The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (14 page)

“He was a pretty smart fellow, but he and I never agreed,” Day recalled in an interview years later. “We split on politics. You see, I was rather democratic in my notions; Wisner, whenever he got a chance, was always sticking in his damned little Abolitionist articles.”

By the last week of June, less than three weeks after the assault on Attree at the Elysian Fields, George Wisner decided he had had enough. He sat down with Benjamin Day and together they worked out a deal in which Day would pay him five thousand dollars for his half-ownership of the
Sun
—five thousand dollars, when just two years earlier he had been content to work for four dollars a week. It was a fitting payment, he believed, for all his hard work; most important, it was enough to make a fresh start.

Of late, Wisner had been especially interested in the stories he was hearing about Michigan. Brought close by the recently built Erie Canal, the territory had become a magnet for emigrants from upstate New York, including one of his sisters. Perhaps there, in the clean, sharp air of the

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country, away from the constant pressure of turning out a daily paper, he might regain his health. He had been thinking about becoming a lawyer, maybe even one day going into politics. He was still only twenty-three years old.

With Wisner’s departure for Michigan, Benjamin Day had to find himself a new editor. There was, he decided, only one man for the job.

The story of how Richard Adams Locke came to replace George Wisner as the editor of the
Sun
is, like so much of Locke’s life, shadowed by contradiction. As Benjamin Day recalled it, around the time of Wisner’s departure Locke came to him looking for work, claiming that James Watson Webb had fired him after discovering that he was the author of the
Sun’
s Matthias series. Locke’s assertion that his work for the
Sun
had caused his dismissal might have been accurate, or it might have been an effort to play on Day’s sympathies. Benjamin Day, who could not be accused of having an excess of sympathy, always resisted this explanation (in an interview near the end of his life, he used the verb “pretended” in describing Locke’s version of events), suspecting instead that Locke had been fired because of a drinking problem—although this notion casts doubts on his own judgment, as it raises the question of why he would choose to hire such a man as his editor. Yet another account has Locke leaving the
Courier and Enquirer
as a result of a conflict with the paper’s managing editor, Edward Hoskin, and Hoskin did occasionally appear in an unflattering light in the
Sun’
s pages while Locke was editor there, including, during the moon series controversy, a reference to him as the
Courier’
s “supervising (or su-pervicious) editor.” So Locke was fired because he moonlighted for the
Sun,
Locke was fired because he drank too much, Locke was fired because he couldn’t get along with his boss. Each explanation points to a different cause, and each has been advanced in opposition to the others. And each may well be, at least in part, correct.

In May 1835, flush with the money from his Matthias series, Richard Adams Locke moved with his family from Duane Street several blocks north to 30 Franklin Street, between Centre and Elm. The Lockes had finally escaped the incessant noise rising from the Chatham Street marketplace, but their new residence was peaceful only by comparison; it lay across from the State Arsenal and beside the state-owned public yard, later to be taken by the New York and Harlem Railroad for its freight depot.

Locke had now been with the
Courier and Enquirer
for the better part of

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The Atrocious Impositions of Matthias

two years, and he must have been feeling frustrated with his situation there. He could not have gotten on well with James Watson Webb, he of the silvery sideburns and piercing blue eyes, who modeled himself on the aristocrats from whom Locke had fled in England; nor could Locke have been proud of his association with a newspaper so closely aligned with the interests of Southern slaveholders and Northern nativists. The
Courier
had provided his family a steady income and given him an entry into the world of New York journalism, but after two years he must have been tired of dissipating his talents on thieves and pimps and wife beaters, when his mind was engaged with larger questions.

How, he may well have wondered, had he come to this? He had a writing style all his own, an erudition that in the newspaper district was surpassed only by that of William Cullen Bryant himself, and he had the ability to capture and hold an audience’s attention. The astonishing success of the Matthias series had proven that beyond dispute. For the
Sun
he had lavished thousands of words on a single subject, yet now he was back to turning out his police paragraphs for Colonel Webb. When he was twenty-one he was reviewing works of literature and Italian history; when he was twenty-three he explored the nature of God. It was not merely the hubris of youth to imagine that he would be doing that sort of writing forever. The Matthias series had given him the unexpected opportunity to bring his learning to bear once more on his writing, to address critical issues of science and faith. He had felt liberated, but the feeling had lasted only briefly—until he clapped back on the irons of the police court.

So it would not be surprising if, in his boredom and frustration, he had taken to drinking, most likely at Windust’s restaurant on Park Row, a popular gathering place for newspapermen and—this would have been especially appealing to Locke—English actors in town to perform Shakespeare at one of the nearby theatrical houses. (Quotations from Shakespeare adorned the restaurant’s walls; above the beefsteak broiler hung these lines from
Macbeth:
“If it were done, when ’tis done / Then ’twere well ’twere done quickly.”) Maybe, done in by drink and resentment, Locke missed a few sunrise sessions of the police court; maybe he resisted Hoskin’s demands to cover yet another tragedy, to plunge himself again into miseries better imagined than described. (According to James Gordon Bennett of the
Herald,
who had been working for the
Courier
at the time, Locke had wanted to write editorials but was rebuffed by Hoskin.) Locke’s position at the
Courier and Enquirer
would already have been
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growing precarious when Colonel James Watson Webb—not a man who suffered insubordination lightly—learned the name of the anonymous author of
Memoirs of Matthias the Prophet.

It was May 1835; in a few weeks George Wisner would announce that he was leaving the
Sun
and Benjamin Day would begin to look for another editor. Day had greatly admired Locke’s work for the
Courier,
and his coverage of the Matthias trial for the
Sun
had turned a handsome profit for everyone. Now, with the editor’s seat unfilled and Locke in need of a job, it only made sense to see if together they might find success anew.

He offered Locke the
Sun
editorship at a salary of twelve dollars a week.

It wasn’t much money, to be sure (five thousand dollars to the poorer, Day was done handing out shares of the paper to his editors), but Locke accepted the offer nonetheless. A decade after he was forced to step down at the
Bridgwater and Somersetshire Herald,
Richard Adams Locke was a newspaper editor once again.

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c h a p t e r
5

“The Evil Spirit of

the Times”

Richard Adams Locke was not the only new editor in town. Nor, among the new editors, was he the only immigrant from Great Britain, nor, remarkably enough, the only new British editor with crossed eyes. At the beginning of May, just as the
Sun
was winning thousands of new readers with its Matthias series, a cross-eyed, Scottish-born newspaperman named James Gordon Bennett took a room in a cellar office on Ann Street, jury-rigged a desk from a pine plank stretched across two flour barrels, and began to publish a penny paper he called the
Morning
Herald.
Within a matter of weeks it had established itself as the
Sun’
s most dangerous rival, and Bennett himself as Richard Adams Locke’s most capable enemy.

Many New Yorkers considered James Gordon Bennett their enemy, for Bennett was one of those men who make enemies as naturally—and, seemingly, as happily—as others make friends. In the course of his long career at the
Herald,
he suffered numerous public beatings, many of them administered by rival editors; once conducted a duel with another editor in Hoboken (though shots were fired, both men escaped unharmed); and was even the target of an assassination attempt, foiled only when the mysterious package that had arrived at his office began leaking black powder and was discovered to be a bomb. Once for a full year the city’s other papers set aside their differences to join in a campaign intended to put the
Herald
out of business forever; over time this struggle became known as the Moral War, sounding less like a boycott of a hated rival than a crusade
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against wickedness itself. In 1842 Bennett was described this way by the editor of the
New York Aurora:

A reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh or fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth; a creature, hated by his nearest intimates, and bearing the consciousness thereof upon his distorted features, and upon his despicable soul; one whom good men avoid as a blot to his nature—whom all despise, and whom no one blesses—
all this
is James Gordon Bennett.

So wrote the twenty-three-year-old Walt Whitman.

Bennett himself would not have been entirely displeased by Whitman’s characterization, for he seemed to believe in the Latin maxim that it is an unhappy fortune to have no enemies. He reveled in the invective hurled at him by other editors (“lowest species of scurrility,” James Watson Webb called him; “polluter of the press,” said Mordecai Manuel Noah) and often tried to provoke it, understanding that people would buy his newspaper just to find out who his next target would be, and that every editorial response from a rival newspaper constituted, for him, free advertising.

He ridiculed every sector of society except the readers of the
Herald,
for whom he expressed only the highest respect and affection. He trafficked freely in racial and ethnic slurs. Jews, he once declared, were “without a single redeeming feature, except the beauty, excellence, black eyes, small feet, and fine forms of their women.” He called rival editor Park Benjamin, who was physically handicapped, “half Jew, half infidel, with a touch of the monster.” In an early editorial he derided the
Sun
as a “dirty, sneaking, drivelling contemporary nigger paper.” Elsewhere he observed, “The existing position of the Southern colored races”—that is to say, enslaved—“is their natural position.” Raised as a Catholic in Scotland and trained for the priesthood, as an adult he turned against the Church with the special bitterness of the disillusioned former lover. The Catholic Church, said Bennett, “has seen her best day, and aught henceforth to be preserved in Museums, or venerated as an old Gothic edifice, or Grecian temple, but no more.”

Bennett delighted in shocking those he considered prudes, using the word
leg
when other newspapers allowed themselves only
limb
(sometimes, as a joke, he used
branch
instead) and, most shockingly, referring

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to underwear as
pantaloons
rather than by the common euphemism
inexpressibles.
“Petticoats—petticoats—petticoats,” he exclaimed in one editorial, “there—you fastidious fools—vent your mawkishness on that!” For years he sold advertising space to the city’s most notorious abortionist, Madame Restell of Greenwich Street, whose advertisements promised “a simple, easy, healthy, and CERTAIN remedy,” at the price of only five dollars a package. (If that treatment failed—for the remedy was by no means certain—Madame Restell resorted to a painful and risky procedure using a wire.) He specialized in blind items about lecherous clergymen and amorous widows, about adulterous politicians and beautiful young women who sipped champagne in high-priced brothels. He preferred the more gruesome crimes, the more sordid scandals, because they sold more papers and confirmed his belief in the essential nature of human depravity.

In an industry dominated by arrogant, egotistical men, Bennett was the
ne plus ultra.
Early in his career he declared that he intended to be the genius of newspapers, as Shakespeare was genius of the drama and Byron genius of the poem. He bestowed on himself the military title of General, just so that he might outrank his two former employers, Colonel Webb of the
Courier
and Major Noah of the
Star.
Until his marriage at forty-five, he used the newspaper
’
s editorial page as his own lonely hearts column, advertising his charms to the paper’s female readers; when he married, he ran news of his honeymoon on the
Herald’
s front page. Bennett was rail thin, even gaunt, for he ate sparingly (he much preferred to work than to eat), and had the slump-shouldered posture common among tall men. His voice was loud, and his Scottish burr was as thick as oatmeal. He had long, wavy hair, a hooked nose, and steel-gray eyes, one of which veered alarmingly toward the other, as if he were unable ever to pull his gaze from the subject that fascinated him the most: James Gordon Bennett himself.

Henry J. Raymond, the legendary founding editor of the
New York
Times,
was once heard to cry, “It would be worth my while, sir, to give a million dollars, if the Devil would come and tell me every evening, as he does Bennett, what the people of New York would like to read about the next morning.” For Raymond, as for New York’s other newspaper editors, Bennett was an especially maddening foe because he was so very good at his job. He believed that newspapers could be, in his words, “the greatest organ of social life” (replacing literature, theater, and, especially,
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