What hath God wrought! If The Journal of Commerce was ever branded conservative, cantankerous or stubborn — and it was — those traits could be traced directly to the most famous of the publication’s founders, Samuel F.B. Morse. The inventor of the Morse code was, in 1827, an underemployed and perennially indebted portrait artist and widower with three children. He also was a fiery reactionary who was easily roused to action by perceived blemishes on the moral fabric of society. Samuel F.B. Morse, in an undated photo, wearing some of the many medals he received from European governments that had adopted the use of his telegraph. In some cases, the medals were awarded to him in lieu of royalty payments. One such affront to Morse’s concept of decency was the appearance in February of what was, for the times, a scandalously dressed dancer at a Bowery theatre and by the positive reviews she received by critics, one of whom wrote, “She never lets concealment prey on her charms.” Morse vented anonymously in a letter to the Observer newspaper. In the process he called for the creation of a new aper that could help cleanse the city of its of its moral impurities. Morse went on to write the prospectus for the new newspaper and is credited by historians for giving it its name. The “Journal of Commerce” was not initially intended to be primarily a business newspaper, but instead was so named because wealthy merchants such as its initial bankroller, Arthur Tappan, were envisioned as its main supporters. The Erie Canal had been opened just two years earlier, attracting a new business class of ambitious New Englanders such as Tappan to New York City. Morse was a complex individual. Raised in New England by a Calvinist minister who was opposed to slavery and educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, he held strong prejudices, including being a supporter of slavery. Morse was a moralist as well as an inventor “He dislikes immigrants, especially Catholics and especially Irish,” said Kenneth Silverman, whose biography of Morse, “Lighting Man,” will be published by Knopf next year. “A lot of that came from his visits to Europe, where he got to see the Catholic church first-hand and blamed it for the state of European society, which he thought was immoral, backward and despotic, and didn’t want that to come to America. “The other side of it is that he is a tremendously imaginative and inventive guy,” Silverman said. He credits Morse with largely creating the art scene in New York, helping found the National Academy of Design in 1825. Morse was himself an accomplished artist acknowledged by posterity; in 1982 one of his paintings sold for the highest price ever paid for the work of an American artist, $3.25 million. By the late 1830s Morse was working full time on the device for which he would become most famous, the electric telegraph. It was not his idea, and other models had been proposed earlier, according to historians. Even the Morse Code did not differ significantly from others’ versions. But Morse persuaded Congress to fund the first telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, over which were sent the famous words, “What hath God wrought!” It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision to finally secure Morse’s patent rights to the invention, but he had already gotten rich, buying an estate overlooking the Hudson and building an Italian villa there. Throughout his life, Morse maintained an affection for the JoC. He used the publication to defend the National Academy of Design and when he went abroad he was occasionally asked to serve as a special correspondent.

Covering shipping news was far from the mind of Arthur Tappan, a wealthy silk merchant and prominent abolitionist, when he founded the JoC in 1827. Instead, he was responding to the appearance at New York’s Theater Bowery of a provocatively dressed, or undressed, Parisian dancer named Madame Francisque Hutin.

Tappan did not himself attend the scandalous performance, but read about it in an anonymous letter that appeared in the Observer, a religious weekly jointly owned by Gerard Hallock and his two brothers. The letter turned out to have been written by a man who had seen Madame Hutin dance. His name was Finley Breese Morse, a popular portrait artist better known as Samuel F.B. Morse, who later gained fame as the inventor of the telegraph.

In his letter, Morse, the son of a Calvinist minister from New England, called for the establishment of a new daily newspaper that would uphold morality and drive from the city such moral backsliding as Madame Hutin and her many enthusiastic fans exemplified.

Tappan agreed to finance the paper if Morse would write the prospectus. Morse did and also gave the paper its name, not because he thought the city needed another business newspaper but because he thought its merchants would support a paper with such a name. The name turned out to be fortuitous in view of the way the paper was to evolve.

Back then, nine of New York’s leading broadsheet newspapers jointly maintained a fleet of rowboats through the Association of Editors at an annual cost of some $2,000 apiece. The boats were used to meet incoming vessels at the harbor’s entrance and bring back the hot news from Europe.

But the Calvinist Tappan refused to have any truck with an organization that worked on Sundays, so in 1828 the JoC had a 50-ton schooner built by the Dorgin and Bailey yards in Baltimore, which it christened the Journal of Commerce.

According to “Journalism in America” by William Hudson, the Journal of Commerce “was the first news boat of any size in America. Small boats had been used to board shipping in the harbor by the Journal as well as other papers, but no one up to this time had sent a news boat to sea. The enterprise was regarded by others as ridiculous and ruinously expensive. But the schooner, which occasionally ventured far out to sea, gave the JoC a strong edge in the race against the fleet of rowboats maintained by the other 11 “six-penny” daily newspapers to get the latest news from Europe. It proved so successful that the paper built and equipped the 90-ton Evening Edition within the year so that it would always have one vessel ready to meet incoming ships.

Seeing their fleet of rowboats consistently beaten to the source of incoming news, the other New York papers soon followed suit with their own vessels, but they weren’t as fast as the JoC’s pair, which usually beat the competition into print by as much as a full day.

Maritime news has been a principal area of coverage for the JoC throughout its history. In 1827, almost everything that was shipped into or among the 24 states in the union was waterborne, moving from port to port on sailing vessels that plied the ocean and up the many rivers that linked the states together.