As a result of his political positions and a personal friction with Adams, his 1837 bid to paint for the Rotunda failed. Yet, Morse remained clueless: “I regret to learn that Mr. Adams, from some cause wholly unknown to me, should have taken so decided and openly hostile attitude towards me. I never gave him the slightest cause of personal offence, either on political, religious, or any other ground. Yet his opposition (I learn it from the best authority), has been of a character which evinced strong personal animosity.” Did Morse not understand that his racist politics were a red flag to Adams, the outspoken abolitionist from Massachusetts? Could he not imagine that turning over a Rotunda commission to a strident nativist might offend some members of the selection committee?
Morse felt “the bitterness of disappointment he [Adams] has caused in my heart.” He “staggered under the blow” of rejection, took to bed “quite ill,” and flirted with thoughts of suicide. He wrote in a letter that he believed that the honor had been “snatched from me at the moment when it appeared to be mine beyond a doubt.” To Allston, he confessed, “What is better known to you than to any one else the struggles and sacrifices I have made under every disadvantage and discouragement to keep myself prepared for a great work of the kind long held up by the government to lure the artist of ambition to make just such exertions and sacrifices as I have made.” James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole tried to rally him out his depression with kind words, but Morse struggled to regain his bearings.
Morse took refuge from the hurt of the 1837 rejection in the form of his experiments with the electromagnetic telegraph, which were absorbing, promising, and potentially lucrative. By the time another Rotunda commission opened up in 1846, his experiments were becoming an empire as telegraph companies were busy stringing lines across the East, patents were being secured in his name, tens of thousands of federal dollars were funding his projects, old patterns of communication were being replaced, and as a result Morse was being hailed as “the nation’s idol!” Yet, he still craved that Rotunda commission and wrote that he imagined he could be “restored to my position as an artist by the same power that prostrated me [in 1837].” He hung his last great painting, The Muse (1837; fig. 1), in the Rotunda as demonstration of his artistic powers and benefited from a petition, signed by the leading artists and patrons of the arts in New York, begging Congress to select him.