The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (13 page)

Locke called it—six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and “had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays.” (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.) For most of the
Sun’
s readers—and likely Benjamin Day as well—the story of Matthias was just a sensational case of murder, one made especially

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appealing by the air of depravity swirling around it. For many observers, though, the trial became something greater, and Matthias himself a dark symbol of a host of modern ills. Among conservative Christians, he was seen as a warning sign of rising Jacksonian democracy, of abolitionism, individualism, and godless doctrines imperiling social stability. Jacksonians countered that he represented the kind of fanaticism that led to a dangerous moral righteousness. For at least one radical editor, George Henry Evans of the
Workingman’s Advocate,
Matthias was a religious con man of the type that was flourishing in “this age of imposture.” Others, more sanguine in their outlook, took Matthias’s limited popularity, and his subsequent downfall and imprisonment, as an indication of the essential health of American society.

Richard Adams Locke saw something else in the story of Matthias the Prophet. It was not just a cautionary tale about the dangers of religious delusion (although it was that as well), but also a stark illustration of the struggle between the competing claims of religion and science. Long a religious freethinker—one who had managed to alienate himself from both sides of the Protestant-Catholic struggle back in England—and an advocate of the liberating and ennobling power of scientific knowledge, Locke warned in his
Sun
series about the dangers that arose from sacrificing rationality to faith. He pointed out that Matthias had found his followers not among the poor but rather among New Yorkers of wealth, intelligence, and high station; while it might be assumed that such advantages would prevent people from falling victim to this brand of religious imposture, recent history was rife with counterexamples—among them Joanna Southcott, the mystic prophetess of Devon (Locke had been living nearby in Somerset at the time of her death in 1814), who had declared herself to be the woman that the Book of Revelation had foretold would give birth to the future Messiah. Southcott’s theories, Locke reminded his readers, had found far more adherents among the English literati than had those of any of the leading scientists working to increase the stores of human knowledge. “Nearly every religious delusion,” he wrote, “occupies a position in the imagination which reason and science cannot reach, and stands with a self-consecrated circle which they cannot pass.” The fear and mistrust of science, though, could be found not only in religious delusion of the sort exemplified by Southcott and Matthias, but in religious belief generally.

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There is, indeed, no religion, however rational and pure, but repudiates the application of reason and science to many of its mysteries as pre-sumptuous and profane. It assumes to have domes and spires too loftily and too brilliantly commingled with celestial radiance, for the inspection of the human intellect. There are lines of demarcation between the kingdoms of reason and of faith, which cannot be crossed by subjects of either, without instant hostilities and deadly warfare; and as faith is generally content with her own fertile dominions, so will she never yield them to the pretensions of her restless neighbor.

The long conflict between “the kingdoms of reason and faith” was a topic about which Richard Adams Locke cared deeply. He would return to it later that year, with far greater effect, in his moon series.

Richard Adams Locke’s Matthias articles were enormously popular with the readers of the
Sun
. Indeed, the articles were so much in demand that only two days after the series completed its run, Benjamin Day issued it as an octavo-size pamphlet, sixteen pages long, with the same dramatic title as the individual articles. The cover page featured a large illustration of Matthias in his astronomical robe, one hand resting on his double-edged sword, the other holding aloft his prophet’s rod, his long hair and beard luxuriant, his eyes menacing under heavy brows. (The
Sun’
s readers had never before seen any images of Matthias, who, as Locke pointedly indicated, “startlingly resembles the most celebrated pictures of Christ, at a mature age, by the old masters.”) The
Sun
printed ten thousand copies of the pamphlet, which Benjamin Day gave to his newsboys to hawk on the streets of the city. That the articles had already appeared in the
Sun
seems to have diminished the popularity of the pamphlet not at all, for the boys sold more than six thousand on the first day alone. Day had priced the pamphlets at three cents per copy, which meant total sales upward of $180; assuming that he maintained the same split in the sale of the pamphlets as he did with the daily papers (with the newsboys keeping one-quarter to one-third of the money they brought in), he had made more than $120 in a single day.

(Less than two years before, of course, Day could afford to pay George Wisner a salary of only four dollars per week, and by 1835 twelve dollars was considered a reasonable weekly salary for an editor.) Over the

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next several weeks the pamphlet continued to sell, in the phrase of the time, like hot cakes; ultimately, according to William Griggs in his account of the moon series, more than forty thousand copies of the pamphlet would be sold. Even allowing for a certain amount of exaggeration on Griggs’s part, sales of
Memoirs of Matthias the Prophet
undoubtedly earned the
Sun
several hundred dollars at least, and perhaps even as much as a thousand.

It was a windfall for the
Sun,
and Benjamin Day was, in his own gruff way, overjoyed by the results. He was also instructed by them. Suddenly he understood that enormous profits could be made from material that had appeared in the newspaper, if the right subject matter was given skill-ful handling; and Richard Adams Locke, the writer whose talents had allowed him this insight, assumed a new importance in his eyes. Locke had by now returned full-time to the
Courier and Enquirer.
Day paid him $150 for his work on the Matthias case—for Locke, it was equivalent to several months’ salary—and promised him a similar amount for any other series of popular articles that he might care to write for the
Sun.
Locke set about finding one.

So the summer of 1835 commenced. In June a new play premiered at the Bowery Theatre, a comedy with an unlikely subject—it was called
Matthias the Prophet.
Nearby, the City Saloon was showing Henry Hanington’s peristrephic dioramas, or moving scenes of animated nature; the vast canvases, slowly turned and combined with the most convincing light and sound effects, allowed audiences to inhabit a pastoral Italian scene, a shipwreck at sea, and, most entertaining of all, the conflagration of Moscow. Crowds gathered in front of Coleman’s bookshop on Broadway, where the front window displayed magnificent color plates from Audubon’s
Birds of America.
Everywhere in the city, the talk was of real estate; speculation in land ran rampant, with large swaths of the countryside in upper Manhattan going under the auctioneer’s gavel. Immense fortunes were made with the stroke of a pen. “There must come a change,”

the former mayor Philip Hone worried in his diary, “and when it does, woe to those who are caught!”

In an overcrowded city built mostly of wood, fire was a constant threat. The large fire bell in the cupola of City Hall tolled almost every night, the sentinel stationed beside it shining his lantern, like Paul Revere’s compatriots in Boston’s Old North Church, in the direction of the

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blaze. Disasters struck and were averted. A boy playing near a third-story window of the National Hotel on Broadway lost his balance and fell out, and would surely have plunged to his death but for the intervention of the hotel awning below; the boy bounced on the awning for a few moments, as if being tossed by a blanket, and then was rescued entirely unharmed. For nights on end hundreds of young men fought in the streets around the Chatham Market, to the battle cries of “Ireland!” and “America!” Games of roulette could be found on the Bowery, faro on Canal Street, and cutthroat on Park Row. Thousands turned out to watch the foot races on the Hunting Park Course and the Harlem Trotting Course. Regularly collecting the winner’s purse, which often totaled several hundred dollars, was the celebrated Stannard, who could run the three-mile course in just over sixteen minutes; his main rival was an Iro-quois known only as Barefoot. Up in Harlem, a man named George Crosby rode a horse bareback for a mile in two minutes and forty seconds, a feat that local horse enthusiasts claimed demonstrated the North’s superiority over the South in riding. On weekends, when the weather was good, New Yorkers escaped the dirt and smell of the city with a ferry ride across the Hudson River to Hoboken. Not far from the ferry terminal, a winding footpath shaded by large oak trees gradually opened up to reveal the pleasure garden called the Elysian Fields. Its manicured lawn undulating down to the water’s edge, surrounded by bu-colic meadows and forests, with gravel terraces and a refreshments pavil-ion, it made a perfect spot for a picnic supper on a warm day. Nearby was the Sybil’s Cave, a spacious cavern with a bubbling spring, carved by the proprietor of the Fields out of solid rock.

Among those looking to enjoy the pleasures of the Sybil’s Cave on the first weekend of June was William Attree, formerly the police reporter for the
Transcript,
now working for the
Courier and Enquirer.
That Saturday afternoon Attree and a woman named Eveline Reynolds crossed to Hoboken by ferry and then strolled along the river, arm in arm, to the Sybil’s Cave. The pair had just entered the cave, with Attree bending down to get Reynolds a cup of water from the spring, when someone leaped out from behind one of the artificial columns supporting the roof and bludgeoned Attree on the back of the head. Attree instantly crum-pled to the ground, but his assailant continued to beat him, kicking and stomping him on his head and chest, finally pulling out a knife and stab-bing him in the face, the blade passing through the left side of Attree’s
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nose near the bridge and—according to the first physician who attended him—piercing his brain.

Frantic, shrieking in terror, Eveline Reynolds ran from the cave in search of help. She managed to find some men nearby; one of them, as it turned out, was George Wisner, the editor of the
Sun
and Attree’s longtime rival at the police court, who by sheer coincidence had been out on the Elysian Fields that same afternoon. Wisner and the others ran back to the cave, but by that time the attacker had escaped.

Two days later Attree’s assailant was tracked down and captured in Hoboken, where he was identified as a barber named John Boyd. It turned out that in the
Transcript
’s police column William Attree had reported an assault charge made against Boyd by a prostitute who worked in a brothel on Duane Street (where Attree himself happened to be a regular client); Boyd had been especially infuriated by the story’s allegation that his wife supported them both by working as a hairdresser for prostitutes. That Saturday afternoon, he had noticed Attree passing by his Barclay Street barbershop on the way to the Hoboken ferry. Boyd was a member of the Chichesters, a notoriously ruthless Five Points gang; quickly he gathered a few of his Chichester fellows and together they boarded the ferry with their intended victim. Disembarking at Hoboken, they trailed Attree and Reynolds, waiting for the opportunity to strike. Boyd must have walked right by the strolling couple on the path to the Sybil’s Cave, a perfect hiding place from which to make his ambush.

Attree’s surgeons pronounced his condition so precarious that he might not survive, but he made a remarkable recovery and within a month was back to reporting for the
Courier.
George Wisner, on the other hand, seems to have been deeply unnerved by the events in the Sybil’s Cave. (In a
Sun
editorial following the attack, he declared that he was armed and “ready to blow out the brains of any man that lays his hands upon us.”) He had passed countless hours sitting beside Attree in the morning court, had developed a certain intimacy with him in the way that old rivals do, and it would not have been surprising if he had begun to contemplate how the victim might just as well have been him, or might the next time
be
him. John Boyd was behind bars, at least temporarily, but his friends still walked free. Nor were the Chichesters the only gang in town. In any of the low places of the Five Points—in the pitch-dark allies, the seamen’s bars with walls brightened by pictures of Black-Eyed Susan and Paul Jones the Pirate, the hideous underground dens thick
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with the smoke of charcoal fires—could be found Roach Guards, Shirt Tails, and Plug Uglies (so called for the oversize plug hats they wore, lined with leather and wool, very useful for protecting the skull during a fight), many of whose members Wisner had publicly named in the police court reports of the
Sun.

Wisner was living on Chambers Street, about a five-minute walk from the Five Points; more ominously, he was still covering the police court, where every defendant, or defendant’s friend, loomed as a potential assassin. It would have been frightening enough were he still single, but he now had a wife and a young son depending on him, and his health, he could tell, was beginning to slip. For the better part of two years he had taken poor care of himself, writing deep into the night and then waking before sunup for court. His constitution had always been delicate, but he was troubled by how weak his lungs had become, how tired he became during his rounds of the city. His large dark eyes seemed now larger against the hollows of his face, darker against the pallor of his skin. Nor was he help-ing himself by his habit of chewing tobacco; he was little seen anymore without the telltale bulge of a chaw in his cheek. (Wisner was hardly alone in this. After his visit to America, Charles Dickens complained of “the odious practice of chewing and expectorating” he had witnessed in public places.) At the office he and Benjamin Day had taken to quarreling, particularly over slavery, an issue that increasingly dominated Wisner’s mind.