DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT
The Success of “The Sun” Leads to the Founding of the “Herald.”—Enterprises and Quarrels of a Furious Young Journalism.—The Picturesque Webb.—Maria Monk.
THE usefulness of Richard Adams Locke as a Sun reporter did not end with the moon hoax. Far from expressing regret that its employee had gulled half the earth, the Sun continued to meet exposure with a calm and almost flippant front, insisting that it would never admit the non-existence of the man-bats until official contradiction arrived from Edinburgh or the Cape of Good Hope. The paper realized the value, in public interest, of Locke’s name, and was proud to announce, in November of 1835, that it had commissioned Locke to write another series of articles, telling the story of the “Life and Adventures of Manuel Fernandez, otherwise Richard C. Jackson, convicted of the murder of John Roberts, and to be executed at the Bellevue Prison, New York, on Thursday next, the 19th instant.”
This was a big beat, for the young men of the Courier and Enquirer, and perhaps of the Herald, had been trying to get a yarn from the criminal, a Spaniard who had served in foreign wars, had been captured by savages in Africa, and had had many other adventures. Fernandez was convicted of killing another sailor for his attention to Fernandez’s mistress, a Mrs. Schultz; and for about three weeks Locke spent several hours a day in the condemned man’s cell. The “Life and Adventures,” which was printed on the first page of the Sun, ran serially from November 14 to November 25, and was read with avidity.
It was ironical that the hero of the story, who had expressed to Locke an eagerness to have his career set before the public in its true light, was prevented from reading the later instalments; for the law, taking no cognizance of the literary side of the matter, went about its business, and Fernandez was hanged in the Bellevue yard on the 19th, a morning when the Sun’s narrative had wrecked the sailor off the coast of Wales. Mr. Locke reported the execution and drew upon the autopsy to verify the “Adventures.”
It is an interesting fact that the corpse of Fernandez exhibited marks of all those serious injuries which are recorded in the course of our narrative of his life, more particularly that dreadful fracture of his vertebræ which he suffered in Leghorn.
The mere word of a “medical gentleman immediately from Scotland” was no longer to be relied upon!
The Sun’s story of the great fire of December, 1835, sounds like Locke, but it may have been written by one of the other bright young men who worked for Benjamin H. Day. Among them were William M. Prall, who succeeded Wisner as the court reporter, and Lucius Robinson.
“Robinson seemed to be a young man of excellent ideas, but not very highly educated,” Mr. Day remarked about fifty years later.
Perhaps the Day standards were very high. Robinson was twenty six when he worked on the Sun. He had been educated at an academy in Delhi, New York, and after that had studied law and been admitted to the bar. He was too poor to practise at once, and went into newspaper work to make a living. After leaving the Sun he was elected district attorney of Greene County, and in 1843 was appointed master of chancery in New York. He left the Democratic party when the Republican party was organized, but returned to his old political allegiance after the Civil War. In 1876 he was elected Governor of New York—an achievement which still left him a little less famous than his fellow reporter, Locke.
“Give us one of your real Moscow fires,” sighed the Sun in the first week of its existence.
The prayer was answered a little more than two years later, when about twenty blocks south of Wall Street, between Broad Street and the East River, were consumed. The fire started late in the evening of Wednesday, December 16, and all that the Sun printed about it the next morning was one triple-leaded paragraph:
POSTSCRIPT—HALF PAST 1 O’CLOCK—A TREMENDOUS CONFLAGRATION is now raging in the lower part of the city. The Merchants’ Exchange is in flames. Nearly all the blocks in the triangle bounded by William and Wall Streets and the East River are consumed! Several hundred buildings are already down, and the firemen have given out. God only knows when the fire will be arrested.
On Friday morning the Sun had two and a half columns about the fire, and gave an approximately correct estimate that seven hundred buildings had been burned, at a loss of twenty million dollars. The calamity provided an opportunity for the fine writing then indulged in, and the fire reporter did not overlook it; nor did he forget Moscow. Here are typical extracts:
Where but thirty hours since was the rich and prosperous theater of a great and productive commerce, where enterprise and wealth energized with bold and commanding efforts, now sits despondency in sackcloth and a wide and dreary waste of desolation reigns.
It seemed as if God were running in his anger and sweeping away with the besom of his wrath the proudest monuments of man. Destruction traveled and triumphed on every breeze, and billows of fire rolled over and buried in their burning bosoms the hopes and fortunes of thousands. Like the devouring elements when it fed on Moscow’s palaces and towers, it was literally a “sea of fire,” and the terrors of that night of wo and ruin rolling years will not be able to efface.
The merchants of the First Ward, like Marius in the ruins of Carthage, sit with melancholy moans, gazing at the graves of their fortunes, and the mournful mementoes of the dreadful devastation that reigns.
On the afternoon of the following day the Sun got out an extra edition of thirty thousand copies, its normal morning issue of twenty-three thousand being too small to satisfy the popular demand. The presses ran without stopping for nearly twenty-four hours.
On Monday, the 21st, the Sun had the enterprise to print a map of the burned district. Copies of the special fire editions went all over the world. At least one of them ran up against poetic justice. When it reached Canton, China, six months after the fire, the English newspaper there classed the story of the conflagration with Locke’s “Astronomical Discoveries,” and begged its readers not to be alarmed by the new hoax.
The Sun had grown more and more prosperous. In the latter part of 1835 its four pages, each eleven and one-half by eighteen inches, were so taken up with advertising that it was not unusual to find reading-matter in only five of the twenty columns. Some days the publisher would apologize for leaving out advertisements, on other days, for having so little room for news. He promised relief, and it came on January 4, 1836, when the paper was enlarged. It remained a four-page Sun, but the pages were increased in size to fourteen by twenty inches. In announcing the enlargement, the third in a year, the Sun remarked:
We are now enabled to print considerably more than twenty-two thousand copies, on both sides, in less than eight hours. No establishment in this country has such facilities, and no daily newspaper in the world enjoys so extensive a circulation.
In the first enlarged edition Mr. Day made the boast that the Sun now had a circulation more than double that of all the sixpenny respectables combined. He had a word, too, about the penny papers that had sprung up in the Sun’s wake:
One after another they dropped and fell in quick succession as they had sprung up; and all, with but one exception worth regarding, have gone to the “receptacle of things lost upon earth.” Many of these departed ephemerals have struggled hard to keep within their nostrils the breath of life; and it is a singular fact that with scarcely an exception they have employed, as a means of bringing a knowledge of their being before the public, the most unlimited and reckless abuse of ourselves, the impeachment of our character, public and private; the implications, moral and political; in short, calumny in all its forms.
As to the last survivor of them worth note, which remains, we have only to say, the little world we opened has proved large enough for us both.
The exception to the general rule of early mortality was of course the Herald. In spite of this broad attitude toward his only successful competitor, Day could not keep from swapping verbal shots with Bennett. The Sun said:
Bennett, whose only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope, falsely charges the proprietor of this paper with being an infidel, the natural effect of which calumny will be that every reader will believe him to be a good Christian.
Day had a dislike for Colonel Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, almost as great as his enmity toward Bennett; so when Webb assaulted Bennett on January 19, 1836, it was rather a hard story to write. This is the Sun’s account of the fray:
Low as he had fallen, both in the public estimation and his own, we were astonished to learn last evening that Colonel Webb had stooped so far beneath anything of which we had ever conceived it possible for him to be guilty, as publicly, and before the eyes of hundreds who knew him, to descend to a public personal chastisement of that villainous libel on humanity of all kinds, the notorious vagabond Bennett. But so it is.
As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat, and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot. For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering, supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run.
Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so far descended from himself as to come in public contact with the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we could not have believed.
Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the Herald’s financial articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of Wall Street. When he was a writer on the Courier and Enquirer, and one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters. In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet.
In 1828 he became Washington correspondent of the Enquirer, and it was at his suggestion that Webb, in 1829, bought that paper and consolidated it with his own Courier. Bennett was a Tammany Society man, therefore a Jacksonian. He left Webb because of Webb’s support of Nicholas Biddle, and started a Jackson organ, the Pennsylvanian, in Philadelphia. This was a failure.
Meanwhile Bennett had seen the Sun rise, and he felt that there must be room for another penny paper in New York. With his knowledge of stocks he believed that he could make Wall Street news a telling feature. In his second issue of the Herald, May 11, 1835, he printed the first money-market report, and three days later he ran a table of sales on the Stock Exchange. At this time, and for three years afterward, Bennett visited Wall Street daily and wrote his own reports.
His flings at the United States Bank, of which Webb’s friend Biddle was president, and his stories of alleged stock speculations by the colonel himself, were the cause of Webb’s animosity toward his former associate. Bennett took Webb’s assault calmly, and even wrote it up in the Herald, suggesting at the end that Webb’s torn overcoat had suffered more damage than anything else.
Day’s quarrel with Bennett, which never reached the physical stage, was the natural outcome of an intense rivalry among the most successful penny papers of that period—the Sun, the Herald, and the Transcript. Against the sixpenny respectables these three were one for all and all for one, but against one another they were as venomous as a young newspaper of that day felt that it had to be to show that it was alive.
Day’s antagonism toward Webb was sporadic. Most of the time the young owner of the Sun treated the fiery editor of the Courier and Enquirer as flippantly as he could, knowing that Webb liked to be taken seriously. Day’s constant bête noire was the commercial and foreign editor of Webb’s paper, Mr. Hoskin, an Englishman.
On January 21, 1836, the Sun charged that Webb and Hoskin had rigged a “diabolical plot” against it. The sixpenny papers had formed a combination for the purpose of sharing the expense of running horse-expresses from Philadelphia to New York, bringing the Washington news more quickly than the penny papers could get it by mail. The Sun and the Transcript then formed a combination of their own, and in this way saved themselves from being beaten on Jackson’s message, sent to Congress in December, 1835.
In January, 1836, Jackson sent a special message to Congress. It was delivered on Monday, the 18th, and on Wednesday, the 20th, the Sun published a column summary of it. Webb made the charge that his messenger from Washington had been lured into Day’s offices, and that the Sun got its story by opening the package containing the message intended for the Courier and Enquirer. The Sun replied that it received the message legitimately, and that the whole thing was a scheme to discredit Mr. Day and his bookkeeper, Moses Y. Beach:
The insinuation of Webb that we violated the sanctity of a seal we hurl back in proud defiance to his own brow.
Webb went to the police and to the grand jury, and for a few days it looked as if the hostile editors might reach for something of larger calibre than pens. Thus the Sun of January 22:
We were informed yesterday at the police office, and subsequently by a gentleman from Wall Street, that Webb, of the Courier and Enquirer, had openly threatened to make a personal assault upon us. It was lucky for him that we did not hear this threat; but we can now only say that if such, or anything similar to it, be his intention, he will find each of the three editors of the Sun always provided with a brace of “mahogany stock” pistols, to accommodate him in any way he likes, or may not like.
The specification of “mahogany stock” referred to Colonel Webb’s own supposed predilection for pistols of that description. Mr. Day and his aids may have carried these handsome weapons, but it is not on record that they made use of them, or that they had occasion to do so. Persons gunning for editors seemed to neglect Mr. Day in favour of Mr. Bennett.
No sooner was this fierce clash with Webb over than the Sun found itself bombarded from many sides in the war over Maria Monk. This woman’s “Awful Disclosures” had just been published in book form by Howe & Bates, of 68 Chatham Street, New York. They purported to be “a narrative of her sufferings during a residence of five years as a novice and two years as a black nun in the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery at Montreal.” On January 18, 1836, the Sun began to publish these shocking stories, in somewhat condensed and expurgated form. It did not vouch for their truth, but declared that it printed them from an “imperative sense of duty.” “We have no better means than are possessed by any reader,” it cautiously added, “to decide upon their truth or falsehood.”
The “Disclosures” ran in the Sun for ten days, during which time about one-half of the book was printed. Maria Monk herself was in New York, and so cleverly had she devised the imposture that she was received in good society as a martyr. Such was the public interest that it was estimated by Cardinal Manning, in 1851, that between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand copies of the volume were sold in America and England. The Know-Nothing Party used it for political capital, and anti-Catholic riots in several cities were the result of its publication.
Its partial appearance in the Sun, while it may have helped the circulation of the book, undoubtedly hastened the exposure of the fraud. The editor of the Commercial Advertiser, William Leete Stone, liked nothing better than to show up impostors. He had already written a life of Matthias the Prophet, and he decided to get at the truth of Maria Monk’s revolting story.
Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of the Herkimer American, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the Northern Whig, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany Daily Advertiser, and of the Hartford Mirror. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded Zachariah Lewis as editor of the Commercial Advertiser. As a Mason he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the anti-Masonic movement.
Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841 President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also the first superintendent of the New York public schools—an office which he held at the time of his death, in 1844.
Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book, “Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant scandal of the time.
News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types from Maria Monk. There was the celebrated murder of Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr. Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre. Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes met their death on March 6, 1836, but the details did not reach New York for more than a month; it was April 12 when the Sun gave a column to them.
Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns full until May 10, when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the Sun:
Upon calculating the number of public floggings which that miserable scribbler, Bennett, has received, we have pretty accurately ascertained that there is not a square inch of his body which has not been lacerated somewhere about fifteen times. In fact, he has become a common flogging property; and Webb has announced his intention to cowskin him every Monday morning until the Fourth of July, when he will offer him a holiday. We understand that Webb has offered to remit the flogging upon the condition that he will allow him to shoot him; but Bennett says:
“No; skin for skin, behold, all that a man hath will he give for his life!”
The Sun beat the town on a great piece of news that spring. “Triumphant News from Texas! Santa Anna Captured!” the head-lines ran.
This appeared on May 18, four weeks after Sam Houston had taken the Mexican president; but it was the first intimation New York had had of the victory at San Jacinto.
During the investigation of the murder of Helen Jewett and the trial of Richard P. Robinson, the suspect, the Sun attacked Bennett for the manner in which the Herald handled the case. Bennett saw a good yellow story in the murder, for the house in which the murdered girl had lived could not be said to be questionable; there was no doubt about its character. Bennett’s interviewing of the victim’s associates did not please the Sun, which pictured the unfortunate women “mobbed by several hundred vagabonds of all sizes and ages—amongst whom the long, lank figure of the notorious Bennett was most conspicuous.”
When it was not Bennett, it was Colonel Webb or one of his men. The Sun went savagely after the proprietor of the Courier and Enquirer because he led the hissing at the Park Theatre against Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wood, the English opera-singers. The offence of the Woods lay in giving a performance on an evening when a benefit was announced for Mrs. Conduit, another popular vocalist. The town was divided upon the row, but as the Woods and Mrs. Conduit were all English-born, it was not a racial feud like the Macready-Forrest affair. The Sun rebuked Colonel Webb particularly because, after booing at the Woods, he had refused Mr. Wood’s offer to have it out over pistols and coffee.
Wood was not a lily-finger. He had been plain Joe Wood, the pugilist, before he married the former Lady Lennox and embraced tenor song in a serious way. Society rather took the part of the Woods, for after the Park Theatre row a dinner in their compliment was arranged by Henry Ogden, Robert C. Wetmore, Duncan C. Pell, John P. Hone, Carroll Livingston, and other leading New Yorkers.
The fearlessness of the Sun did not stop with saucing its contemporaries. When Robinson was acquitted of the Jewett murder, after a trial which the Sun reported to the extent of nearly a page a day, the Sun editorially declared:
Our opinion, calmly and dispassionately formed from the evidence, is that Richard P. Robinson is guilty of the wilful and peculiarly atrocious murder of Helen Jewett.... Any good-looking young man, possessing or being able to raise among his friends the sum of fifteen hundred dollars to retain Messrs. Maxwell, Price, and Hoffman for his counsel, might murder any person he chose with perfect impunity.
Robinson’s acquittal was credited largely to Ogden Hoffman, whose summing up the Sun described as “the most magnificent production of mind, eloquence, and rhetorical talent that ever resounded in a hall of justice.” This was the Ogden Hoffman of whom Decatur said, when Hoffman left the navy in 1816, that he regretted that the young man should have exchanged “an honourable profession for that of a lawyer.” Hoffman and his partner Maxwell, who shared in this tremendous fee of fifteen hundred dollars, had been district attorneys of New York before the time of the Jewett murder, and the Sun inquired what would have been Robinson’s fate if Hoffman, and not Phenix, had been the prosecutor.
On August 20, 1836, the Sun announced that its circulation averaged twenty-seven thousand copies daily, or fifty-six hundred more than the combined sale of the eleven six-cent papers. Of the penny papers the Sun credited the Herald with thirty-two hundred and the Transcript with ten thousand, although both these rivals claimed at least twice as much. Columns were filled with the controversy which followed upon the publication of these figures. The Sun departed from a scholarly argument with the Transcript over the pronunciation of “elegiac,” and denounced it as a “nestle-tripe,” whatever that was.
There was a little room left for the news. Aaron Burr’s death got a stick; Marcy’s nomination for Governor of New York, an inch; Audubon’s arrival in America, four lines. News that looks big now may not have seemed so imposing then, as this Sun paragraph of September 22, 1836, would show:
Two more States are already spoken of for addition to the Union, under the names of Iowa and Wisconsin.
Richard Adams Locke left the Sun in the fall of 1836, and on October 6, in company with Joseph Price, started the New Era, a penny paper for which the Sun wished success. In less than a month, however, Locke and his former employer were quarrelling about the price of meals at the Astor House. That famous hotel was opened in May, 1836, with all New York marvelling at the wonders of its walnut furniture, so much nicer than the conventional mahogany! Before it was built, it was referred to as the Park Hotel. When it opened it was called Astor’s Hotel, but in a few months it came to be known by the name which stuck to it until it was abandoned in 1913.
But to return to our meal. Said Mr. Locke’s New Era:
A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers abusing the Astor House. Nothing can be more groundless. Where the arrangements are complete, the charges, of course, must be corresponding. We suppose the report has been set afloat by some person who was kicked out for not paying his bill.
To this horrid insinuation Day replied:
The report they speak of was set afloat by ourselves, after paying $1.25 for a breakfast for a lady and her infant a year and a half old, served just one hour and seven minutes after it was ordered, with coffee black as ink and without milk, and that, too, in a room so uncleanly as to be rather offensive.
Locke wanted to make the New Era another Sun, but he failed. His second hoax, “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park,” which purported to tell hitherto unrelated adventures of the Scottish explorer, fell down. The public knew that the New Era was edited by the author of the moon story. When the New Era died, Locke went to the Brooklyn Eagle, just founded, and he succeeded Henry C. Murphy, the proprietor and first editor, when that famous lawyer and writer was running for mayor of Brooklyn. Locke afterward was a custom-house employee. He died on Staten Island in 1871.
Squabbling with his former friend Locke over hotel service was no such sport for Day as tilting at the owner of the Herald. The Sun attacked Bennett in the fall of 1836 for his attitude toward the Hamblin benefit. Thomas Sowerby Hamblin was made bankrupt by the Bowery Theatre fire on September 22, for the great fires of the previous December had ruined practically all the fire-insurance companies of New York, and there was not a policy on the theatre which this English actor-manager, with James H. Hackett, had made the leading playhouse of America. Hamblin did not like Bennett’s articles and the Sun thus noted the result of them:
Alas, poor Bennett! He seems destined to be flogged into immortal fame, and become the common buffet-block of all mankind. Mr. Hamblin paid him a complimentary visit last evening [November 17] in his editorial closet and lathered him all into lumps and blotches, although the living lie was surrounded by his minions and had a brace of loaded pistols lying on his desk when the outraged visitor first laid hands on him.
When the Sun’s advertising business had increased until its income from that source was more than two hundred dollars a day, it bought two new presses of the Napier type from Robert Hoe, at a cost of seven thousand dollars. These enabled Mr. Day to run off thirty-two hundred papers an hour on each press. On the 2nd of January, 1837, the size of the Sun was slightly increased, about an inch being added to the length and width of each of its four pages.
In February, 1837, the price of flour rose from the normal of about $5.50 a barrel to double that amount. The Sun declared that the increase was not natural, but rather the result of a combination—a suspicion which seems to have been shared by a large number of citizens. The bread riots of February 13 and later were the result of an agitation for lower prices.
The Journal of Commerce denounced the Sun as an inciter of the riots, and suggested that the grand jury should direct its attention toward Mr. Day. The Sun not only refused to recede from its stand, but suggested that the foreman of the grand jury, the famous Philip Hone, had himself incited a riot—the riot against the Abolitionists, July 11, 1834—which had a less worthy purpose than the Sun’s stand on the matter of flour prices. The Sun was virtuously indignant, even more than it had been a short time before, when the Transcript charged the Sun’s circulation man, Mr. Young, with biting two of the Transcript’s carriers!
The beginning of regular transatlantic steamship service did not find in the Sun a completely joyous welcome—thanks, perhaps, to the temperament of Lieutenant Hosken, R.N. He was an officer of the Great Western, a side-wheeler of no less than thirteen hundred and forty tons, with paddles twenty-eight feet in diameter