The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (37 page)

In hindsight, Richard Adams Locke must have seemed the obvious cul-prit. Not only was he the editor of the newspaper to which the Edinburgh

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supplement had allegedly been provided, but he was well-known for his learnedness, at least within the few blocks of New York’s newspaper district. (No one seems to have been aware that he had not attended “one of the English Universities,” as he vaguely expressed it in his letter to the
Evening Star.
) Moreover, Locke’s Matthias pamphlet had demonstrated that he could comfortably handle the demands of a long narrative. By September, then, with Locke under heavy suspicion and the man-bats having produced their artwork in the shadow of their temples (a scene that even the most credulous reader might find difficult to credit), the moon series retained few supporters among the city press. Even the
Daily Advertiser,
once its strongest advocate, now acknowledged that the series was an “article of fiction.” New York’s other newspapers branded it a hoax, if a particularly ingenious one.

That charge was soon taken up by newspapers around the country.

“The Great Hoax,” the series was called in the
Indiana Democrat
of Indianapolis; “Stupendous Hoax,” said St. Louis’s
Missouri Republic;
“A Consummate Hoax,” declared the Mobile
Daily Commercial Register
and Patriot.
But even as they denied the truth of the story, America’s newspapers could not resist printing it. Throughout the month, as the mail from New York traveled farther west, newspapers brought the series to readers in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, and many smaller cities and towns.
Great Astronomical Discoveries
became the most widely circulated newspaper story of its time.

“With our American papers, it seems to be a subject that never tires,”

Locke observed in the
Sun,
adding an apt citation from
Hamlet:
“They resume it again and again, as if their appetite had increased by what it fed on.” New York’s editors, having envied the
Sun
its moon series in August, now had to see it again in September, in the newspapers they received in free exchange from around the country. “Our exchange papers are filled with the clever hoax of discoveries in the Moon,” noted the
Evening Star.

“We wish for the sake of news, that the moon would stand still.”

For its part, the
Sun
did not admit to having perpetrated a hoax (a decision so important would presumably have been made by Benjamin Day himself), but as the month went along its denials became less insistent. On Tuesday, September 1, the day after the series concluded, the
Sun
had issued its strongest defense of the series—though without ever quite claiming it to be genuine. Instead, the paper focused attention on its rivals, praising the newspapers that had accepted the discoveries as “the sensible, candid and
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scientific portions of the public press” and condemning its more skeptical contemporaries as those “to whom none of those attributes can be ascribed.” To profess disbelief of the Herschel series, the
Sun
seemed to be saying, was to cast oneself with the enemies of science, even of reason itself.

As might be expected, given Richard Adams Locke’s political beliefs, much of the
Sun
’s argument for the series—specious as Locke surely knew it to be—was framed by the conflict between science and religion. Ignorance, he pointed out, had always found cause to doubt the most important scientific discoveries, but in matters of religion it “could swallow any dogmas, however great, that are given upon the authority of names.” He recalled how “those who in a former age imprisoned Galileo for asserting his great discoveries with the telescope, and determined upon sentencing him to be burnt alive, nevertheless believed that Simon Magus actually flew in the air by the aid of the devil.” New York’s newspapers were hardly immune from what he termed “the most improbable credenda of extravagant systems of faith.” The
Journal of Commerce,
he noted, had denounced the moon series, and yet that paper—the two editors of which were both devout Christians—“believes and defends the innocence of the murderer Avery.” (Reverend Ephraim K. Avery was the Methodist minister acquitted by a Rhode Island jury of the murder of a young woman; Richard Adams Locke had served as court reporter for the trial.) Locke concluded the item with a reference to the mathematical calculations, said to have been extracted from a page of John Herschel’s notes, that had appeared the day before in the
Sun.
He claimed to have received assurances from “several eminent mathematicians” that the work was correct, and indeed “the greatest mathematical discovery of the present age.” These testimonials he asserted as evidence of the
Supplement’
s authenticity. “We did not make it,” Locke insisted about the work, “for we know nothing of mathematics whatever.” While the first part of that statement may have been true enough, the same cannot be said for his conclusion: “therefore, it was made by the only person to whom it can rationally be ascribed, namely Herschel the astronomer, its only avowed and undeniable author.” As Locke surely understood, there was no logical reason why, if the calculations had not been made by the editor of the
Sun,
they had therefore been made by John Herschel. In fact, he had taken the calculations from a recently published paper by Wilhelm Olbers (the German astronomer mentioned alongside Gruithuisen and Gauss in the
Edinburgh
New Philosophical Journal
article “The Moon and its Inhabitants”)—a
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paper, presumably, that had not yet been read by those “several eminent mathematicians.”

Locke was working too hard, reaching too far, to make his claims for the genuineness of
Great Astronomical Discoveries;
surely he was growing tired of having to defend a proposition that could not be truthfully defended. Indeed, in his subsequent comments on the topic he sought to shift the discussion away from the authenticity of the moon series to the other subject that so occupied the city’s attention: the abolition of slavery.

By the end of the week the
Sun
was asserting:

We go from the genuineness of the discoveries because we like a sprinkle of the marvellous and because we hope that, by directing all eyes to the ladies and gentlemen of the moon, there will be less devilment practiced on earth. We are curious to know whether
Lynch Law
exists amongst our Lunar neighbors, or whether they have not yet arrived at that degree of
refinement!

“Lynch law,” a term that seems to have entered into common usage in 1835, referred to mob violence, most often directed against blacks and abolitionists. (“Lynching” at that time applied to many kinds of violence and not just to hanging, as the term came to be understood later.) All through that autumn, alongside its regular coverage of local crime and entertainment, the
Sun
carried news of the latest outrages: a former semi-narian in Kentucky seized by a mob and whipped until nearly dead, the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison paraded about the city with a noose around his neck, a Presbyterian minister hanged in Louisiana for distributing abolition pamphlets. As always, the
Sun
directed much of its outrage against the newspapers sympathetic to the Southern cause—those whom Locke denounced as “the purchased, the collared, the hungry pack of New York editors, who, under the plausible pretext of crying down the immediate abolitionists, have been struggling to destroy the moral sense of the community with regard to the iniquity of slavery.” For instance, a long article in the
Courier and Enquirer
had asserted the right of slaveholding states to demand the extradition of the abolitionist leader Arthur Tappan to the South (where he would surely face execution, if not by legal decree then by Lynch law). “What if we were to write an article,” the
Sun
inquired, “to prove that the British government at Botany-bay has an international right to one of the Courier editors?”

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On September 16, the
Sun
brought together the two issues by means of a curious apologia for the moon series: it had provided a welcome respite from the nationwide conflict over slavery.

Most of those who incredulously regard the whole narrative as a hoax, are generously enthusiastic in panegyrizing not only what they are pleased to denominate its ingenuity and talent, but also its useful effect in diverting the public mind, for a while, from that bitter apple of discord, the abolition of slavery; which still unhappily threatens to turn the milk of human kindness into the rancorous gall. That the astronomical discoveries have transiently had this effect, is obvious from our exchange papers; for abolition and astronomy being the only matters of exciting interest on the tapis, all the brilliant editorializing which have been expended on the latter, would have become inflammable matter devoted to increase the combustible horrors of the former. Who knows, therefore, whether these discoveries in the moon, with the visions of the blissful harmony of her inhabitants which they have revealed, may not have had the effect of reproving the discords of a country which might be as happy as a paradise! which has valleys not less lovely than those of the Ruby Colosseum, of the Unicorn, or of the Triads; and which has not inferior facilities for social intercourse, to those possessed by the vespertiliones-hominem, or any other hominem whatever?

Richard Adams Locke, who daily chronicled in the
Sun
the horrors being visited on slaves and abolitionists, surely did not believe that his moon story would have any discernible effect on the enduring institution of slavery; but in September of 1835, as race riots still raged throughout the country, he must have found some brief pleasure in imagining that it might.

By the middle of September the moon story had grown beyond the confines of journalism and entered the realm of popular culture. On September 14, just two weeks after the final installment of
Great Astronomical
Discoveries,
a play inspired by the
Sun’
s series premiered at the Bowery Theatre. The Bowery had opened in 1826 as one of New York’s largest and most fashionable theaters—it was the first in the country to have a stage lit entirely by gas—and within its first four years had twice burned to the ground. The rebuilt theater, like so many of the city’s newer structures, was
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designed in the Greek Revival style; modeled on the Temple of Theseus in Athens, it had great Doric columns and a portico patriotically ornamented with a large golden eagle. The interior was just as magnificent, especially the boxes, painted gold in the front and a delicate pink in the back (to show off their occupants to best advantage), where tickets cost seventy-five cents; tickets for the gallery cost a quarter, while down in the pit, where the newsboys reigned, a seat could be had for just three and a half cents.

The Bowery’s program usually comprised a selection of short plays, which by the middle of September included the new comic extravaganza
Moonshine, or Lunar Discoveries,
written by the manager of the theater, Thomas Hamblin. It starred Henry J. Finn (not the Finn who worked for the
Journal of Commerce
), the immensely popular actor who was reprising his role as Major Jack Downing, a character originally created by the Maine humorist Seba Smith. In
Moonshine,
the sharp-witted Major Downing becomes embroiled in a series of comical misadventures with the lunar inhabitants King Moonshine, Prince Mooncalf, and Lord Pigeon Wing. The actual plot of the play is no longer remembered (it seems to have eluded even some of those in the audience), but in the climactic scene Major Downing, having failed to bag a flock of man-bats with his rifle, blows them up with a highly combustible bundle of abolitionist tracts.

Moonshine,
the
Sun
declared, was “the most amusing thing that has been on these boards for a long time,” and it played to overflow audiences for the length of its run at the Bowery—one that was all too brief, because the next week Finn had to leave town to play an engagement elsewhere.

Fortunately, New Yorkers could soon enjoy another spectacle inspired by Locke’s moon series. At the City Saloon on Broadway, the resident artist Henry Hanington had long been delighting crowds with his moving dioramas (peristrephic dioramas, he called them), vast rotating canvases with sound and light effects carefully designed to create the illusion of reality. Hanington had made a great hit with “The Deluge,” his rendering of the biblical account of the Great Flood, from the darkening of the heavens to the advent of the rainbow and the return of the dove. It was followed by the equally dramatic (if less morally elevated) “The Storm and Shipwreck,” with its remarkable effects of rain and lightning and thunder.

A more relaxing tone was then established with the pastoral “Scene in Italy,” a trip through the Italian countryside that culminated in a funeral procession of monks by torchlight, who laid their companion to rest to the solemn tolling of the abbey bell. The final diorama, “The Conflagra-

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tion of Moscow,” depicted the burning of Moscow by the city’s residents as Napoleon’s army approached; in the climactic scene, conducted to the sound of distant explosions, a Russian patriot set fire to the castle of his ancestors and then fled to the surrounding forests to join the struggle against the French invaders.

On September 28, these dioramas were joined by another, called

“Lunar Discoveries,” which illustrated “the reported Lunar observations of Sir John Herschell.” It was the most ambitious spectacle that Henry Hanington had yet conceived. Painted on more than one thousand feet of canvas, the diorama managed to portray the entire lunar landscape, from the Ruby Colosseum to the Vale of Triads: all the mountains, volcanoes, lakes, and rivers of the moon, and its various inhabitants as well, which could be seen, promised the advertisements, “with their natural motions to resemble life.” (Hanington’s renderings of the man-bats were apparently so realistic that during one performance a Newfoundland dog belonging to an audience member began to howl whenever one of them appeared. The dog was “baying at the moon,” joked one observer.) For Richard Adams Locke, who was among the thousands of New Yorkers to attend a showing of Hanington’s dioramas that month, it must have been a deeply affecting experience to see the work of his imagination— work that had become such an object of contention and controversy—so exquisitely rendered on the artist’s immense canvas. There, spread out before him, were the crystal mountains, the hills of amethyst and topaz. The island volcanoes actually seemed to be erupting with smoke and streams of what appeared to be genuine lava; the lunar cataracts rushed and roared; golden pheasants filled the groves with their sweet music; the winged man-bats soared high overhead.