The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (8 page)

A more fanciful story reported how a doctor in the city had successfully extracted a large black snake, more than four feet in length, that had been living for some months in a sailor’s stomach. (The sailor claimed that he had drunk from a spring in Jamaica, at the bottom of which he later noticed several tiny hair snakes wriggling.) The ingenious physician had coaxed the snake out of the sailor’s mouth with a bowl of warm milk— the face of the man had then “assumed a dark and ghastly appearance”—

at which point the snake was immediately seized and killed. The snake story created quite a stir in the city, and in subsequent weeks the
Sun
published several follow-up items about the “singular operation.” The
Courier and Enquirer
and the
Journal of Commerce
denounced the story

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as a hoax, but Day, whose first issue of the
Sun
had featured a boy who whistled while he slept, knew that his readers would enjoy debating its truthfulness and appreciate its entertainment value. For his part, Wisner preferred to see the story as an allegory: the black snake of slavery, swallowed small but now grown large and dangerous, might be coaxed into unwariness with milk (of human kindness), but this was only a halfway measure, and it then had to be seized and destroyed by violence.

Benjamin Day allowed Wisner to print his political views, but he also understood that his readers wanted to be entertained as well as edified.

Even more, they wanted to find out about the life that was going on all around them. The best newspaper, he believed, served as a kind of omnium-gatherum that welcomed (as the
Sun
itemized in an article called “What Is a Newspaper?”) “bombastic panegyrics, jests, anecdotes, deaths, marriages, conundrums, enigmas, puns, poetry, acrostics and advertisements of every shade and color, and form, from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” News was not just the high doings of important persons, but rather the “shreds and patches” of everyday life, a daily record of the city in all its mottled and disorderly splendor.

Best of all, Day knew, were the crime stories (they were the ones that most fully engaged the attention of his readers), and in the spring of 1835

an especially promising crime story was developing in a town north of the city. For some years New Yorkers had been acquainted with a man named Robert Matthews, a carpenter from upstate who had grown his hair and beard long and rechristened himself Matthias the Prophet. Dressed in a green frock coat lined with pink silk, carrying a sword and preaching a furious gospel, Matthias had managed to win himself a small following among some of the city’s prominent residents, a handful of whom gave him money and houses in exchange for his promise of eternal abundance in heaven. Matthias’s disciples lived together in a farmhouse near the town of Sing Sing, up the Hudson, where they grew their own food, ate and bathed communally, and listened to his hours-long tirades against the human devils who would one day incur the wrath of the Lord, among them clergymen, doctors, disobedient women, and men who wore spectacles. Eventually dark stories began to spread about sexual escapades in the farmhouse, and when one of the disciples, a merchant named Elijah Pierson, fell sick and died and Matthias (known to the authorities as Robert Matthews) was arrested and charged with poisoning him, all of the ingre-dients—murder, madness, apostasy, depravity—were in place for what
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would become one of the most bizarre and sensational trials New York had ever seen, and for the
Sun,
a potential bonanza.

Ever since the arrest, the
Sun
had been devoting extensive coverage to the case, examining it from every possible angle, including a report from a phrenologist who claimed to have analyzed Matthews’s cranial developments from across the courtroom during his arraignment (“Amativeness, large; Philoprogenitiveness, moderately large; Destructiveness moderately full; Combativeness rather small,” etc.). There was no chance that Benjamin Day would miss out on the opportunity to bring the trial of Matthias the Prophet to his readers; unfortunately, the trial was being held in White Plains, well north of the city. Wisner was tied up with his daily police reports and Day, who was not a polished writer, didn’t think he could render the events of the trial in all their lurid glory. In the end, he decided that he would travel up to White Plains; if necessary he would cover the trial himself, but he would much prefer to find someone who could do it for him. All of the newspapers in town, even the staid mercantile papers, had been reporting on the case in the months leading up to the trial, but to Day’s mind the most colorful and lucidly written coverage had come from the writer for the
Courier and Enquirer.
Perhaps, he thought, he might offer the
Courier’
s man a little money to write for the
Sun
on the side. The articles would all be unsigned anyway, and surely the paper’s editor, the redoubtable James Watson Webb, was not paying his reporter so well that he could afford to turn down extra money.

Inside the crowded courtroom, Day asked a spectator to point out the reporter from the
Courier and Enquirer.
He was directed to a man of middling stature, with a prominent forehead, crossed eyes, and pockmarked cheeks. Day introduced himself as the editor of the
Sun.
Was he the reporter from the
Courier?

He was, the man replied. His name, he said, was Richard Adams Locke.

At the time of the Matthias trial Richard Adams Locke had not yet grown the beard he wears in the only known image of him, a portrait made by the New York engraver Augustus Robin. The engraving is undated, but Locke is now a man deep into his middle years, and has turned out for the sitting in his finest dress. His silk bowtie shines in the light; his collar is starched and high, and a thin triangle of white shirt peeks out beneath a black vest and topcoat. His nose is Roman, strong and sharp and aquiline at the bridge; little half-moons of age and worry wax under his
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The only known image of Richard Adams Locke, in an undated
portrait made by the New York engraver Augustus Robin.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

eyes, which gaze sternly toward the horizon. The mouth is a thin, straight line. Locke’s hair is still dark, but has now receded behind a great broad brow, one much admired by Edgar Allan Poe. “The forehead is truly beautiful in its intellectuality,” Poe observed in his 1846
Literati of New
York City
essay about Locke. “I am acquainted with no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke.” His beard is modest and well trimmed, not as luxuriant as the ones favored by some of his journalistic contemporaries, but even so Locke surely hoped it might hide some of the scarring that pitted his face, remnants of the smallpox he had suffered as a
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boy in England. Some scars are visible on the cheeks and forehead, but Augustus Robin has clearly downplayed them in his engraving; moreover, the artist has positioned his subject in three-quarter profile, to minimize the effect of a severe case of strabismus—another unfortunate vestige of smallpox—in which not just one but both of Locke’s eyes were permanently crossed.

It is a handsome engraving, the sort that any customer would have wanted to leave to his descendants, and to posterity. Yet it does not capture the man that Richard Adams Locke actually was, and not simply because of the engraver’s generous attentions. The subject of this portrait is by all appearances a man of means, but at the time of his retirement at the age of sixty-one, having lived in New York for nearly three decades, Locke still did not own his own home and had accumulated a personal estate estimated at only one thousand dollars. The grim set of his mouth belies the memory of a man known around town for his fine sense of humor, who was a popular drinking companion among the journalists who regularly gathered after work for steaks at Windust’s restaurant or drinks at the bar of the American Hotel. A winning congeniality was among the chief characteristics Locke’s colleagues remembered; another was his modesty. In an age when a titanic ego seemed to be a job requirement for a New York newspaper editor, Richard Adams Locke shunned publicity.

He spoke little of himself, and even less about the life he had left behind.

When he did, however, he proved to be a distinctly unreliable narrator. So the history of Richard Adams Locke that has come down through the years bears a certain resemblance to the moon story itself: some of the details are genuine enough, but others are inventions of Locke’s own, and it is not always an easy matter to tell them apart.

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c h a p t e r
3

Bearer of the

Falcon Crest

Richard Adams Locke made his name as newspaper fabulist, but his inventions were hardly confined to tales of life on the moon. They encompassed, as well, the stories of his family background, his education, even the location of his birth.

Parish records show that Locke was born on September 22, 1800, in East Brent, a village in the southwestern English county of Somerset. He was
not
born in New York City, which was the version of events that in later years he regularly told to census inspectors and officials of the New York Custom House, the institution that provided him a desperately needed salary for the final two decades of his work life, when he was no longer able to function as a journalist. Unfortunately, the New York story has been repeated in several reference works; even the introduction to the 1852 republication of the moon series, entitled
The Celebrated “Moon
Story,” Its Origins and Incidents,
claims, confusingly, that Locke was “of English parentage and education, but American birth.” (The introduction was written by William Griggs, a friend of Locke’s, who likely maintained the cover story to protect Locke’s employment.) Richard Adams Locke’s branch of the family had lived in Somerset for centuries, as far back as records were kept. According to an eighteenth-century Locke family historian, himself a resident of East Brent, “The Locke family in this neighborhood consider themselves as descended from a very ancient house.” It was an eminent line, with its own coat of arms, colored blue and gold, displaying an escutcheon of three indorsed falcons
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below a crest of another falcon bearing a padlock in its beak. The family’s forebears included numerous ministers, sheriffs, merchants, army officers, and one very eminent philosopher. Richard Adams Locke was related to John Locke, although he was not, as he sometimes claimed, a direct descendant: his great-great-great-grandfather Lewis (who managed to father thirty-five children by four wives) was the philosopher’s uncle.

Richard Adams Locke’s grandfather—also named Richard Locke—was by all accounts a remarkable man, as shrewd as he was intelligent, possessed of keen powers of observation, boundless energy, and an indomitable will. Born into a farm family in Burnham, at the age of eighteen he became a land surveyor, a trade that he would pursue for nearly fifty years and eventually pass on to his son. Richard Locke, however, was not content to measure and assess the land; he was far more interested in improving it. Over the course of his life he almost single-handedly revolu-tionized farming in Somerset by developing innovative agricultural techniques and advocating land reform, in which formerly common fields were enclosed and the acreage allotted to individual farmers. He was a highly regarded writer as well, who published two major histories of Somerset,
The Western Rebellion
and
The Customs of the Manor of Taunton;
at his death he left three other manuscripts still unpublished, the most important being
A Survey of Somerset,
a massive undertaking (published posthumously) in which he scrupulously recorded the entire geography of the county, enumerated on the title page as “the Hundreds, Cities, Towns, Parishes, Tithings, Manors, Villages, Hamlets, Gentlemen’s Seats, Capital Farms, Decayed Vills, Forests, Hills, Rivers, Bridges, Sites of Abbies, and old Encampments.” Any profits from the book’s publication, Locke noted in the manuscript, were to go to the Burnham Society, a religious debating society that he founded in 1772 and for which he was the main benefactor. He always viewed his writing much as he had his work for land reform: as motivated by social benefit rather than private gain. “I never published a pamphlet which I conceived would be written by another hand,” he wrote proudly in his
Survey of Somerset,
adding, “I have never enriched myself by printing to the value of sixpence.”