The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse
by Carleton Mabee
Summary
Carleton Mabee's title points to the double career Morse packed into one lifetime, first as a serious painter, celebrated for large historical canvases like his 1822 group portrait of the House of Representatives and later for a gallery scene copying dozens of Louvre masterpieces onto a single canvas, then as the inventor whose telegraph and code reshaped how information moved across distance. The book follows Morse from his early ambitions as an artist, his years helping found and lead the National Academy of Design in New York, through the shipboard conversation in 1832 that first turned his mind toward an electric telegraph.
Mabee traces the working partnership with Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail that turned Morse's idea into a workable system, and gives full weight to the moment that made him famous outside art circles entirely, the May 1844 message What hath God wrought, tapped out over the new Washington to Baltimore line. The book follows the long patent fight that resulted, including the 1854 Supreme Court decision that upheld Morse's core claims to the telegraph while narrowing the broadest monopoly he had sought over any use of electromagnetism to send signals, a partial victory that still left him wealthy and internationally honored, including a patent granted personally by the Ottoman sultan.
Mabee does not soften the less admirable sides of his subject, following Morse's activity in the nativist Anti Catholic movement, including an unsuccessful run for New York mayor on a party built around opposing Catholic immigration, and his later defense of slavery as a divinely sanctioned institution, positions the book treats as genuinely part of the man rather than footnotes kept separate from his inventions. Reading it means holding two very different Morses in view together, the brilliant painter and inventor alongside the bigot, and it suits a reader who wants a biography willing to sit with that contradiction rather than resolve it.
Historical Context & Significance
The American Leonardo won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Carleton Mabee, then early in a long career as a historian that would eventually center on African American history, including a later biography of Sojourner Truth. His willingness to give Morse's nativism and proslavery writing real space, rather than treat them as embarrassing footnotes to an inventor's story, distinguished the book from more purely celebratory accounts of Morse's telegraph.
Morse's own reputation has grown more complicated in the decades since, as historians have increasingly reckoned with his prominent role in nativist politics and his explicit defense of slavery alongside his invention's genuine importance to global communication. Mabee's biography remains one of the few full length studies willing to treat both halves of Morse's legacy as equally real, and it is still cited by historians examining the uncomfortable overlap between nineteenth century American innovation and the era's ugliest political currents.