samuel F.B. Morse was the eldest son of Jedidiah Morse, a minister instrumental in the Second Great Awakening of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Both carried with them a sense of divine mission; it is a matter of little surprise that the first words transmitted by the telegraph were “What hath God wrought?” Though Morse did not choose the words, he loved the verse so much that he quoted it frequently.
Samuel Morse and his father were staunch Calvinists with a belief in the elect. Both argued their cause with brutal rhetoric. Jedidiah fought against the corruption he saw in Jeffersonian democracy and its teeming masses. Samuel argued for the continuation of slavery, and against Catholicism and foreign influence. The fountains of their belief flowed from millennialism and evangelicalism. Both sought to resurrect the “city on the hill,” and harbored a deep hatred for anything that might threaten it.
Though he studied art in England at the peak of romanticism, Samuel Morse’s theories of art were largely conventional. He met and attempted a portrait of Coleridge, but his theories of imagination derive more from Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds than the romantic aesthetic of his teachers at the Royal Academy. While it is possible that he didn’t understand the complexities of romantic theories of vision, it seems more likely that he really didn’t want to acknowledge them.
But in a profound way, Morse was an artistic revolutionary. Dissatisfied with the American Academy of Art when he returned home, he was instrumental in the foundation of the National Academy of Design. The American Academy was formed as a joint-stock artistic community; membership was $25. Only members could draw from their stock of casts, and it had no school of art. The National Academy took a more egalitarian approach. Where the emphasis of the American Academy, headed by John Trumbull, was connoisseurship, the emphasis of the National Academy was practice. For a $5 membership fee, the new organization offered a growing collection of materials for copyists, and classes on a diverse number of topics.
Morse shared with his father the awareness of the importance of rhetoric. Morse’s introductory lectures on art for the National Academy were not published in his lifetime, but rather repeated orally for decades. His compulsion was to quote the Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair as often as he quoted Reynolds, and he forcefully argued for a uniquely American school that was not built solely on the imitation of old masters. The “highest form” of art in this period was history painting, and though he stressed the accuracy of transcription as a pedagogical tool, he did not see mechanical copying as art. The real job of transcription was the discovery of the essence behind things, delivered unto the people by an artistic elect.
Portraits were a lesser form, but they were the way that Morse earned his daily bread. He was a skilled miniaturist, and a competent painter of portraits, but he failed in his efforts to attain support as a history painter. His forceful and often paranoid rhetoric scared people. It is not surprising that Congress chose Trumbull to paint the historical tableaus in the Capital over Morse. Rejected as an artist, he gave up serious painting around 1837. In 1839, he became one of the first teachers of the daguerreotype process in the United States. He never saw photography as an art, but rather a method of generating fac-similes for artists to copy and improve upon.
Morse attained financial security in 1844 from his invention of the telegraph. He ran for office on an anti-populist, anti-immigration platform. His democratic reforms instituted in the National Academy eventually eroded any hopes for an elect culture; the coming generations of artists trained there did not share his hatred for the general population.
