Samuel Morse is best remembered as a painter and the inventor of the telegraph, but he was also a leader in the nativist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and he wrote and spoke out against immigration throughout his life. He viewed Catholicism in particular as a grave threat to American democracy and advocated strict restriction of immigration from countries with large Catholic populations. The following passage is from an anti-immigration book Morse wrote in 1835.
Let us examine this point a little more minutely. These materials are the varieties of Foreigners of the same Creed, the Roman Catholic, over all of whom the Bishops or Vicars General hold, as a matter of course, ecclesiastical rule; and we well know what is the nature of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical rule—it is the double refined spirit of despotism, which, after arrogating to itself the prerogatives of Deity, and so claiming to bind or loose the soul eternally, makes it, in the comparison, but a mere trifle to exercise absolute sway in all that relates to the body. The notorious ignorance in which the great mass of these emigrants have been all their lives sunk, until their minds are dead, makes them but senseless machines; they obey orders mechanically, for it is the habit of their education, in the despotic countries of their birth. And can it be for a moment supposed by any one that by the act of coming to this country, and being naturalized, their darkened intellects can suddenly be illuminated to discern the nice boundary where their ecclesiastical obedience to their priests ends, and their civil independence of them begins? The very supposition is absurd. They obey their priests as demigods, from the habit of their whole lives; they have been taught from infancy that their priests are infallible in the greatest matters, and can they, by mere importation to this country, be suddenly imbued with the knowledge that in civil matters their priests may err, and that they are not in these also their infallible guides? Who will teach them this? Will their priests? Let common sense answer this question. Must not the priests, as a matter almost of certainty, control the opinions of their ignorant flock in civil as well as religious matters? and do they not do it?
Source: Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the United States through Foreign Immigration (New York: E. B. Clayton, 1835), 13.
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