Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Many Americans interpreted their nation's destiny in religious terms, as preparing the world for a millennial age of free institutions, peace, and justice. . . . Wars will cease from the earth,. Men 'shall beat their swords into plough shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.' . . . Then shall come to pass the millennium. . . . In the King James Version of the Bible, an exclamation mark follows the words 'What hath God wrought.' But when Morse transmitted the message, he left off any closing punctuation. Later, when transcribing the message, Morse added a question mark, and thus it was often printed in accounts of his achievement. This misquotation had its own significance. Morse's question mark unintentionally turned the phrase from an affirmation of the Chosen People's destiny to a questioning of it. . . . In later years, people looked back upon Morse's demonstration of 1844 as a pivotal moment in the shaping of their world. John Quincy Adams's grandson Henry . . . identified the first telegraphic message between Baltimore and Washington as the time when 'the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.'" [Howe: What Hath God Wrought, p. 1-7, 854]