The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (4 page)

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All of the papers were only four pages long. It was a convenient format for publishers, as one sheet printed on both sides and folded over made a tidy four-page newspaper, of which little more than a page consisted of original news content. The front page was taken up by advertisements, which were supplemented by transcripts of speeches, serialized fiction, and, occasionally, special features (most of the papers would reprint the
Sun’
s moon series on their front page). The back page was likewise given over to ads, printed in small type and usually only an inch or two long, much like today’s classifieds. The advertisements paint a vivid portrait of upper-class life in nineteenth-century New York: houses and hotels and country residences for sale and lease, racehorses at auction, silk just arrived from Paris and linen from London, pearl needle cases, cravats made in India and Italy and Germany, coal from Pennsylvania, and sperm oil from Nantucket, as well as a parade of tonics, lotions, ointments, syrups, and elixirs, almost every one named after the doctor who discovered it (“Dr. Root’s Celebrated Ointment,” “Dr. Church’s Antispasmodic Elixir”), and furnishing a certain cure for seemingly every human ailment, including convulsions, falling fits, the salt rheum, fever and ague, bald-ness, long-standing gleets (otherwise known as gonorrhea), involuntary emissions, irregular menses, gout, asthma, nervousness, impurities of the blood, and—if the complaint was of a less readily identifiable nature— general weakness.

Page three featured commercial matters, including inventories of the latest ship clearances, bank note tables, and sales by auction. Only on the second page would a reader find actual news, most of the stories no longer than a couple of paragraphs, mixed in with items that were actually editorials though not labeled as such. (By the 1830s most of the daily newspapers were no longer owned and operated by political parties, as they had been earlier in the century, but they still identified themselves as Whig or Democrat. This was just good business sense, because the party in power distributed lucrative printing contracts to friendly presses.) The papers had few local reporters on staff, and their city coverage tended toward dramatic events like fires or riots, or unfortunate ones like breakins at the better residences or reports of crude gestures made by young dandies at the city’s respectable ladies. Far more space was given to news from around the country, the items usually taken directly from newspapers in other cities, and to international news clipped from the foreign papers brought in by oceangoing packet ships. For a New York newspaper
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editor, it was said, the most important tools of the trade were not pen and paper but a pair of scissors and a paste pot.

Unlike today’s editors, who generally oversee writing done by others, the editor of the 1830s wrote most of the original content that appeared in a newspaper. He also introduced the material reprinted from foreign newspapers, selected letters from readers for publication, and often replied to the letters as well. The editor was the public face of the newspaper, his name often the only one that appeared on a masthead. Editors advised readers about what politicians to vote for, what shows to see, what books to read, even what foods to eat. A newspaper’s fortunes rose and fell on the personality of its editor, and in a crowded field—there were eleven daily newspapers in New York, seven published in the morning and four in the evening—success seems to have required from the editor an unusual level of personal confidence, one not easily distinguishable from pure egotism; a pride that ran into arrogance; and a competitiveness that verged on combativeness. It was not uncommon for rival editors to come to blows when they passed each other on the street, so deep was their personal animosity. Three times in a matter of weeks in 1836 James Watson Webb, the editor of the
Courier and Enquirer,
caned the editor of the
Herald,
James Gordon Bennett, as retribution for critical editorials, the third attack so vicious that Bennett afterward kept a set of loaded pistols in his office. Even the renowned poet William Cullen Bryant, longtime editor of the
Evening Post,
once horsewhipped a fellow editor in front of the American Hotel on Broadway after an exchange of editorial insults; his target, William Leete Stone of the
Commercial Advertiser,
fought back with a bamboo cane that shattered on impact, revealing inside it a long, slender steel sword.

In 1833 the most widely read of the city’s newspapers was Webb’s
Courier and Enquirer,
with a circulation of some 4,500. Among the evening papers, Bryant’s
Evening Post
was the largest, with 3,000 readers, followed by the
Evening Star
at 2,500 and the
Commercial Advertiser
at 2,100. New York’s eleven daily newspapers had a combined circulation of only 26,500—this in a city with a population of more than a quarter million, with tens of thousands more living in Brooklyn and nearby towns.

For all the intensity of their rivalry, the newspapers were actually competing for a very thin slice of the city: those few New Yorkers who could afford to read them. Newspapers cost six cents per copy, and though copies could be bought at a newspaper’s offices, publishers discouraged individual

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sales (they believed that advertisers preferred the guaranteed readership that came from long-term subscriptions) by offering a comparatively lower price for a year’s subscription, ten dollars. This was still a great deal of money, about as much as a skilled artisan might expect to earn for a week’s work. But these papers were not intended for skilled artisans, much less anyone lower on the economic scale. They were intended instead—to use the phrase then coming into vogue—for the upper crust, an emphasis that was reflected in their news coverage, which leaned heavily on international news (vitally important to merchants, since any sort of disruption around the world could dramatically affect the markets for import or export), political and economic news from Washington, currency conversion tables, and other matters of interest to the mercantile readership.

The merchant papers were all produced within a few blocks of each other in lower New York, from Wall Street running up William and Nassau streets, and their coverage of the city extended little farther than that.

Thanks to the editors’ zeal in appropriating the foreign papers, their readers could learn about a new prince installed in Greece or the launch of a new packet ship in Liverpool; thanks to their Washington correspondents, they could learn about the latest debate over the central bank or the passage of a new tariff on cotton or iron; or, thanks to the free exchange with other newspapers around the country, about an Indian battle that had been fought near St. Louis or a record steamship time that had been set in Charleston. But little was ever heard of the doings in nearby Corlear’s Hook or Chatham Square or the Bowery. So closely focused on each other, the editors were blind to the changes that were rapidly overwhelming their city.

As the world’s goods now flowed through New York Harbor, so too the world’s people flowed through the city’s streets. In the 1830s a visitor from Boston remarked with some wonder at the “English, German, French, and Spanish, which, with the addition of Italian, you may hear almost any day, in Broadway, at the hours when it is most frequented”; a local resident marveled at how New York had become a kind of “human patchwork,” its inhabitants “the natives, and the descendants of the natives, of every nation, and kindred, and tongue on the face of the earth.”

The new arrivals were coming from everywhere, from around the country and around the world, and were doing so in unprecedented numbers; between 1821 and 1835 the population of each of New York’s wards at

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least tripled. Taking advantage of this massive increase in population, the city’s landlords were realizing that large buildings could be cheaply divided into much smaller units, each of which would provide rental income while requiring little maintenance. Packing families into these cramped quarters, they were creating the first of the tenant houses that would soon acquire a far more notorious name—tenements. Just a dozen blocks from the newspaper district, to the west of Chatham Square, a lake known as the Collect had been filled in and houses built on its unstable earth; by the beginning of the 1830s the area was known as the Five Points, and had declined into the most squalid of the city’s neighborhoods, fouled by the run-off from the nearby slaughterhouses, glue factories, and turpentine distilleries, where the poorest of black and white lived packed together in rickety wooden structures with leaky roofs and walls roughly patched with handbills, eating from sawed-off barrel tops and sleeping on mat-tresses filled with straw. Outside, groups of boys were forming themselves into gangs with jaunty, aggressive names like the Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, Roach Guards, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, and, for the most venerable gang of them all, the name that a century later the movies would make iconic—the Bowery Boys. Irish immigrants, both Catholic and Protestant, were arriving in New York by the thousands, in flight from oppression and destitution, and before long they would make up the most powerful political force in the city. Black New Yorkers, only recently assured of their freedom—slavery was not officially abolished in the state until 1827—were often left to do the jobs disdained by their fellow citizens. They worked as domestics, launderers, cooks, chimney sweeps, rag-pickers, and, having been excluded from the occupation of regular carting, as “necessary tubmen,” collecting and hauling the city’s shit (as excrement was popularly known even then) under darkness of night. Yet even in these mean jobs they were increasingly being displaced by the new Irish immigrants, setting off a racial conflict that was fierce and durable and all the more bitter for bringing such meager rewards.

The orange sellers plying their trade in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, the hot-corn girls and the basket men and the knife grinders sending their cries through the streets, the clerks and bookkeepers, grocers and tavern keepers, stevedores and draymen, the hackney drivers, the pawnbrokers and sec-ondhand clothes men on Chatham Street, the cabinetmakers on Greenwich Street, the dyers and tanners and bone boilers in the uptown slaughterhouses, the cutters and stitchers turning out ready-made clothing in the
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huge new textile factories; the blacksmiths, carpenters, caulkers, and riggers building ships along the docks; the fat collectors and the candle lighters, the butchers with their top hats and bloody smocks—these were the city’s bone and sinew, the people who kept it moving forward, and who, barring great misdeed or misfortune, never found their way into the papers.

In 1833 Benjamin Day was twenty-three years old, and he had been in New York for three years. He grew up in West Springfield in the southwestern part of Massachusetts near the Connecticut border, where at the age of fourteen he had left school to serve an apprenticeship at a new weekly newspaper, the
Springfield Republican.
By the age of twenty he was a first-class printer and had set his sights on the rapidly expanding metropolis to the south.

Not until 1868 would Horatio Alger send his Ragged Dick wandering the streets of New York, but real-life urban rags-to-riches tales were already making their way into the countryside, and nowhere more so than in New England, from which scores of entrepreneurially minded Yankees had lit out for the city and made fortunes in trade and manufacturing.

Benjamin Day, however, came to New York not to get rich but simply to save enough money to support a family, with perhaps enough left over for the occasional brandy and cigar. A photograph taken in his first prosperous days shows a round-cheeked young man, his eyes peering suspiciously at the camera and his mouth set into a thin hard line, a few whiskers peeking out beneath his chin; he looks distinctly uncomfortable in a bowtie and ill-fitting top hat, like a teenager forced to dress up for a graduation picture. Day was never particularly interested in the trappings of wealth, most of which he considered foppish. Even as an old man, when he could afford otherwise, he walked rather than rode (he enjoyed walking, he explained), and when his favorite armchair needed new springs or one of his house’s cuckoo clocks was running slow, he fixed it himself with a cherished old set of carpenter’s tools.

“He was self-sufficient, he was firm and solid by nature, a man made of granite,” his grandson Clarence would write. He could be aloof and was often irascible, though he was kind to family and a few close friends, and to those who had managed to win his favor; his
New York Times
obituary noted that he “was exceedingly charitable and concealed a very warm heart behind a brusque address.” He had no time or patience for the glad-handing and drawing-room nicety that was the publisher’s stock in trade,
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but unlike many of the men who had started their own newspapers he was genuinely interested in hearing what other people thought, although he rarely asked a direct question. Instead, he would toss out a few quiet remarks, seemingly offhand but in fact carefully calculated, and then observe the effects they produced. Benjamin Day was not an especially reflective man, except as the reflection touched on business. He was eminently practical, proud of his common-school education and suspicious of the merits said to be bestowed by higher learning. He was by trade a printer, and by chance an editor, but by nature he was always a businessman.

After arriving in New York in 1829 Day drifted among the merchant papers, working as a fill-in compositor, living frugally, saving whatever he could toward the purchase of types and a printing press of his own. Early the following year, in what turned out to be a pivotal decision, he joined the staff of the
Daily Sentinel,
a radical paper being started by several printers from the
Courier and Enquirer.
Compared to the men who ran the other newspapers in town—and to those he would later hire to write for the
Sun,
including Richard Adams Locke—Day was not very politically minded. He was distrustful of ideologies of any kind, but he had a strong feel for labor, having himself spent years composing by the light of a candle, working antiquated presses until his hands were blistered and his back was as stiff as iron. (Under his leadership the
Sun
would be a fierce advocate of higher wages and shorter working hours, and of the nascent labor movement in general. In early 1834, for instance, the paper gave extensive coverage to a strike by hundreds of Lowell mill girls, even reprinting the full text of their manifesto,
Union Is Power.
) There had been other radical newspapers in New York before, all of them directed at the city’s artisan class, but the
Daily Sentinel
was different because it was also produced by artisans. Its six directors—Benjamin Day among them— described themselves in the first issue as “all practical printers . . . [who]