By Matthew Ehret
In this new series dealing with the power of art as integral to political freedom, I am going to introduce two incredible figures who played a causal role in shaping both the success of the revolution of 1776, and established the foundation for a new renaissance tradition which shaped the greatest leaps of progress throughout the 19th century USA and which unfortunately have been nearly completely wiped from our collective memory. The figures in question are Benjamin West, and Samuel Finley Breeze Morse.
I also want everyone to know that the contents featured below are an extract from the newly published first 228 page RTF Anthology “The Art of Liberty”
Before getting into any details, I want to begin with a painting.
Men of Progress by Christian Schussele – Dr. William Thomas Green Morton: surgical anesthesia James Bogardus: cast-iron construction Samuel Colt: revolving pistol Cyrus Hall McCormick: mechanical reaper Joseph Saxton: coal-burning stove, hydrometer. Featured in a painting within the painting: Benjamin Franklin
This is a painting by Christian Chusel, who was a European painter who moved and became a cultural leader inside of America in Pennsylvania and New York during the Civil War.
This title of the painting is Men of Progress. And I think it showcases, on a variety of levels, the paradox within America currently that’s being exploited by the United States’ historic enemies to destroy it from within. And what you have here is an array of scientists and inventors from the United States.
We can see such figures as Samuel Colt. There is Joseph Henry with his elbow near the pillar in the back. He’s the father of electromagnetism in America.
And everybody’s sort of centered around this one particular figure. You see that guy with his right hand on the table, right? Do people know who this figure is in the center?
That’s Samuel Morse.
Samuel Morse is renowned for pretty much having discovered something we today call the Morse code, a series of taps of sequences that are used in the device next to his right hand on the table that was the first way that we as human beings were able to transmit information miles and miles away using electricity and the code system that he and a few of his collaborators pulled together in the nineteenth century.
You see, he didn’t do this alone. He did this with the help of many people including Joseph Henry, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Alexander Dallas Bache, Alexander von Humboldt and various European scientists which included Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber, were part of the network that innovated a way that you could take the new discoveries of electricity that had only been made a few decades earlier by Benjamin Franklin.
These discoveries that Franklin made in the 1750-53 period completely polarized the thinking of Europeans and Americans alike and stimulated a profound explosion of profound discoveries by such great scientists as Alexander Volta, Carl Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, Andrea Marie Ampère of France, and so many others.
The theme of these many of these figures (and especially the great Benjamin Franklin) is that they profoundly believed in a better age of humanity which could attain a level of culture and liberty that would allow for the actualization of the powers of all humanity: to resolve the apparent paradox caused by the juxtaposition of duty and freedom.
And as we all know, in 1862, the year of the painting ‘Men of Progress’, the United States of America was going through an existential civil war.
Like the schism today which threatens yet another Civil War, the war shaping the USA in 1862 was based upon the inability to reconcile a paradox related to the problem of duty vs freedom. That paradox was found in the apparent contradictory priorities of society found within America’s Founding Documents namely the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and Constitution of 1787.
On the one hand, you had a nation founded upon the unalienable rights of the individual as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, and
one the other hand, you had a nation that’s founded upon the principle of the general welfare as outlined in the Constitution.
Unfortunately, alot of people have had a very difficult time reconciling these apparently contradictory impulses aspects of goodness: The goodness of Individual Liberty and the Goodness of the General welfare of the whole society.
And that’s always been there.
In the case of the Civil War, we had many fallacies of this argument where people called Abraham Lincoln “a dictator and a tyrant” for trying to abolish the rights of certain citizens among some parts of the USA. What is ignored by these revisionists of the ‘Lost Cause’ romantic school is that those citizens whose rights Lincoln threatened believed that it was their right to literally own other humans as property.
Now while some of these issues were resolved in the fires of the Civil War, much was left unresolved, and today the animosity caused by the past abuses against Native Americans, African slaves, and other minorities is being enflamed by America’s enemies who would like to see the USA fall into another civil war. Many conservatives have been brainwashed to believe that liberty cannot co-exist with national government, while many liberals have been brainwashed to believe that personal liberty cannot be tolerated for the sake of ‘the greater good’.
So the question is: How do you really reconcile these things in a way which opens the door to a true sustainable civilizational recovery?
I contend that it is in the domain of culture, of science, of the arts, and of music that the essential solution is to be found.
While this was understood better in past generations, it is much less understood today.
Electricity Sets the Stage of the Drama
Throughout the 18th century, insights began to be developed showcasing how electricity was far more than the effect of rubbing pieces of amber together. The name “electricity” comes from the Greek word “electro” meaning “amber”. Although its existence was observed by the ancient scientist Thales of Miletus, the first scientific studies on electricity were documented by none other than the great Plato in the 4th century BC and outlined in his epic study ‘The Timeaus’.
What Thales and Plato observed, was that the rub of amber (an organic tree resin) along side fur you create an attractive force and you’re able to get a little electric shock. In the Timeaus, Plato also explored magnetite and introduced the world’s first non-superstiitous attempt to generate a scientific hypothesis about the nature of this invisible force.
But it remained somewhat obscure for millennia… that is, until a network of scientists revived this forgotten study starting with the English Platonist William Gilbert (1544-1603) who first demonstrated that the earth itself operates as a form of magnet. His works inspired the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who was the first to recognize that the gravitational field caused by the sun was also of a magnetic character, and the English physicist Stephen Grey (1666-1736) who made an enemy of Sir Isaac Newton when he demonstrated that matter and space were shaped by more important, albeit invisible subtle currents of electricity.
This was the Platonic tradition that Benjamin Franklin was attracted during his early work in England in the 1720s as he began to create a series of tests that were able to demonstrate that the same thing coming out of clouds overhead during thunderstorms are of the same nature as the stuff we had coming out of a Leyden jar or amber.
The static electricity is the same. And he conceptualized it as a form of subtle fluid.
Benjamin Franklin was also the first person to develop a thorough theory explaining the reasons for a negative and a positive component to this ‘fluid’.
Alexander Volta (1745-1827) and many others discovered that you could compile piles that served as the earliest known batteries that would hold the charge that could be then used at a later time, and Volta found that this electrical property was found in even life, such that when you wanted to move a limb of an animal or human,, that electricity is a part of that formula that makes it work.
It also became apparent, that this ‘electrical fluid’ moves extremely fast, and the idea of transmitting information at the speed of electricity became a popular topic of exploration at this time. So, the experiments of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Wilhelm Weber, Joseph Henry and Morse led quickly to the development of the telegraph and the system that was applied in the United States first and then spread across Europe and Canada and beyond.
Conceptualizing the potential behind this new revolution in communications, Morse said in 1933: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.”
Describing the development of the wireless telegraph which gave rise to a nearly light speed communications, Alex Dimitrios writes of Morse’s insights:
“Morse became known as the “Lightning Man,” and the telegraph soon joined the steamship of Robert Fulton as uniquely American creations that bent the very notion of time and space. In 1775, it took news of bloodshed at Lexington and Concord three weeks to get from Massachusetts to South Carolina. It took up to a week to travel between Albany and New York City via sailboat. Now, it took seconds for news to travel, and mere hours for people and goods to travel:
“Steam and electricity, with the natural impulses of a free people, have made, and are making, this country the greatest, the most original, the most wonderful the sun ever shone upon.” [New York Herald, 1847]
By the time the Civil War, telegraph lines had been laid across the USA Europe and the Trans-Atlantic ocean itself, rendering international communication at the speed of electricity.
Exploring the Mind of Samuel F.B. Morse
In order to properly understand the genius of Samuel F. B. Morse, it is important to look not into his role as an inventor which began in 1833, but rather as his role as one of America’s greatest artists which occupied the first two decades of his adult life.
However, Morse was first and foremost an artist and patriot, whose early career saw him rise to the heights of artistic excellence, and during which time he also oversaw a major battle that took place between two opposing cultural movements in the young USA.
As we will soon see, one of those movements was led by the Anglophile enemies of the republic who were committed to promoting an effete and decadent style of aesthetics designed to reduce the powers of moral cognition. The other healthier movement was led by Samuel Morse.
For more work on Classical painting and the fight for republican principles across the ages, pick up a copy of ‘The Art of Liberty’ which I just released with Cynthia Chung in time for Christmas
Matt is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media where this article was first posted and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).