A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy

17 The Telegraph

17 the telegraph Kendall had been living with astounding increases in the speed of communication all of his life. When he was a boy, news of the death of George Washington took fifteen days to reach Dunstable; when he was forty, copies of Andrew Jackson’s annual message arrived there in only a day and a half. He had seen the changes firsthand in 1827 when he traveled from New York to Washington in half the time it had taken in 1814. His express mail had cut the time for mail delivery between New York and New Orleans from two weeks to one. The climax came on May 29, 1844, when news of James K. Polk’s nomination traveled from Baltimore to Washington almost instantaneously over Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph.1 The telegraph was a product of the great popularization of science in the years following the War of 1812. Morse was only one of over fifty inventors who built some sort of an electromagnetic telegraphic device before 1840. Not a scientist himself, he could not have built the telegraph without the help of Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale and the research of the renowned scientist Joseph Henry. Morse’s telegraph prevailed because it was better built, less complicated , and less expensive than the others and because he was able to fight off the claims of his rivals. To develop the telegraph Morse formed a partnership in which he owned nine-sixteenths of the patent, Vail one-eighth, Gale one-sixteenth, and former congressman Francis O. J. Smith of Maine onefourth . After securing a patent in 1840 and winning an appropriation from Congress in 1843, the partners (or patentees as they were called) built the telegraph line that brought the news from Baltimore to Washington.2 1. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 14–15; Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York, 1943), 276–79. 2. David Hochfelder, “Taming the Lightning: American Telegraphy as a Revolutionary Technology , 1832–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1999), 7–8, 31–36, 172–73; Robert L. Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States 832–866 (Princeton, 1947), 8–33. 246 A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy Morse planned to sell the patent rights to the government and, perhaps, also to private interests, but he dreaded the prospect of dealing with the legal and business problems that would be involved. He had brought Smith into the partnership to handle such matters but had soon lost trust in him. Smith had concealed the fact that he was Morse’s partner while he remained a congressman and worked to pass the appropriation bill. He continued to hide his connection with Morse while his company was building the Baltimore line. After it was completed, Morse confided in Alfred Vail that he was “sick at heart” about Smith. Too moral to tolerate such behavior but too weak to stop it, he needed help.3 In the winter of 1845 Morse came to Washington to sell the rights to the government. While he was there, he ran into Kendall and talked with him at length about the telegraph. The subject was not a new one for Kendall. Ever since he was a boy he had been interested in machinery and concepts such as perpetual motion. In the Post Office he had set a high priority on speed. Frustrated by the railroads, he had started the express mail and had thought seriously of building an optical telegraph system. He was present on February 20, 1838, when Morse gave the cabinet a demonstration of his electromagnetic telegraph, and from then on was “strongly of the opinion that the project ought to be adopted and fostered by the government.” The more he and Morse talked, the more interested Kendall became.4 On February 25, 1845, he sent Morse a glowing letter describing his vision of the future of the telegraph. Like his express mail, it would bring news to all parts of the Union long before the large East Coast newspapers could get there. Newspapers would become purely local. And since financial correspondence would be sent by telegraph, the mails would have much less need for speed and would rely less on the railroads. Once the new administration understood how much money the telegraph could save the Post Office, it would surely buy the rights. With his...