Samuel Morse's Pro-Slavery and Nativist Writings
Telegraph inventor Samuel Morse was an outspoken pro-slavery advocate and anti-Catholic nativist whose views are documented in his own published pamphlets, undermining the "product of his time" defense.
Samuel Morse, conventionally credited as inventor of the American telegraph, was an outspoken advocate of chattel slavery and a leading nativist agitator whose views are documented in his own published pamphlets — not inferred from secondhand accounts. His 1863 pamphlet "An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the Social System" argues directly that "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." In the same body of work he refers to Black people as "degraded beings" and "barbarous" and calls abolitionists "godless fanaticists," "demons in human shape," and "wretched and disgusting." An earlier pamphlet, "Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration," is an anti-Catholic nativist tract that refers to immigrants as "hermaphrodites." Morse eventually left the Know Nothing movement for not being sufficiently pro-slavery. The common "product of his time" defense fails on the dates: Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1783, well before Morse was born in 1791, and his immediate New England milieu was broadly antislavery. According to Kenneth Silverman's biography *Lightning Man*, Morse acquired his pro-slavery views as an adult during a failed painting career that took him into the American South. Silverman also documents Morse's theology, in which technology and religion were "two sides of the same thing": Morse believed the telegraph would spread a pro-slavery Anglo-American Christian monoculture, which he regarded as divinely sanctioned. The actual historical effect of his invention was nearly the opposite — see How the Telegraph Accelerated Abolition.