The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (7 page)

William Smith, alias Fitz, “got drunk by drinking too much.” The magistrate informed him that this was the way in which people always got drunk, and admonished him to lead a sober life in the future; after which he was discharged.

John Votey, of Reed street, was charged with getting drunk, and assaulting his father and mother. John was a mischievous boy of about

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38—his father was 93, and his mother who appeared as complainant, was 88. John was in the constant habit of getting drunk and abusing his parents—yet the mother couldn’t find it in her heart to have him sent to prison. The old lady was so overcome with the fatigue of getting to the police so early in the morning, that she fainted. One of the officers supported her in his arms until she recovered, and, taking the arm of her drunken, disgraceful son, she left the office in tears.

Mr. and Mrs. Townsend made their appearance this morning to settle their connubial disputes after the manner the law has prescribed. It appeared on investigation, that Mrs. Townsend asked her husband yesterday for a two shilling piece to buy some brandy “to wash the children’s heads”; that the husband not believing that his lady would allow the spiritous liquid to go as high as the head, without saluting it with her lips, refused to grant the request; a quarrel ensued, and Mr. Townsend was driven out of the house by the infuriated dame. Last evening, when Mr. T. returned from his work to get his supper, he found his wife in an unmentionable condition, and upon his upbraiding her, she took up the tongs and smote him over the head. Mr. T. then knocked her down.

They were both committed.

Susan Burke—a lady vagrant—hadn’t any home for 3 months. The magistrate said it was time she had one, and gave her one for 6 months.

Passing through the courtroom each morning was a dismal parade of drunkards and wife beaters, con men and petty thieves, prostitutes and their johns. But Wisner could also see love, fear, anger, jealousy, greed, sometimes even tenderness and generosity, and while it is an overstatement to call him “the Balzac of the daybreak court,” as he was called by a historian of the
Sun,
he did display a novelist’s eye for the telling detail, the ability to limn a character in a few short strokes. His police reports were filled with the distinctive voices of the Five Points and its environs, by turns argumentative, wheedling, rueful, furious, mocking of themselves and those around them. Many of the cases he dispensed with in a single brisk sentence (“George McCarthy was charged with stealing a stove from 491

Pearl street. Committed.”). Most he granted a couple of sentences, but sometimes, when the material seemed especially inviting, Wisner presented his readers little set pieces, complete with dialogue and stage directions:

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Hugh Kelly, was charged with attempting to pass bills of a broken bank, knowing them to be such. Mr. Kelly was a man of about 40—bald head—long face—and had on a neat gray quaker coat.

Mag.—What’s your occupation, Kelly?

Pris.—(quite angry) My occupation!! I’m a
merchant,
Sir.

M.—What do you deal in?

P.—Goods, to be sure, and what does your honor suppose I’d be after dealing in?

M.—Where’s your store?

P.—(Rather bothered) Why—its—its—what’s that you say?

M.—Where’s your store?

P.—O, your honor, I meant I was a
travelling
merchant.

M.—Ah, you’re a pedler, then—where are you from?

P.—I have the misfortune to have come from Ireland.

M.—Then you call it a misfortune to be an Irishman?

P.—I do, your honor,—If ever the Almighty erred it was when he made my native country—my own swate Ireland. (Laughter.)

M.—Stop Sir, we don’t allow blasphemy here.

P.—(Seating himself very coolly) Very good.

Nothing like this had ever appeared in an American newspaper. Wisner’s police reports were at once scary and amusing and titillating, a daily glimpse into a world previously hidden from the public’s gaze.

New Yorkers were riveted by the spectacle; the police office column instantly became the most popular feature of the paper.

George Wisner was proving immensely valuable to Benjamin Day, and within weeks the two men had struck a new deal: Wisner would continue to receive four dollars a week, but he and Day would now split the
Sun’
s profits, with Wisner’s share being applied toward a half ownership of the paper. By the end of October the
Sun
’s masthead read: “Published daily, at 222 William Street, by Benjamin H. Day and George W. Wisner.” Day had originally conceived of the
Sun
primarily as a means of publicizing his printing business, and he was always more interested in the business side of the paper than in the actual writing of it. Though he retained the title of senior editor, he increasingly devoted his attention to production, advertising, and circulation, and after winning the printing contract for the nearby American Museum (the large
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collection of oddities that would later be acquired by P. T. Barnum) he left the editorial duties almost entirely to Wisner.

By the beginning of 1834 George Wisner was the de facto editor of the
Sun,
and the paper increasingly reflected his brand of radical politics, which included—highly unusual in a New York newspaper editor—strong sympathy for the city’s abolition movement, a small but impassioned band of reformers comprising mostly middle-class blacks and whites led by two wealthy silk merchants, the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan. One
Sun
article, for instance, reported gleefully that the anniversary dinner of the New-York Colonization Society (a group encouraging the migration of free American blacks to Africa—a pet cause of the editors of the
Courier
and Enquirer
and the
Commercial Advertiser
) had collected only $238, while the previous day’s benefit for the American AntiSlavery Society had garnered ten times that amount. In another story, reporting the arrest of a runaway slave by one of the city’s marshals, the
Sun
acknowledged that while the officer had performed his duty as required by law, “We believe the day is not far distant when the clanking of slavery’s chains will be heard no more—and America stand before the world practicing, as well as preaching, the glorious doctrine that
all
men are created free and equal.”

In one especially striking item, Wisner reported the story of a Missouri slave driver who had purchased a young black woman married to another slave. The woman had been given ten minutes to prepare her departure and was not permitted to see her husband, although she did manage to send word to him that she was gone. Hearing the news, the husband was “absolutely stunned with the most unexpected blow” and thought to follow the slave driver into town to say good-bye, but this idea caused him greater anguish than he could bear. When he was asked what he intended to do, the slave replied, “I will tell master to sell me to the driver, and go with my poor wife; my days will not be long on earth, and I hope this will shorten them.”

It was unusual enough that George Wisner recognized a slave’s capacity for full human emotion—but actually to print the slave’s words as he bewailed the injustice of his lot was, for a New York newspaperman, extraordinary. Wisner, though, did not end there. Having recounted the story of the sundered couple, he went on to challenge his readers directly: Suppose, reader, the scales were turned. Suppose a negro should seize a white woman, force her away from her husband, carry her to a city of
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blacks, and sell her to some purse-proud, sooty African, as a slave—

perhaps a paramour—what would be your feeling, at thus beholding the tenderest and holiest ties of human nature trampled upon?

It was a highly daring stance for a newspaper to take in New York, perhaps the most pro-Southern of Northern cities, with an economy highly dependent on the cotton trade. Nor would the story endear the
Sun
to its readers, many of whom were Irish immigrants engaged in a fierce economic struggle with American-born blacks. But that didn’t seem to matter; week after week the
Sun’
s readership continued to grow. By November 1833, an editorial proudly reported a daily circulation of more than two thousand. “Its success,” the
Sun
pronounced of itself, “is now beyond question.”

No longer did Benjamin Day have to copy advertisements or clip news stories from rival papers. Advertising was now coming in steadily, the police reports were a sensation, and Wisner had branched out into book reviews and other features. The paper had also begun running a serial on its front page,
The Life of Davy Crockett;
Day was sure that the frontiers-man’s already legendary exploits in hunting bears and wrestling wildcats would appeal to his readers. The
Sun
had even begun occasionally to print illustrations alongside its articles. The very first one, a large woodcut stretching across two columns, was captioned “Herschel’s Forty-Feet Telescope.” It depicted the large reflecting telescope that had belonged to the late British astronomer Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus and the father of Sir John Herschel, who that very year had set sail with his own telescopes for the Cape of Good Hope—where, the
Sun
would later report, he made the most remarkable lunar discoveries.

In December 1833, with circulation approaching four thousand, nearly as great as that of the mighty
Courier and Enquirer,
Benjamin Day bought a new double-cylinder printing press; it was able to produce about one thousand impressions an hour, five times the capacity of his earlier one.

With the new press turning out so many papers each day, Day realized that he needed help with production, and he hired the journeyman printers Willoughby Lynde and William J. Stanley to work for the
Sun
as compositors and pressmen.

Lynde and Stanley were old friends of Day’s from his time at the
Daily
Sentinel.
They had likely agreed to take the jobs because they felt more

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comfortable working for a friend than for any of the aristocratic six-penny editors, but in fact the opposite turned out to be the case: they were still trying to survive on a printer’s salary of nine dollars a week, while their old friend Ben Day was earning profits that, in the early days of 1834, seemed potentially limitless. (By January, Wisner’s share of the
Sun’
s profits had already purchased him a half ownership of the paper.) Before, Day had stood beside them in the composing room, just another itinerant printer with, as the saying went, itching feet and a parched throat, but now he was an editor himself, giving them orders in his gruff, no-nonsense manner, his attention largely taken up by the advertisers and subscribers who brought in the money. Lynde and Stanley must have envied Day’s newfound success and resented taking instructions from a former colleague. They must also have regretted not listening more closely to his ideas about a penny paper when they had the chance, because only a few months after Day hired them, Lynde and Stanley left the
Sun
to start a penny paper of their own.

The new paper was to be called the
New York Transcript,
and another printer, Billings Hayward, would join them as co-owner. As the paper’s editor they chose Asa Greene, a local bookseller and the author of several satirical novels. The
Sun
had shown the
Transcript’
s owners that a penny paper could not succeed without a police court reporter, and for that position they hired William H. Attree, a printer at a local type foundry, paying him the munificent salary of three dollars a week. (A recent English immigrant, Attree was, by every account, abrasive and mean-spirited, prone to confrontations, and not overly concerned with the accuracy of his news reports. The normally even-tempered Horace Greeley characterized him as “a shrewd, active and unprincipled penny-a-liner,” while Isaac Clark Pray, a New York journalist of midcentury, observed that Attree was “facile with his pen” and “indifferent . . . to the feelings of the poor creatures left to its mercy.” Attree’s general character was perhaps most cogently captured in the nickname by which he was widely known around town: “Oily Attree.”) In March 1834 the
Transcript
began publication and proved to be a surprisingly potent rival. Attree’s police columns, while coarser in tone, were otherwise strikingly similar to Wisner’s (from the heading “Police Office” to the device of presenting certain cases in dramatic form), and thus helped negate an advantage the
Sun
would otherwise have had. The
Transcript
gave extensive coverage to prizefights and horse races, some-

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thing the
Sun
had not emphasized, which won the paper a following among the city’s sports fans; its printer owners had also chosen well in Asa Greene, who brought a winningly light touch to the paper’s columns, with a special flair for amusing descriptions of city life. By the end of 1834

the
Transcript
was fast catching up to the
Sun
in total circulation and was even outselling it in the towns outside the city.

Benjamin Day, however, was not to be outdone. At the start of 1835 he bought yet another printing press for the
Sun,
this one a state-of-the-art Napier. He also increased the size of the
Sun’
s pages to eleven by eighteen inches. (The new paper was costing him four-fifths of a cent per sheet, nearly as much as the price of the newspaper itself, but he hoped to make up the difference with the additional advertising the larger pages would allow.) The
Sun’
s expanded news page offered each day a richly flavored salmagundi, in which a forceful call for the abolition of imprisonment for debt, an investigation into reports of new cholera cases, and a critique of urban renewal plans (“of all the improvements recently introduced, there is not one that does not favor the
rich,
to the inconvenience of the
poor
”) might be mixed together with accounts of comically weaving drunkards and a local pig with a face like a human being’s. In the spring, Wisner took the
Sun’
s readers on a tour of the Five Points, offering them “a thorough examination of those haunts of iniquity which have become so infamously celebrated,” its cellar lodgings and tipling houses and brothels with names like the Diving Bell and the Yankee Kitchen and Squeeze Gut Alley. For only a penny the
Sun
’s readers were, from the safety of their own homes, allowed entry into “seats of vice, hot beds of debauchery, wretchedness, and poverty, such as few eyes have witnessed.” It was a sensational story, done in classic
Sun
style: equal parts crusade and carnival.