Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

by Edwin G. Burrows

Also in 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, just back from Europe, published a series of letters in the New York Observer, an evangelical paper, concerning a “Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.” The artist announced that in Vienna he had discovered the existence of a plot by European monarchs leagued in the Holy Alliance to flood the United States with Catholics. In another Morse series, issued as a pamphlet in 1835, the newly appointed NYU professor warned of “foreign turbulence imported by ship-loads” at the behest of “priest-controlled machines” and rhetorically demanded: “Can one throw mud into pure water and not disturb its clearness?”