"There are associations in my mind with those two eminent and beloved names which appeal too strongly to me to be resisted. Now I have a favor to ask which I hope will not be denied. It is that I may be allowed to present to the Academy that portrait in my own name. You can appreciate the arguments which have influenced my wishes in this respect. Allston was more than any other person my master in art. Leslie was my life-long cherished friend and fellow pupil, whom I loved as a brother. We all lived together for years in the closest intimacy and in the same house. Is there not then a fitness that the portrait of the master by one distinguished pupil should be presented by the surviving pupil to the Academy over which he presided in its infancy, as well as assisted in its birth, and, although divorced from Art, cannot so easily be divorced from the memories of an intercourse with these distinguished friends, an intercourse which never for one moment suffered interruption, even from a shadow of estrangement?"
It is needless to say that this generous offer was accepted, and Morse at the same time presented to the Academy the brush which Allston was using when stricken with his fatal illness.
As his means permitted he made generous donations to charities and to educational institutions, and on May 20, 1865, he endowed by the gift of $10,000 a lectureship in the Union Theological Seminary, making the following request in the letter which accompanied it:—
"If it be thought advisable that the name of the lectureship, as was suggested, should be the Morse Lectureship, I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is so named in honor of my venerated and distinguished father, whose zealous labors in the cause of theological education, and in various benevolent enterprises, as well as of geographical science, entitle his memory to preservation in connection with the efforts to diffuse the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and his gospel throughout the world."
Curiously enough I find no reference in the letters of the year 1865 to the assassination of President Lincoln, but I well remember being taken, a boy of eight, to our stable on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street, from the second-floor windows of which we watched the imposing funeral cortège pass up the avenue.
The fifty-fifth reunion of his class of 1810 took place in this year, and Morse reluctantly decided to absent himself. The reasons why he felt that he could not go are given in a long letter of August 11 to his cousin, Professor E.S. Salisbury, and it is such a clear statement of his convictions that I am tempted to give it almost in its entirety:—
"I should have been most happy on many personal accounts to have been at the periodical meeting of my surviving classmates of 1810, and also to have renewed my social intercourse with many esteemed friends and relations in New Haven. But as I could not conscientiously take part in the proposed martial sectional glorification of those of the family who fell in the late lamentable family strife, and could not in any brief way or time explain the discriminations that were necessary between that which I approve and that which I most unqualifiedly condemn, without the risk of misapprehension, I preferred the only alternative left me, to absent myself altogether.
"You well know I never approved of the late war. I have ever believed, and still believe, if the warnings of far-seeing statesmen (Washington, Clay, and Webster among them) had been heeded, if, during the last thirty years of persistent stirring up of strife by angry words, the calm and Christian counsels of intelligent patriots had been followed at the North, and a strict observance of the letter and spirit of the Constitution had been sustained as the supreme law, instead of the insidious violations of its provisions, especially by New England, we should have had no war.
"As I contributed nothing to the war, so now I see no reason specially to exult in the display of brave qualities in an isolated portion of the family, qualities which no true American ever doubted were possessed by both sections of our country in an equal degree. Why then discriminate between alumni from the North and alumni from the South at a gathering in which alumni from both sections are expected to meet?… No, my dear cousin, the whole era of the war is one I wish not to remember. I would have no other memorial than a black cross, like those over the graves of murdered travellers, to cause a shudder whenever it is seen. It would be well if History could blot from its pages all record of the past four years. There is no glory in them for victors or vanquished. The only event in which I rejoice is the restoration of Peace, which never should have been interrupted….
"I have no doubt that they who originated the recent demonstration honestly believed it to be patriotic, for every movement nowadays must take that shape to satisfy the morbid appetite of the popular mind. I cannot think it either in good taste or in conformity with sound policy for our collegiate institutions to foster this depraved appetite. Surely there is enough of this in the political harangues of the day for those who require such aids to patriotism without its being administered to by our colleges. That patriotism is of rather a suspicious character which needs such props. I love to see my children well clad and taking a proper pride in their attire, but I should not think them well instructed if I found them everywhere boasting of their fine clothes. A true nobleman is not forever boasting of his nobility for fear that his rank may not be recognized. The loudest boasts of patriotism do not come from the true possessors of the genuine spirit. Patriotism is not sectional nor local, it comprehends in its grasp the whole country….