Morse had heard of this melancholy event, for, in a letter to Mr. Shaffner of February 22, he says:  “Poor Vail! alas, he is gone.  I only heard of the event on Saturday last.  This death, and the death of many friends besides, has made me feel sad.  Vail ought to have a proper notice.  He was an upright man, and, although some ways of his made him unpopular with those with whom he came in contact, yet I believe his intentions were good, and his faults were the result more of ill-health, a dyspeptic habit, than of his heart.”

He refers to this also in a letter to his brother Sidney of February 23:  “Poor Vail is gone.  He was the innocent cause of the original difficulty with the sensitive Henry, he all the time earnestly desirous of doing him honor.”

And on March 30, he answers Mr. Kendall’s letter:  “I regret to learn that poor Vail was so straitened in his circumstances at his death.  I intend paying a visit to his father and family on my return.  I may be able to relieve them in some degree.”

This intention he fulfilled, as we shall see later on, and I wish to call special attention to the tone of these letters because, as I have said before, Morse has been accused of gross ingratitude and injustice towards Alfred Vail, whereas a careful and impartial study of all the circumstances of their connection proves quite the contrary.  Vail’s advocates, in loudly claiming for him much more than the evidence shows he was entitled to, have not hesitated to employ gross personal abuse of Morse in their newspaper articles, letters, etc., even down to the present day.  This has made my task rather difficult, for, while earnestly desirous of giving every possible credit to Vail, I have been compelled to introduce much evidence, which I should have preferred to omit, to show the essential weakness of his character; he seems to have been foredoomed to failure.  He undoubtedly was of great assistance in the early stages of the invention, and for this Morse always cheerfully gave him full credit, but I have proved that he did not invent the dot-and-dash alphabet, which has been so insistently claimed for him, and that his services as a mechanician were soon dispensed with in favor of more skilful men.  I have also shown that he practically left Morse to his fate in the darkest years of the struggle to bring the telegraph into public use, and that, by his morbid suspicions, he hampered the efforts of Mr. Kendall to harmonize conflicting interests.  For all this Morse never bore him any ill-will, but endeavored in every way to foster and safeguard his interests.  That he did not succeed was no fault of his.