MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE
“The Sun” Uses Albany Steamboats, Horse Expresses, Trotting Teams, Pigeons, and the Telegraph to Get News.—Poe’s Famous Balloon Hoax and the Case of Mary Rogers.
THE second owner of the Sun, Moses Yale Beach, was, like Ben Day, a Yankee. He was born in the old Connecticut town of Wallingford on January 7, 1800. He had a little education in the common schools, but showed more interest in mechanics than in books. When he was fourteen he was bound out to a cabinet-maker in Hartford. His skill was so fine that he saw the needlessness of serving the customary seven years, and his industry so great that he was able, by doing extra work in odd times, to get together enough money to buy his freedom from his master. He set up a cabinet-shop of his own at Northampton, Massachusetts.
When Beach was twenty, he made the acquaintance of Miss Nancy Day, of Springfield, the sister of Benjamin was the inventor of the Ben Day process used in Day were married in 1821, and as the business at Northampton was not prospering, they settled down in Springfield.
The young man was a good cabinet-maker, but his mind ran to inventions rather than to chests and high-boys. Steamboat navigation had not yet attained a commercial success, but Beach was a close student of the advance made by Robert Fulton and Henry Bell. First, however, he devoted his talents as an inventor to a motor in which the power came from explosions of gunpowder. He tried this on a boat which he intended to run on the Connecticut River between Springfield and Hartford. When it failed, he turned back to steam, and he undoubtedly would have made a success of this boat line if his money resources had been adequate.
Beach then invented a rag-cutting machine for use in paper-mills, and he might have had a fortune out of it if he had taken a patent in time, for the process is still used. As it was, the device enabled him to get an interest in a paper-mill at Saugerties, New York, where he removed in 1829. This mill was prosperous for some years, but in 1835 Beach found it more profitable to go to work for his young brother-in-law, Mr. Day, who had by this time brought the Sun to the point of assured success.
Beach was a great help to Day, not only as the manager of the Sun’s finances, but as general supervisor of the mechanical department. In the three years of his association with Day he picked up a good working knowledge of the newspaper business. He recognized the features that had made the Sun successful—chiefly the presentation of news that interested the ordinary reader—and saw the neglect of this policy was keeping the old-fashioned sixpenny papers at a standstill.
He did not underestimate other news. “Other news,” in that day, meant the proceedings of Congress and the New York State Legislature, the condensed news of Europe, as received from a London correspondent or rewritten from the English journals, and such important items as might be clipped from the newspapers of the South and West. Many of these American papers sent proof-sheets of news articles to the Sun by mail.
When Beach bought the paper there was no express service. There had been, in fact, no express service in America except the one which Charles Davenport and N. S. Mason operated over the Boston and Taunton Railway. But in March, 1839, about a year after Beach got the Sun, William F. Harnden began an express service—later the Adams Express Company—between New York and Boston, using the boats from New York to Providence and the rail from Providence to Boston.
This was a big help to the New York papers, for with the aid of the express the English papers brought by ships landing at Boston were in the New York offices the next day. To a city which still lacked wire communication of any kind this was highly important, and there was hardly an issue of the Sun in the spring of 1839 that did not contain a paragraph laudatory of Mr. Harnden’s enterprise.
The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom. While the Sun did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous article. It was by ship that Sun readers learned of Daguerre and his picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and downs—mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan. There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were the doings of actors known to America:
At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys—father to the Miss Davys whose ears the queen boxed—has been appointed Bishop of Marlborough.
Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty pounds a night for sixty nights in New York.
On June 1, 1839, the Sun got out an extra on the arrival, at three o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen days—the fastest trip up to that time—and fifty-seven thousand copies of the paper were sold. The Sun’s own sailing vessels met the incoming steamships down the bay. The Sun boasted:
In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead of the morning papers.
The Sun had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five feet—less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants—and her paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the Sun favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand. Quoth the Sun:
Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering lazaroni of Wall Street stick up their noses at us?
In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England arrived together, the Sun gave the story a front-page display, and actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article.
A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the Sun’s account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:
Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the 7th, the steamer President had not arrived.
The President never arrived, and her fate is one of the secrets of the sea. She sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with thirty-one passengers, including Tyrone Power, the Irish actor, who had just concluded his second American tour. It is conjectured that the President sank during the great gale that sprang up her second night out.
In getting news from various parts of the United States, the Sun took a leaf from the book of Colonel Webb and other journalists who had used the horse express. In January, 1841, on the occasion of Governor William H. Seward’s message to the Legislature, the Sun beat the town. The Legislature received the message at 11 A.M. on January 5:
An express arriving exclusively for the Sun then started, it being one o’clock, and at six this morning reached our office, thus enabling us to repeat the triumph achieved by us last year over the whole combined press of New York, large and small. It is but just to say that our express was brought on by the horses of the Red Bird Line with unparalleled expedition, in spite of wind, hail, and rain.
Nowadays a Governor’s message is in the newspaper-offices days before it is sent to the Legislature, and there, treated in the confidence that is never betrayed by a decent newspaper, it is prepared for printing, so that it may be on the street five minutes after it is delivered, if its importance warrants. In the old days the message, borne by relays of horse vehicles down the snow-covered post-road from Albany to New York, was more important to the newspapers than the messages of this period appear to be. With newspapers, as with humans, that which is easy to get loses value.
In October, 1841, the Sun spent money freely to secure a quick report of the momentous trial of Alexander McLeod for the murder of Amos Durfee. War between the United States and Great Britain hinged on the outcome. During the rebellion in Upper Canada, in 1837, the American steamer Caroline was used by the insurgents to carry supplies down the Niagara River to a party of rebels on Navy Island. A party of loyal Canadians seized and destroyed the Caroline at Grand Island, and in the fight Durfee and eleven others were killed. The Canadian, McLeod, who boasted of being a participant, was arrested when he ventured across the American border in 1840.
The British government made a demand for his release, insisting that what McLeod had done was an act of war, performed under the orders of his commanding officer, Captain Drew. President Van Buren replied that the American government had several times asked the British government whether the destruction of the Caroline was an act of war, and had never received a reply; and further, that the Federal government had no power to prevent the State of New York from trying persons indicted within its jurisdiction.
The whole country realized the hostile attitude of the British ministry, and accepted its threat that war would be declared if McLeod were not released. The trial took place at Utica, New York, and the Sun printed from two to five columns a day about it. It ran a special train from Utica to Schenectady. There a famous driver, Otis Dimmick, waited with a fine team of horses to take the story to the Albany boat, the fastest means of transportation between the State capital and the metropolis. The Sun declared that one day Dimmick and his horses made the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in forty-nine minutes.
And the end of it all was proof that McLeod, who had boasted of killing “a damned Yankee,” had been asleep in Chippewa on the night of the Caroline affair, and was nothing worse than a braggart. So the war-cloud blew over.
Beach was a man of great faith in railroads and all other forms of progress. When the Boston and Albany road was finished, the Sun related how a barrel of flour was growing in the field in Canandaigua on a Monday—the barrel in a tree and the flour in the wheat—and on Wednesday, transformed and ready for the baker, it was in Boston.
Sperm candles manufactured by Mr. Penniman at Albany on Wednesday morning were burning at Faneuil Hall and at the Tremont, in Boston, on the evening of the same day.
The Sun had faith in Morse and his telegraph from the outset. The invention was born in Nassau Street, only a block or two from the Sun’s office. Morse put the wire into practical use between Baltimore and Washington on May 24, 1844. That was a Friday. The Sun said nothing about it the next day, and had no Sunday paper; but on Monday it said editorially:
MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH—The new invention is completed from Baltimore to Washington. The wire, perfectly secured against the weather by a covering of rope-yarn and tar, is conducted on the top of posts about twenty feet high and one hundred yards apart. The nominations of the convention this day are to be conveyed to Washington by this telegraph, where they will arrive in a few seconds. On Saturday morning the batteries were charged and the regular transmission of intelligence between Washington and Baltimore commenced.... At half past 11 A.M., the question being asked, what was the news at Washington, the answer was almost instantaneously returned: “Van Buren stock is rising.” This is indeed the annihilation of space.
It is hardly necessary to say that the convention referred to was the Democratic national convention at Baltimore, that Van Buren’s stock, high early in the proceedings, fell again, and that James K. Polk was the nominee.
But as New York was not fortunate enough to have the first commercial telegraph-line, the Sun had to rely on its own efforts for speedy news from the convention. It ran special trains from Baltimore, “beating the United States mail train and locomotive an hour or two.”
The Sun soon afterward expressed annoyance at a report that it was itself a part of a monopoly which was to control the telegraph, and that it had bought a telegraph-line from New York to Springfield, Massachusetts. It insisted that there should be no monopoly, and that the use of the telegraph must be open to all. There was no suggestion that Morse intended to control his invention improperly, but the Sun was not quite satisfied with the government’s lassitude. Morse had offered his rights to the government for one hundred thousand dollars, and Congress had sneered.
It was not until 1846 that the telegraph was extended to New York, and in the meantime the New York papers used such other means as they could for the collection of news. Besides trains, ships, horses, and the fleet foot of the reporter, there were pigeons. Beach went in for pigeons extensively. When the Sun moved from 156 Nassau Street, in the summer of 1842, it took a six-story building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, securing about three times as much room as it had in the two-story building at Spruce Street. On the top of the new building Beach built a pigeon-house, which stood for half a century.
The strange, boxlike cote attracted not only the attention of Mr. Bennett, whose Herald was quartered just across the street, but of all the folk who came and went in that busy region. So many were the queries from friends and the quips from enemies concerning the pigeon-house that the Sun (December 14, 1843), vouchsafed to explain:
Why, we have had a school of carrier-pigeons in the upper apartments of the Sun office since we have occupied the building. Did our contemporaries believe that we ever could be at fault in furnishing the earliest news to our readers? Or did they indulge the hope that in newspaper enterprise they could ever catch us napping?
Carrier-pigeons have long been remarked for their sagacity and admired for their usefulness. They are, of all birds, the most invaluable, and as auxiliary to a newspaper cannot be too highly prized. Part of the flock in our possession were employed by the London Morning Chronicle in bringing intelligence from Dublin to London, and from Paris to London, crossing both channels; therefore they are not novices in the newspaper express.
If there was delay in the arrival of the Boston steamer, and the weather clear, we despatched our choice pigeon, Sam Patch, down the Sound, and he invariably came back with a slip of delicate tissue-paper tied under his wing, containing the news. We thus are apprised of the arrival of the steamer some two hours before any one else hears of her. Our men are at their cases; the steam is up in our pressroom, and our extras are always out first.
We sometimes let one of our carriers fly to the Narrows, and in twenty minutes or so we know what is coming in, thirty miles from Sandy Hook Light. We despatch them as far as Albany, on any important mission; frequently to New Jersey, and in the summer-time they sometimes look in at Rockaway and let us know what is going on at the pavilion. We have a small sliding door in our observatory, on the top of the Sun office, through which the little aerials pass. By sending off one every little while, we ascertain the details of whatever is important or interesting at any given point.
They often fly at the rate of sixty miles an hour, easy! For example, a half-dozen will leave Washington at daylight this morning and arrive here about noon, beating the mail generally ten hours or so. They can come through from Albany in about two hours and a half, solar time. They fly exceedingly high, and keep so until they make the spires of the city, and then descend. We have not lost one by any accident, and believe ours is the only flock of value or importance in the country.
We give this brief detail of “them pigeons” because our prying friends and neighbors in the newspaper way have such a meager, guesswork account of them; and because we dislike any mystery or artifice in our business operations.
Speed and more speed was the newspaper demand of the hour, particularly among the penny papers. The Sun and the Herald had been battling for years, with competitors springing up about them, usually to die within the twelvemonth. Now the Tribune had come to remain in the fray, even if it had not as much money to spend on news-gathering as the Sun and the Herald.
Edgar Allan Poe saw the fever that raged among the rivals. He had just returned to New York from Philadelphia with his sick wife and his mother. He was a recognized genius, but his worldly wealth amounted to four dollars and fifty cents. He had written “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and other immortal stories, but his livelihood had been precarious. He had been in turn connected with the Southern Literary Messenger, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and Graham’s Magazine, and had twice issued the prospectuses for new periodicals of his own, fated never to be born.
His fortunes were at their lowest when he arrived in New York on April 6, 1844. He and his family found rooms in Greenwich Street, near Cedar, now the thick of the business district. “The house is old and looks buggy,” he wrote to a friend, but it was the best he could do with less than five dollars in his pocket.
He had to have more money. The newspapers seemed to be the most available place to get it, and the Sun the livest of them. Speed—that was what they wanted. They had been having ocean steamers until they were almost sick. Railroads were unromantic. Horses were an old story. The telegraph was still regarded as theory, and it hardly appealed to the imagination.
Pigeons? Perhaps there was inspiration in the sight of Sam Patch preening himself on a cornice of the Sun’s building. A magnified pigeon would be an air-ship. Poe sat him down, wrote the “balloon hoax,” and sold it to Mr. Beach. It appeared in the Sun of April 13, 1844.
Beneath a black-faced heading that was supplemented by a woodcut of three race-horses flying under the whips of their jockeys and the subtitle “By Express,” was the following introduction:
ASTOUNDING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM CHARLESTON, VIA NORFOLK!—THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!!!—ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND OF A STEERING BALLOON INVENTED BY MR. MONCK MASON.
We stop the press at a late hour to announce that by a private express from Charleston, South Carolina, we are just put in possession of full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by man. The Atlantic Ocean has actually been traversed in a balloon, and in the incredibly brief period of three days! Eight persons have crossed in the machine, among others Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr. Monck Mason. We have barely time now to announce this most novel and unexpected intelligence, but we hope by ten this morning to have ready an extra with a detailed account of the voyage.
P. S.—The extra will be positively ready, and for sale at our counter, by ten o’clock this morning. It will embrace all the particulars yet known. We have also placed in the hands of an excellent artist a representation of the “Steering Balloon,” which will accompany the particulars of the voyage.
The promised extra bore a head of stud-horse type, six banks in all, and as many inches deep.
“Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk!” it announced. “The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!—Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying-Machine!!!—Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, Near Charleston, of Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and Four Others in the Steering Balloon Victoria, after a Passage of Seventy-Five Hours from Land to Land—Full Particulars of the Voyage!!!”
The great problem is at length solved. The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon! And this, too, without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore!
By the energy of an agent at Charleston, South Carolina, we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst, Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck; Mr. Monck Mason, and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of “Jack Sheppard,” et cetera, and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying-machine—with two seamen from Woolwich—in all, eight persons.
The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as with a slight exception they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.
The story that followed was about five thousand words in length. To summarize it, Monck Mason had applied the principle of the Archimedean screw to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon. The gas-bag was an ellipsoid thirteen feet long, with a car suspended from it. The screw propeller, which was attached to the car, was operated by a spring. A rudder shaped like a battledore kept the air-ship on its course.
The voyagers, according to the story, started from Mr. Osborne’s home near Penstruthal, in North Wales, intending to sail across the English Channel. The mechanism of the propeller broke, and the balloon, caught in a strong northeast wind, was carried across the Atlantic at the speed of sixty or more miles an hour. Mr. Mason kept a journal, to which, at the end of each day, Mr. Ainsworth added a postscript. The balloon landed safely on the coast of South Carolina, near Fort Moultrie.
The names of the supposed voyagers were well chosen by Poe to give verisimilitude to the hoax. Monck Mason and Robert Holland, or Hollond, were of the small party which actually sailed from Vauxhall Gardens, London, on the afternoon of November 7, 1836, in the balloon Nassau and landed at Weilburg, in Germany, five hundred miles away, eighteen hours later. Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, was then one of the shining stars of English literary life. The others named by Poe were familiar figures of the period.
Poe adopted the plan, used so successfully by Locke in the moon hoax, of having real people do the thing that they would like to do; but there the resemblance of the two hoaxes ends, except for the technical bits that Poe was able to inject into his narrative. The moon hoax lasted for weeks; the balloon hoax for a day. Even the Sun did not attempt to bolster it, for it said the second day afterward:
BALLOON—The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible.
About a week later, when the Sun was still being pounded by its contemporaries, a few of which had been gulled into rewriting the story, another editorial article on the hoax appeared:
BALLOON EXPRESS—We have been somewhat amused with the comments of the press upon the balloon express. The more intelligent editors saw its object at once. On the other hand, many of our esteemed contemporaries—those who are too ignorant to appreciate the pleasant satire—have ascribed to us the worst and basest motives. We expected as much.
The “pleasant satire” of which the Sun spoke was evidently meant to hold up to view the craze of the day for speed in the transmission of news and men. Yet the Sun itself, as the leader of penny journalism, had been to a great extent the cause of this craze. It had taught the people to read the news and to hanker for more.
There was another story which Poe and the Sun shared—one that will outlive even the balloon hoax. Almost buried on the third page of the Sun of July 28, 1841, was this advertisement in agate type:
Left her home on Sunday morning, July 25, a young lady; had on a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light-colored shoes, and parasol light-colored; it is supposed some accident has befallen her. Whoever will give information respecting her at 126 Nassau shall be rewarded for their trouble.
The next day the Sun said in its news columns:
The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.
The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken. To the Sun, which had then no Poe, no Sherlock Holmes, the murder was the text for a moral lesson:
There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale of articles purchased exclusively by males—especially of cigar-stores and drinking-houses—young and beautiful females for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and consequent custom, of the other sex—especially of the young and thoughtless.
It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being used as an instrument of cupidity—as a sort of “man-trap” to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the spendthrift and of constant dissipation—she has become the victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to engender and encourage.
The Sun and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill, and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to the ship Kalamazoo, for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene transferred to Paris.
The great social event of the town in 1842 was the visit of Charles Dickens. He had been expected for several years. In fact, as far back as October 13, 1838, the Sun remarked:
Boz is coming to America. We hope he will not make a fool of himself here, like a majority of his distinguished countrymen who preceded him.
The Sun got out an extra on the day when Dickens landed, but it was not in honour of Boz, but rather because of the arrival of the Britannia with a budget of foreign news. Buried in a mass of Continental paragraphs was this one:
Among the passengers are Mr. Charles Dickens, the celebrated author, and his lady.
The ship-news man never even thought to ask Dickens how he liked America. But society was waiting for Boz, and he was tossed about on a lively sea of receptions and dinners. The Sun presently thought that the young author was being exploited overmuch:
Mr. Dickens, we have no doubt, is a very respectable gentleman, and we know that he is a very clever and agreeable author. He has written seve