o with any of the arrangements, I am held up by name
to the odium of the public. Lawsuits are commenced against them at
Cincinnati and will be in Indiana and Illinois as well as here, and so,
notwithstanding all my efforts to get along peaceably, I find the fate of
Whitney before me. I think I may be able to secure my farm, and so have a
place to retire to for the evening of my days, but even this may be
denied me. A few months will decide.... You have before you the fate of
an inventor, and, take as much pains as you will to secure to yourself
your valuable invention, make up your mind from my experience now, in
addition to others, that you will be robbed of it and abused into the
bargain. This is the lot of a successful inventor or discoverer, and no
precaution, I believe, will save him from it. He will meet with a mixed
estimate; the enlightened, the liberal, the good, will applaud him and
respect him; the sordid, the unprincipled will hate him and detract from
his reputation to compass their own contemptible and selfish ends."

While events in the business world were rapidly converging towards the
great lawsuits which should either confirm the inventor's rights to the
offspring of his brain, or deprive him of all the benefits to which he
was justly and morally entitled, he continued to find solace from all his
cares and anxieties in his new home, with his children and friends around
him. He touches on the lights and shadows in a letter to his brother, who
was still in England, dated New York, April 19, 1848:--

"I snatch a moment by the Washington, which goes to-morrow, to redeem my
character in not having written of late so often as I could wish. I have
been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the
most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has
been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal
shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would
you have believed it ten years ago that a question could be raised on
that subject? Yet this very morning in the 'Journal of Commerce' is an
article from a New Orleans paper giving an account of a public meeting
convened by O'Reilly, at which he boldly stated that I had '_pirated my
invention from a German invention_' a great deal better than mine. And
the 'Journal of Commerce' has a sort of halfway defense of me which
implies there is some doubt on the subject. I have written a note